For most of her life, Kaitlyn Laczko imagined motherhood as something waiting for her in the future.
She remembers being in kindergarten when her teacher asked what she wanted to be when she grew up. Kaitlyn’s answer was simple: a mom.
Years later, after Kaitlyn met Zac Laczko and the two began building a life together in Chattanooga, motherhood no longer seemed like an abstract hope. She could picture Zac as the father of her children. Zac, who’d spent much of his 20s giving little thought to parenthood, began picturing it, too.
But the path toward the family they envisioned has looked nothing like either expected.
After months of trying unsuccessfully to conceive, the couple learned earlier this year that they were facing male-factor infertility and that in vitro fertilization offered their only path to conceiving together.
Then came another daunting reality: They were quoted as much as $30,000 for a single IVF cycle, and their insurance would not cover the treatment.
The Laczkos, both teachers, didn’t have that kind of money sitting in the bank. Then, on July 28, after months in which doctors’ appointments brought one difficult answer after another, they received good news: They’d been selected for a $15,000 IVF grant from the Wyatt Foundation and Conceive Fertility Foundation, two nonprofits working to expand access to fertility treatment.
For Kaitlyn and Zac, the grant doesn’t eliminate the uncertainty ahead. It doesn’t guarantee that IVF will result in a pregnancy, and it doesn’t cover the entire cost.
But it does make the next step possible, offering welcome hope to a couple learning to live with what they cannot control.
A home by the river
Neither Kaitlyn nor Zac originally set out to build a life in Chattanooga.
Zac was born in Texas and raised in Pensacola, Florida. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he was working from home and looking for an escape from his desk when he used vacation time to attend a weeklong raft guide school at Nantahala Outdoor Center in North Carolina.
By the end of the week, he’d been offered a job guiding on the Ocoee River. On his way home, he gave his boss two weeks’ notice.
The decision helped clarify another direction in his life. Zac had long considered becoming a teacher, and seasonal work on the river fit naturally with the profession.
That path eventually led him to Ivy Academy, where he’s spent the last four years teaching history and computer science.
Kaitlyn’s route was just as circuitous. Originally from Washington, she moved to Nashville after college because, as she recalls, “it sounded cool.” She eventually became an Ocoee raft guide herself.
The two met through the river community – at what Kaitlyn describes as “the one bar in Ocoee” – and after a year of long-distance dating, settled together in Chattanooga. Kaitlyn now teaches at Hardy Elementary.
They married July 20, 2024, and were soon ready to start a family.
Month after month
As an adult, Kaitlyn had begun thinking more about her relationship with her own parents and the kind of parent she hoped to become.
She’s grateful for her childhood, she says, but adulthood has allowed her to recognize things she needed then and wants to give her own children someday.
“I’m ready to be the mom I needed,” she says. “I’ve become the teacher I needed growing up, and this feels like one more part of the equation.”
For Zac, building a life with Kaitlyn had made fatherhood feel real in a way it hadn’t before.
“I know she’s going to be a great mom, and thinking about that makes me happy,” he says.
Once they decided to try, the Laczkos knew pregnancy might not happen immediately. But as the months accumulated, anticipation repeatedly turned into disappointment.
“Each month we’d get our hopes up, only to be disappointed again,” Zac says.
After about a year, they decided it was time to look for an explanation.
Kaitlyn has celiac disease and endometriosis, both of which can complicate fertility, so she initiated a fertility workup with her physician, Dr. Patricia McLelland at Galen Medical Group. McLelland referred both Kaitlyn and Zac for further testing.
By May, the testing had provided an answer. To conceive together, they’d need IVF.
For Kaitlyn, the news meant grieving a version of motherhood she’d always assumed would come naturally.
“A little girl doesn’t grow up thinking, ‘I’m going to do IVF someday,’” she says. “We’re grieving the cost, but we’re also grieving the fact that it can’t be easy for us like it is for many other people.”
When the answer was his
Testing determined that the couple was facing male-factor infertility. Zac was diagnosed with non-obstructive azoospermia, a condition in which sperm is absent from the ejaculate without a physical blockage.
Although male infertility can be an isolating diagnosis, it’s hardly uncommon. Male factors are the sole or contributing cause in 30% to 40% of infertility cases among couples, according to the National Institutes of Health. Azoospermia affects an estimated 10% to 15% of infertile men.
Zac has developed his own way of explaining his diagnosis.
“There might be swimmers in the locker room, but they’re not making it out to the pool,” he laughs, finding some humor in the diagnosis.
An upcoming procedure will determine whether those “swimmers” are there. If doctors find viable sperm, they can be extracted and frozen for use in IVF.
Kaitlyn says they’ve been told there’s a 50-50 chance the procedure will succeed. If it doesn’t, the couple plans to consider donor sperm and continue with IVF.
