The Baby Chase

A warped 2018 issue of Architectural Digest sits on a glass table in a fertility clinic waiting room, its pages softened by hundreds of nervous hands. The Baby Chase opens there, following a thirty-four-year-old architect who sketches aggressive geometric shapes in a notebook rather than look at the clinic's wall of birth announcements, and the husband beside her who mistakes silence for steadiness.Drawing on a 1993 study finding that infertility produces anxiety and depression on par with cancer or heart disease, and family therapist Pauline Boss's concept of ambiguous loss, grief with no funeral and no closure, the book explains why couples fracture along the line of who manages the crisis and who becomes its passenger.It follows a physical therapist and a history teacher whose bedside table of ovulation strips and specimen cups replaced the massage oil of their early marriage, and a couple who built a community garden as a second, parallel life untouched by appointments, calling it Track B.Discover why protecting a marriage through infertility treatment means deliberately building a life outside the clinic, one neither of you has to earn with a positive test.