Before You Arrived

There is something nobody tells you about trying to start a family. Not the biology of it, not the logistics, but the emotional weight of wanting something deeply and having it withheld — month after month, test after test, hope after hope — while the world around you seems to do it effortlessly.

Kim and I began trying not long after we were married. We were ready, or at least we believed we were. We had built something solid between us — a relationship that had been tested early and had held. We had a home, a shared vision, and a love that had matured from something electric into something grounded. It felt like the natural next step.

What followed was two and a half years of waiting.

Two miscarriages. Two losses that arrived just as hope was beginning to settle into something real.

The first came at around four weeks. Kim started bleeding. What had felt like the beginning of something became, very quickly, an ending. There is a particular kind of grief in that — not the grief of losing someone you knew, but the grief of losing someone you had only just begun to imagine. A future that had started forming in your mind, quietly and instinctively, dissolving before it had a chance to fully exist.

The second was discovered at a scan. Six to seven weeks in. We were both in the room — Kim on the bed, me beside her, both of us waiting for the moment we would hear something. The sonographer moved the probe and looked for a heartbeat.

There was none.

I don't remember exactly what was said in that room. What I remember is the silence. And looking at Kim. And feeling something I had no language for — a helplessness that is particular to watching someone you love carry something you cannot carry for them. I wasn't going through what she was going through. I couldn't. As the man in the room, my experience of it was always one step removed from hers. She had the physical reality of it in her body. I had the witnessing of it — which carries its own weight, but a different kind.

Kim had wanted a baby deeply. That desire was real and present in her in a way that I, if I am honest, didn't feel with the same intensity. I wanted children. But I also had a capacity to stay present with what we had, to not let what we couldn't control consume what we could. I focused on us. On Kim. On the love that was already there regardless of what came next.

But watching her hurt was its own heartbreak. You show up. You hold the space. You say the things that need to be said and you don't say the things that don't. And sometimes you sit in silence together because silence is the most honest thing available.

During those years, Frankie was already with us. Our black cavoodle, who came home with us in October 2014, was in many ways our first family member — the living thing we loved and cared for and came home to. Interestingly, I had grown up genuinely afraid of dogs in the Philippines.

Frankie was part of how that fear quietly dissolved over time. I am grateful for it now — because Hendrix and Riley have grown up with that companionship completely naturally, without the fear I once carried. Bhodi came later, a girl cavoodle we welcomed from a family that could no longer keep her. She needed a home and we had one. That felt right. It still does.

When we found out the third pregnancy was holding — the signs more positive, the weeks passing with more reassurance than before — we shared the news publicly on September 7, 2017. Not with a carefully designed announcement image but with a story. Because the story was what mattered.

We wrote about the two and a half years. The two miscarriages. The waiting. Not for sympathy, but because we knew we weren't alone in it. We knew there were others going through the same thing in silence — comparing themselves to everyone around them who seemed to conceive without effort, feeling like something was wrong with them, hiding their grief because the world hadn't given them permission to name it publicly.

We wanted to say — we feel you. Stay hopeful. Your journey is what makes you unique, and there is a lot of beauty in there, even when it is hard to see.

What those two and a half years gave us, beyond Hendrix, was empathy. A permanent, felt understanding of what it means to want something deeply and face loss instead. We don't ask couples when they're having children anymore. We don't ask parents of one when they're having a second. You never know what someone is navigating behind a question you think is harmless. Empathy, once earned through experience, changes how you move through the world.

Hendrix arrived in March 2018. A rainbow baby — the term given to a child born after pregnancy loss, the colour that appears after the storm has passed. He was healthy. He was here. And we treasured him with a depth that two and a half years of waiting had quietly made possible.

Then came Riley.

Our plan had always been one child. Kim and I felt so complete as a family of three — Hendrix, the two of us, Frankie and Bhodi — that the idea of expanding further had genuinely receded. Riley was unplanned. A surprise that arrived when we had stopped expecting one.

The shock was real. And then, gradually, something else arrived alongside it.

I had always quietly hoped for a girl. When Hendrix was born that preference dissolved instantly — boy or girl simply didn't matter the moment I held him. But the wish had existed. And when Riley came, even before I knew whether she would be a boy or a girl, I felt the blessing of it. Something had arrived that we hadn't planned for and didn't know we still needed.

The moment she was born stays with me in a way I didn't anticipate. With Hendrix I had cut the umbilical cord — that first act of welcome, of separation and connection at the same time. With Riley it went further. The doctor asked me to be in position, to help hold her head and guide her out. I was part of bringing her into the world in a way that was more physical, more immediate, more present than anything I had experienced before. That arrival into my hands, before she was even fully here, landed somewhere deep. Things don't fully register for me until they are actually happening. And in that moment, they registered completely.

She was healthy. That was everything.

People often commented on having one of each — a boy and a girl — as though that was the ideal combination, the complete set. I understand the sentiment but it never resonated with me. If we had two boys or two girls it would have been equally complete. What makes a family isn't the composition. It's the love inside it.

Hendrix and Riley are six years apart. People sometimes wondered about that gap — whether they would connect, whether the distance in age would create distance between them. It hasn't. They play together, laugh together, and find their way back to each other after the small conflicts that are simply part of being siblings. We have never expected them to be best friends. What we hope for is simpler — that they know they have each other. That when life gets hard, as it will, they remember there is someone in the world who has known them from the very beginning.

My own sisters and I are not best friends. We have respect, love, and the kind of bond that doesn't require constant contact to remain real. Kim and her sister are similar — different values, different paths, different ways of seeing the world, and still they come together, they talk, they enjoy each other's company. That is what we hope Hendrix and Riley find in each other over time. Not obligation. Just the quiet knowing that the other one is there.

What this chapter of our lives taught me — the waiting, the loss, the unexpected arrival of Riley — is that family doesn't unfold the way you plan it. It unfolds the way it needs to. And the detours, the losses, the surprises, all of it shapes the love you eventually arrive at in ways the straightforward path never could.

Hendrix was worth every month of waiting. Riley was worth every moment of surprise.

And what the journey between them taught me is something no plan could have delivered — that the life worth living is rarely the one you mapped out. It is the one that asked more of you than you expected, and gave back more than you imagined.