this woman’s work

Now this is interesting.

When I was trying to get pregnant, there was a whole slew of women also trying to get pregnant at the same time — all with varying issues of infertility. There were also several who were very unhappily taking a break from treatment, perhaps permanently. Every single one of these women are now pregnant, with the most recent calling me this morning to announce her happy news. I hung up the phone and I didn’t feel bad or sad or jealous but a thought did come creeping into my mind, “Could that have been me?”

At the time, it seemed very clear to me that it was time to stop. Some (not all) of the other women were so hell-bent on getting a baby that it helped convince me to let it go. I could see myself in them and I realized that I was being consumed by not having a baby. It was becoming everything to me and I was letting it define my entire life.

Our decision to end our treatments was met with mixed reviews by my infertility peers. Some of them seemed annoyed, as if our decision was a commentary on their continued effots. Others were disappointed because they were sure that the very next treatment (or the one after) would certainly work. I was frustrated that they couldn’t understand and as I watched them hammer away at their treatment plans, I felt very free and lucky to be out of it. Now here they all are pregnant and we’re still waiting for a baby and I guess it’s natural that to find myself reexamining our decision.

I know that adoption through this agency is a sure thing but I think that the echo of all of those miscarriages makes that hard to believe. I’ve wanted a baby for an awfully long time (four years this November since we’ve been trying) and there were lots of times I thought we would get one only to be disappointed. From this vantage point, with all of these women getting pregnant and painting their nurseries, I couldn’t help but wonder if I had stuck with it a little longer, would I be among them?

So why did I stop and do those reasons still make sense? Let’s revisit:

1. My obsession and pain were hurting my relationship with Noah. I look back now and realize how stressed he was, too. He had this nervous habit of clearing his throat and I didn’t recognize this at the time, but now I’m sure it was caused by my ups and downs and misery while on the Clomid.

2. Our insurance ran out. That’s not a huge reason because we would have found a way if we had been convinced it was worth it to continue.

3. We both knew that IVF was never going to be an option for us. I think this is because adoption always seemed like a good idea to me, even before I knew I was infertile. The reason we did other treatments was that up until a certain point, it still seemed easier to make a baby than to adopt one. I knew that IVF was a lot of emotional and physical work and it seemed like more work — and just as expensive — as adopting a baby and it was also fraught with ethical decisions I really didn’t want to deal with.

Yes, those reasons all still make sense to me.

The other thing is that I have been really happy since we quit our infertility treatments. I think that going through the process of trying and then the process of deciding not to try helped me grow a lot as a person and helped me understand more about myself and what it means to me to be a mother. I’m grateful for that.

Also, letting go of getting pregnant helped me let go of some of the pressure that I might have put on the child we could have had. I think that had I gone through those treatments and gotten pregnant without some space to think that I might have pushed myself into a post-partum depression. I was starting to think about a baby the way I used to think about those last 10 pounds when I was in high school. If I could lose just ten more pounds, I’d think, then every thing would be fine and I would be happy. That’s the way I was thinking about a baby. I just knew that the reason I was sad and frustrated and depressed was that I couldn’t have a baby and while my infertility was a really unhappy crisis, it wasn’t the cause of all of my problems. Lifting that veil off of my life demanded that I face up to other issues that were hiding behind it. I’m much better at coping now and I like myself more. Go figure.

This is a big part of the book that I want to write. Being a mother is such an enormous part of who I am that my inability to make myself a mother again cut to the core of my ego. I had to learn to tie my self-esteem on things I could control and not on external events. This was very difficult because fertility is central to our concept of womanhood, especially in the feminist, natural mothering world of which I am a part. I had to expand my concept of fertility to other things; I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do this if I hadn’t stepped away from infertility treatments.

That’s what I want my book to be about ultimately: finding the power to make sense of our destinies. You know the best thing about all of these pregnant mamas is that when our baby arrives, we will all have little ones around the same age. That’s going to be an awfully nice thing.

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