I haven't forgotten my childless days of the past. After all, I had quite a number of them! I've recently been quite thoughtful of my past and have come to the conclusion that it was a great advantage to my life. Seriously, I can hardly concentrate on this with my daughter whining and fussing in her crib because she doesn't want to take a nap! If I hadn't had such an experience as 9 years of infertility, I might not have the patience I have today with my little girl. So, it is with great wisdom and understanding that I consider my heart-wrenching years of childlessness an advantage in my life now.
The lesson I've learned is invaluable. Only after my grief has ended have I gained the whole of this lesson. I used to be so certain that people were only saying such positive things about their hard experiences because they had finally succeeded and didn't remember their grief. I don't believe that anymore. My eyes have been opened. I finally understand. Suddenly, as the fog fades, I can see everything I blindly waded through behind me. I understand both sides of the story, mine as well as those around me. It's sad to think of myself without my daughter Sabina, back when I was crushed, bitter and angry at the whole world, including those I loved. Describing my feelings was, and still is one of the hardest things I've ever tried to do, but at least I myself can understand them much better now.
The worst part of being struck by infertility grief is having to deal with the public. And it wasn't really general public that got to me the worst, it was friends and family. Seeing them all so happy at the announcement of a new pregnancy or birth was soooooooooooooo SOOOOOOOOOOOOO hard to deal with!!! I wanted to run away and hide. I didn't want anything to do with them. I knew that at one point in my previous life I would have been blindly happy for them just as everyone else was, but I couldn't now. On my bad days (and there were many) I felt compelled to go as far as to lash out at them if they tried to gain my happiness for them. I mean, I couldn't even be happy for myself, how on earth was I supposed to be happy for them?!
My mom once told me I should be happy for people who get pregnant and have babies because they are proud, and one day I'd be the pregnant one and want other people to be proud of me. I didn't see that as any good reason to give them the pleasure of ripping my heart out. I wasn't proud of them, and why should I go through the pain of faking it for their sakes? I mean, what did they do? Wash their underwear together to get pregnant?
How flipping miraculous.
There's a REAL difference from:
- having sex and getting pregnant. VS.
- discovering after a year of having unprotected sex and not getting pregnant that something is wrong with one or both of you, so...
- you see a doctor
- the doctor puts you on medication
- you chart temperatures religiously every morning
- take ovulation tests daily
- get blood draws several times a month to check hormone levels to the point that your veins in your elbows hurt
- have your husband collect semen at home
- then rush immediately to the lab to have it washed
- sit in the gynecologist's waiting room with cup of semen in your hands while you await the next inter-uterine insemination that fails
- so you go home and cry in the bathroom 2 weeks later when your pregnancy test is negative
- then don't know what to do because you don't have anymore money
- so you just go back to trying without medical help, which of course does nothing
- so you see another ob/gyn
- and then a fertility specialist
- you undergo an internal ultrasound where you learn you have polycystic ovarian syndrome
- but your ob/gyn suspects more so you undergo laproscopic surgery and are told you have endometriosis as well, which is why you can't get pregnant, and are told your only hope is IVF, the most expensive fertility treatment there is.
- so finally years later you convince your in-laws to take out a $10K loan so you and your husband can do a single cycle of IVF
- you go through a whole month on an incredibly insane regimen of drugs, injections and hormones that turn your belly purple and sore from bruising
- undergo a painful surgical egg retrieval in which they pull over 20 eggs from your swollen over stimulated follicles.
- undergo an embryo transfer 5 days later where they congratulate you and tell you to think that you're pregnant
- 10 days after that you get a call from the fertility clinic telling you they're sorry but you're not pregnant!!!!!!!
- cry for an entire day straight
- seriously consider grief counseling to deal with the blow
- consult with fertility doctor about doing a 2nd IVF cycle
- go to urgent care clinic when you think you're having a bad reaction to the medication post IVF and wonder what else can possibly go wrong for you
- begrudgingly take a pregnancy test at the urgent care because the doctor insists
- the nurse informs you that you're pregnant.
- The nurse gives you another pregnancy test for you to do yourself so you can physically see the two lines form before your own eyes.
- Yes, you really are pregnant!
And that's just a summery! So, please try not to compare your 'we got pregnant overnight' story with mine, because we have nothing in common!--except for the fact that I did in fact get pregnant overnight, only it took about 8 years longer than you to achieve. Honestly though, of course I was proud of my pregnancy and the birth of my daughter, and of course I wanted people to be happy for me, too. But I still stand behind my pre-pregnancy mentality that you could never have convinced me of being happy for someone else while I was under that deep cloud of depression. Just try that kind of tactic with anyone experiencing depression and I'm sure you'll be met with severe resistance. It doesn't matter if it's true. When you're depressed that much, misery loves company and other people's happiness hurts like a punch in the gut!
My sister in law once told us, when she was just starting trying to have a baby, that she was going to have to undergo some kind of injection therapy for a blood disorder or something and stated that she guessed she was "in the same boat" as us now. ?!!!??! As you might imagine, I did not take that well. I was actually furious that she could even suggest such a notion! She had no blooming idea what it was like in our boat!! In what way did a few injections compare to the years of termoial we had gone through?! It literally infuriated me when like a second later she announced her pregnancy! Of course, is all I could think. It kind of surprised me that I had secretly hoped she would have fertility troubles just so I could have someone in the family who understood me. But I had to grieve that loss as well when her injections turned out to be a mere hicup in her quick jaunt to pregnancy. It had already been a hard long road for us, and we still had 6 more years to go at that point before we'd reach the end. I don't know what I would've done had I known that then how long it would be. What I realize now is that my sister in law honestly didn't know just how bad it was--nobody did, and they almost all told me after I had my baby just how hard it was on them to know how much we wanted to have a family and how they didn't know what to say to us. She was just trying to say something that would help us feel better, I know, and she didn't know it was the wrong thing to say, or that pretty much anything you could say to us at the time would be the wrong thing to say!
I am actually having a tough time realizing that I'm not considered "infertile" anymore. I know I'm a mom, and have definitely made that transision in my mind (rather abruptly, I might add) but I carry the weight of infertility like a proud battle scar. It's a part of who I am now, and I am trying to adjust to that fact. I still to this day get flair-ups of my infertility whenever I see pregnant women or women with babies or loads of children. It's just automatic to assume she probably didn't think twice about conceiving those kids, and it irritates me. I'm definitely getting better about it, but it's still there. What I've found is that I can now finally appreciate the love that a parent has for their child. Like how precious they really are, how sweet and adorable the things they do and say can be to a parent. I totally love babies! They are so stinking cute, and so completely and miraculously amazing--every single one (okay, almost). I was just unable to see them before because of how much pain they brought me just to look at them. It's the parents where I find I still have trouble with accepting without any underlying resentment.
So, I still have some work to do before I'm completely "healed" of my pain, but quite honestly, I'm rather surprised at how quickly I've recovered to the extent that I have already. It's amazing what a little bundle of joy can do to one's psyche. I've discovered that the very label "bundle of joy" has a deeper meaning than it used to. Finally, I'm becoming more normal. But my battle scars? My infertility wounds are my life lessons, and I know I'll never let them go. It took me a while to realize this, that they won't be forgotten, just the way I think of them changes.
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