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Infertility’s Cruel Joke
In an earlier post this week, I talked about hope and moving on. The post generated a lot of great comments and a number of people mentioned how hope is like carrying around a bowling ball and that it is impossible to move on as long as you hold onto it. I couldn’t agree more.
I have definitely let go of my “bowling ball.” I am no longer hoping for a miracle pregnancy. Given my condition, it would be virtually impossible. The problem is the “virtually” bit.
Recently, after talking to someone about moving on, she reminded me that it could still happen and that her friend, who had been told she’d never have children, got pregnant at 48!
She was trying to make me feel better, in that “hopey” way, but it didn’t work, and now I can’t get this thought out of my head.
What if I got pregnant now? Hormones do wild things and as menopause approaches (which I’ve been told it is) those hormones have been known to misbehave. What if my body suddenly kicked out that one juicy egg? What if I got pregnant at 48?
Even overlooking all the health risks of being pregnant at 48, my husband is 15 years my senior, which means he’d be in his 80s by the time our child made it out of high school!! My father-in-law is currently 81 and he is no condition to be taking care of a teenager, nor would he want to.
But there’s an even bigger factor at play here. The bowling ball. I’ve let mine go and I don’t want to pick it up again. I can’t say that I no longer want children, because that’s not the entire truth, but I don’t want to live with the hope or the worry that I might get unexpectedly pregnant. I want to keep moving on with the life I’m creating now.
So, I now find myself in the ironic position of being diagnosed infertile but having to consider contraceptive options.
Sometimes I wonder if life isn’t just one big April Fool’s joke.
Finding Your Identity After Infertility
Some time ago I mentioned that I was working on putting together some seminars to deal with life after infertility, and I’m very pleased to announce that the first one has been scheduled for June!
I’ve been working with a friend who is an amazing therapist and writer. Using her experience in dealing with loss and my own experience with infertility, plus the information I’ve learned from you through this blog, all bundled together with our mutual knowledge of creative pursuits as therapy, we’ve developed a series of seminars called Healing Through Creativity.
The topic of the first seminar is Finding Your Identity After Infertility. From my own experience, I’ve learned how important it is to rediscover who we are after imagining ourselves in the role of mother for so long. This seminar aims to start that process.
I’m very excited about this new venture and it feels to me like something I’m supposed to be doing.
Here’s the information for the first seminar in Los Angeles, and a link to the website for more details:
Finding Your Identity After Infertility
Sunday, June 26, 2011
8:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
DoubleTree Hotel, LAX/El Segundo
The plan is to run a series of seminars covering different topics and to eventually make them available elsewhere. Watch this space.
Too Perplexed to Be Outraged
You’ve probably seen the news this week about PETA’s vasectomy campaign and National Infertility Awareness Week. If not, here’s a quick rundown.
– PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) announced an upcoming campaign to offer a free vasectomy to a man who has his dog neutered.
– PETA then launched the campaign “in honor” of National Infertility Awareness Week.
– Blogger and IF advocate Keiko Zoll launched a petition and email/phone crusade against PETA’s campaign.
– PETA agreed to remove any reference to National Infertility Awareness Week from the campaign.
You can follow along as the story unfolded on Keiko’s blog.
I must confess that I was not one of the bloggers and infertility advocates that participated in the petition to PETA. I’m afraid to say that this was one of those occasions where I was too stunned for action. I never quite got to the point at being outraged about the lack of respect for the infertility community, because I could never get beyond the whole bizarre nature of the campaign itself.
As much as I support responsible pet ownership, I’m also personally aware of the consequences of human vasectomy. Voluntary human sterilization isn’t something that should be taken lightly or undertaken without weighing all the pros and cons. It certainly isn’t something appropriate to be won in a contest.
So, while Keiko Zoll was fighting and winning her battle, I’m afraid I was sitting here scratching my head trying to make some sense of the campaign. I never even got to the stage of trying to find some tenuous connection between voluntarily vasectomy and infertility.
I applaud Keiko for fighting the fight for the Infertility community and I continue to puzzle over the inner workings of PETA’s marketing department.
