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The MetroWest Daily News
Tuesday, November 2, 2004
For love of family:
Upton woman offers direction
to couples struggling with infertility
By Jennifer Lord / News Staff Writer
The happy strawberry-blond children who come running at the sound of the doorbell in the Magnacca home in Upton give away the ending of "Love and Infertility."
Kristen Magnacca managed to conquer the foe of infertility – twice.
But she's the first person to admit that not every infertile couple will see their battles end with a healthy pregnancy. Some create a family through adoption. Others accept their lives as a child-free couple.
"Your marital relationship just changes so dramatically when you're going through infertility," said Magnacca, who previously authored the self-published "Girlfriend to Girlfriend: A Fertility Companion" and holds seminars around the country for couples undergoing fertility treatments. "There are huge choices to make and you really need to maintain that bond that brought you together."
Magnacca, 41, knows her topic all too well. In "Girlfriend to Girlfriend," she poured out her soul chronicling the infertility battle she and her husband Mark fought. The result was darkly humorous and wrenchingly honest and it struck a chord with thousands of women who were experiencing the same crisis.
"What I hear a lot is 'You were writing my story and you were very brave to do that,'" Magnacca said. "Bravery had nothing to do with that. I felt the story needed to be told. Back when I wrote 'Girlfriend to Girlfriend,' I was still carrying that 'victim of infertility' around."
"Love and Infertility" is decidedly different. This time, Magnacca has the backing of publisher LifeLine Press and, rather than a personal exorcism, it highlights the 28 effective strategies that correspond to the average 28-day fertility cycle.
This is not a book that talks about the medical issues of infertility – there are already plenty of those. Magnacca culls from her own experience to set the scene for each exercise.
Since fertility issues can take over a couple's lives, they need to remind themselves that the crisis does have an end. And at that end, no matter what the result, they still have each other. Magnacca suggests such exercises as visualization, making a gratitude list and writing down each day the three simple things the other can do to make their day better.
The latter tip, the "honey do list," is a particular favorite of Magnacca's, and she frequently is approached at seminars by couples clutching their own 3-by-5 index cards with their lists. A typical list might read "Call me three times today, have dinner with me, ask me about my day."
Many of the tips are culled from the strategies she and her husband pitch to executives through their business, Insight Development Group, as well as methods they learned from the infertility program at the Mind/Body Center for Women's Health at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
Communication in a relationship is even more important than in the business world, yet few couples realize they need to work on it at home, especially when hormone shots and an alphabet soup of fertility treatments start taking over their lives, Magnacca noted.
The end of "Girlfriend to Girlfriend" was her pregnancy with son Cole, now 6. Jumping back into the infertility game was an especially difficult decision the second time around.
"It apparently takes six years for me to get pregnant," Magnacca said. "I wanted to take more of a holistic approach and that caused huge distress. Mark kept telling me we had to do IVF again and, remembering what we went through trying to have Cole, I was so afraid of that effect on our family, on Cole."
Daughter Grace is now 14 months old. As she holds seminars for infertile couples or promotes her books, the fact that Magnacca has two children – even with the difficulty she had conceiving them – can be both helpful and hurtful.
"People going through this are so hurt and so distraught and so heartbroken that sometimes I get the brunt of it when they realize at the end of it, I had a baby," Magnacca said. "There have only been a few people who said 'she misled me – she got pregnant and I didn't."
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