Confessions of a Three

(Hardback)

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When 44-year-old Mari Wyatt, a free-lance editor, decided to have a third child, she had no idea what she was getting into, except that a woman her age had a success rate of less than 5% without help. Undaunted, she wanted to take advantage of her state's insurance mandate requiring large companies that offered pregnancy benefits to also cover infertility treatments (including three cycles of in vitro fertilization). With an undergraduate degree from Princeton and a master's degree from Stanford, she worked for two years as a grocery bagger for a large supermarket chain. As she waited for insurance eligibility, she interviewed dozens of younger, usually marginal women who were willing to sell their eggs in order to pay their rent. Pregnant at last, she endured months then years of ill-effects, risks to her health and even her life. She met other couples who suffered even worse setbacks and unimaginable tragedies.

With infertility on the rise, stories such as Mari's will resonate with others facing similar challenges. Hopefully, they will find inspiration to continue on this expensive and exhausting journey, for which there are no guarantees but, as any parent will tell you, is definitely worth the risk.

Author Bio

Mari Wyatt received her B.A. from Princeton and her M.A. from Stanford in English, and after being deemed unemployable by multiple Midwestern employment agencies, she moved to New York City, where she worked in publishing for over a decade. When it was time to raise a family, she and her husband, Wesley, moved back to the Midwest, and she became a free-lance copy editor to work from home, not imagining that her first child would be diagnosed with autism, which was rare and considered untreatable. She spent the first five years of her son's life inventing treatments for him, and despite being in her forties, she decided that he needed a brother to teach him how to be a guy. What began as a nice idea quickly turned into an all-consuming obsession, and she spent seven years trying to fulfill that goal. She is the author of four romances and the co-author (with her now adult son) of two self-help guides for the parents of special-needs children.