Hope vs. Acceptance
In the past week two different people have made comments to me that have amounted to the same message: Don’t give up hope; there’s still a chance you could have a baby.
Whether you’re childless-by-choice, or by circumstance, I’m willing to bet you’ve had someone say something similar to you.
“It could still happen.”
“You’ll change your mind.”
“Don’t give up hope.”
The “don’t give up hope” type of comment is the one that hits me closest to the core. While I think that hope is key to human survival, I think it can be dangerous if it isn’t backed by action. Just hoping something will happen someday is how potential and lives get frittered away.
While I was trying to get pregnant, I was full of hope, but I was also doing everything I possibly could to make it happen. Now that I am no longer trying, I am no longer holding out hope.
But this doesn’t mean I feel hopeless. And this is what I want to be able to explain to people who still carry hope for me.
Losing hope of having children is very different from accepting and coming-to-terms with the fact that I won’t. I am not hopeless; I haven’t thrown in the towel; I haven’t rolled over and surrendered to my childlessness. I have made a conscious decision to stop my quest to conceive and for the past two years I’ve been working on coming-to-terms with that decision. I haven’t lost hope; I’ve just changed my outcome. I haven’t simply given up on the idea of having children; I’ve made a decision to live childfree.
I know that many of these comments are said with the best of intentions. People who care about us can’t bear to see us not get something we want, or not get something that they think we should want. There is still a pervading idea that people who don’t have children do, or eventually will, want them. But some of us just don’t, or won’t, or did once, but don’t anymore. For the latter group, it’s not about giving up hope; it’s about accepting what is and building a life from there.
Talking About Infertility
Last night I was at a book signing event in San Francisco. It was really fun. I sat around with about ten women and we drank wine and talked about the craziness of infertility and how life doesn’t always give you what you want—and how sometimes that’s ok.
It was a mixed group, including women who were childfree by choice, not-by-choice, or not-exactly-by-choice, as well as a handful of mothers. Here are some of the most interesting highlights for me:
From one of the mothers: “My friend just told me that she’d been through infertility treatments. I had no idea.”
From another of the mothers: “Out of my circle had nine friends, seven had problems conceiving. I didn’t realize how common a problem this is.”
From a woman who was childfree (I think not-by-choice, but I’m not sure): This isn’t the life I’d planned for myself, but I feel like I’m just where I’m supposed to be.”
From a lovely softspoken woman, the oldest member of the group: “I can completely understand how you lost all logic and behaved the way you did, because it happened to me.”
Sometimes you feel as if you’re the only person in the world to go through infertility or to find yourself childfree when you hadn’t planned it that way, but what I’m seeing first-hand is that this touches so many people. And what I’m encouraged to learn is that those who haven’t experienced it themselves want to know more, so they can help the people they care about. I find myself heartened by this.
Another Voice for the Childless-Not-By-Choice
We’ve long bemoaned the lack of media coverage for the childless and childfree. I know that I’ve complained several times about “safe” magazines, such as Runner’s World springing unexpected parenting articles on me in between the shoe reviews and training programs.
So, when I was asked recently to contribute some thoughts about childfree/childless/infertility blogs for a sidebar to an article about the mommy blog phenomenon, I was understandably hesitant.
Well, the article came out in BITCH Magazine this month (Spring ’11) and I must say that I’m thrilled. After the main Mommy Blog article was a FULL PAGE article entitled Barren Bloggers in Breederville!
OK, not the most flattering of monikers, especially considering one of the bloggers mentioned now has twins, but right up there, flying the flag for the “life after infertility” crowd was Silent Sorority’s Pamela – and yours truly.
And Hallelujah, if the author didn’t make a point of mentioning that some women choose a life path that doesn’t include motherhood, and that (and I quote) “Infertility and adoption experts stress that [adoption] is not a universal solution,” especially for “emotionally and financially drained” infertility patients, hesitant to “embark on yet another uncertain journey.” Honestly, I could kiss the author for getting those words into print. In fact I am considering printing them out and keeping them in my pocket for the next time someone asks if we ever considered adoption before deciding to live childfree.
Anyway, I’m keeping an eye open for the article popping up online, and when it does, I will most definitely be posting it here.