For Zac, absorbing what the diagnosis seemed to say about him brought an immediate sense of shame. Even after his doctor explained that the condition wasn’t something he’d caused, he struggled with knowing that the medical reason they hadn’t conceived was on his side.
“I felt like I was the problem, that we’d spent this whole year getting our hopes up and nothing was happening because of me,” he says.
Time, conversations and learning how many other people have experienced infertility have helped loosen that feeling. So has knowing that even if the upcoming procedure doesn’t produce the result they want, another route toward parenthood remains open.
The people who were there all along
One of the crueler aspects of infertility, the Laczkos discovered, was how easily it could make them feel as though they were the only ones experiencing it.
Then they started talking with others.
As Zac opened up about what they were going through, he was surprised by how many people responded with stories of their own experiences or those of people close to them.
Kaitlyn discovered that infertility had touched people much closer to her than she’d realized, including within her own family.
“I didn’t even know my own mom had struggled with this at one point,” she says.
The discovery underscored something that’s become important to the couple: Infertility often feels invisible because people are reluctant to discuss it.
“Whether it’s IVF, miscarriage, freezing your eggs or being unable to get pregnant, there are so many people struggling with infertility, and we can all be in this together,” Kaitlyn says.
That realization has changed how the Laczkos talk about their own experience. Something they once kept to themselves is now a story they’re willing to share.
Kaitlyn hopes that openness can make the experience a little less painful for whoever comes next, while Zac hopes it makes someone feel less alone.
A $30,000 hurdle
Talking helped with the emotional isolation but it didn’t solve the financial problem.
“We’re teachers in Tennessee; we don’t make enough to just come up with $30,000,” Kaitlyn says.
Medical loans were near the top of their list of options. Kaitlyn was also searching online for IVF grants when a friend tagged her in an Instagram post about the grant offered through the Wyatt Foundation and Conceive Fertility Foundation.
It was one of the few programs she found that they qualified for and that was accepting applications.
So they made a video, wrote a letter and told their story.
By then, each had adopted a word to help frame the experience – “hope” for Kaitlyn and “courage” for Zac – and started wearing bracelets bearing the words as reminders.
Kaitlyn understood her own choice immediately. Control comes naturally to her, she says, and infertility has repeatedly forced her to confront its limits. Hope became something she could choose when control wasn’t available.
Zac took longer to settle on his. For him, courage meant moving through something he had no idea how to handle.
“If I’m going to be a father, I know there will be scary moments, so I might as well learn to be as courageous as possible,” he says.
The words became what Kaitlyn calls their pillars.
“We can’t control much about this situation, but we can choose to face it with hope and courage.”
The first good news
On July 28, Kaitlyn and Zac received an email asking them to join a Zoom call. Kaitlyn thought it was another interview.
When the call began, she started telling their story. Then the people on the other side of the screen told them why they’d called: The Laczkos had received the grant.
Kaitlyn began crying when she heard the news.
“It was such a relief because it makes this doable,” she says, fresh tears welling up in her eyes. “We were always going to find a way to pay for IVF, but the grant cut our biggest hurdle in half.”
The Laczkos were among five recipients nationwide selected to receive $15,000 each toward IVF treatment. The program, launched in April during National Infertility Awareness Week, drew nearly 500 applicants.
The grant doesn’t mean the Laczkos can stop thinking about money. They expect they will still incur debt, and one IVF cycle might not be enough. But after months dominated by disappointment and uncertainty, the award was good news.
And they badly needed some.
Through it all, Kaitlyn and Zac say the experience has brought them closer. A friend once pointed out that during one of the hardest periods of their lives, they were becoming more connected rather than pulling apart. Kaitlyn has held onto that observation.
“We’re doing enough waiting now”
When Kaitlyn imagines pregnancy, one of the first pictures that comes to mind is deliberately silly.
She says she wants to be pregnant enough to sit on the couch, kick up her feet, balance a bowl of ice cream on her belly and boss her husband around.
But beneath the joke is the ordinary future she’s been imagining since childhood.
She wants to experience pregnancy, hold her baby and watch that child grow. Her nephews are already 6 and 7, and watching them grow has shown her how quickly childhood passes.
“We’re doing enough waiting now,” she says. “I’m ready to hold our baby, watch them take their first steps and, someday, send them off to kindergarten. I’m ready to do all the things.”
Zac pictures his own small moments: teaching a child to kick a ball or throw one.
There’s still plenty standing between the Laczkos and those imagined moments, beginning with Zac’s procedure and followed by another answer, another decision and, they hope, IVF.
Kaitlyn’s mother has given her a way to think about the distance that remains.
“Someday you’re going to be holding your baby,” her mother told her. “It might not happen the way you thought it would, but you’ll get there.”
For a couple who have spent much of the past year discovering how little they can control, Kaitlyn has decided that’s enough to believe in.
“I’m like, ‘Okay, I can do this. We can do this.’”