Sisters, if we just keep talking, eventually, we will be heard. –x-
Surviving
Today marks the 25th anniversary of the death of my father. 25 years have passed and I’ve grown from a teenage girl to a woman, but if I was sitting in a room with you, I still wouldn’t be able to tell you about my dad without my voice cracking.
Losing my dad was the single most significant thing that had ever happened to me. It changed the whole trajectory of my life and it colored everything I did for many, many years.
Then I found out I couldn’t have children.
In many ways that has trumped my father’s death. It has taken the title of Most Significant Event. It has changed the trajectory of my life in ways I could never have imagined, and it still colors everything that I do. But already I am able to tell you that I can’t have children, without my voice cracking. Because what losing my dad taught me is that life goes on and that I will survive. It does, and I will.
Last night I spoke about writing at the Wellness Community, a cancer support center near my home. I sat in a room with survivors, women whose Most Significant Event has given them an up-close view of their own mortality. Their diagnosis changed their lives and continues to color everything that they do. But they’re here, they’re talking (often with cracking voices), they’re telling their stories and they are surviving.
Life deals us blows; it’s the nature of the thing. But we go on and we survive. That’s what makes us human.
Whiny Wednesday – Thoughtless Comments
It’s Whiny Wednesday and I’ve been brewing a post for a couple of weeks about people who leave thoughtless comments on blogs.
I’ve come across several cases recently of commenters posting hateful or at least unthinking comments on blogs and websites. The worst was on an article about infertility that I reposted here. That article generated some of the most cruel and heartless comments I’ve ever read on the subject.
Then, last week a fellow blogger told me of her experience with an equally unpleasant throw away comment someone left on a blog she visits. It was one of those comments about the childless and childfree that we know in our hearts aren’t true, but that sting anyway. The words, bitter, pathetic and whiny are often associated with those stereotypes.
I know better than to read comments on news sites, because I always get riled up, and yet I do it anyway, and then find myself stomping around furious that someone could be so thoughtless and insensitive.
Finally last week, I had lunch with a friend who had published an article called My Husband, the Convicted Murderer on Salon.com. Her article spawned 122 comments, ranging from support and understanding to the inevitable hate mail variety. I asked her; “How do you deal with this?” and she gave me some helpful advice.
She said (and I’m paraphrasing here):
“Some people just come looking for a fight. They’re looking for controversy and they’re looking for someone to leave their darkest thoughts. The internet is the perfect, almost anonymous place to do that.”
She’s right. People come from all sorts of dark places, and often with their own personal agenda. Sometimes people post before they think, or they just don’t bother wasting energy thinking at all. There’s nothing we can do to help those people, and odds are, they don’t want to be helped or educated or enlightened. They just want to fight.
I feel very fortunate that most of the people who find this blog are coming with something positive to say. It has helped create the kind of community I’d envisioned when I first started this project. But when I venture out into the wider world and encounter the other kind of commenters out there, I’ll be sure to keep my friend’s advice in mind.
It’s Whiny Wednesday, so chime in to the discussion or feel free to have a whine of your own.
P.S. On the subject of other blogs, here’s an article tying in to our National Women’s History month series that I posted on Divine Caroline earlier this week.
Death Penalty for Women Who Miscarry
Ironic that, in this month of celebrating women who made history, this story should hit the headlines.
Kathleen Guthrie sent me this report:
As reported on MSNBC TV yesterday, Bobby Franklin, a Georgia lawmaker, has proposed a bill that would hold women criminally and legally accountable—and eligible for the death penalty—if they miscarry.
This isn’t just the case of one extreme politician. The bill has made it to the legislature, and similar bills are being considered in other states.
I am too stunned to be outraged yet; in fact the bill is so ludicrous that I find myself on the verge of laughing.
But really, it’s not funny.
The women who came before us fought hard for our reproductive rights, and yet it seems we are in constant danger of losing our grip on those rights.
I realize that this bill is a political vehicle to overturn abortion law, but what kind of a country do we live in where a law that would systematically wipe out women who are unable to reproduce make it any further than the first trash can?
