One of the hardest parts about dealing with infertility is trying to stay positive and not stress when every month, every treatment is met with the same heartbreaking results – no baby. When time marches on, your friends have second and third kids and celebrate their birthdays and you’re still waiting for yours, when every day there’s a new bump reveal and newborn pic on your Instagram and Facebook feeds.
Books and articles that try to convince you that you can get pregnant or tell you how changing your diet, lifestyle, cleaning your home of all chemicals will get you pregnant don’t necessarily help either. I thought it’d be empowering to take control of my fertility but it’s just added stress and confusion. Now I’m worrying that everything I eat or drink, when I exercise or dont exercise, when I spray perfume or stress eat ice cream or share a bag of microwave popcorn with the hubs that I’m compromising my fertility and that will be the reason I don’t get pregnant. It’s hard not knowing what exactly could be the reason you’re not getting pregnant when others seem to be conceiving every day.
It’s hard not to think about it all day, every day and not to go down the rabbit hole of every diet, study, miracle story and try the same. But it’s also exhausting and stressful and the info and research on fertility is so contradictory, it’s hard to know what’s right. Perhaps because a huge part of it science can’t explain – there’s a miracle to creating life that we can’t control and when that miracle doesn’t happen for us, we can’t help but wonder why, what did we do wrong.
Some days, I want to try everything anyone has ever tried to get pregnant even if that means drinking green juice all day every day. Other days, I think that if I just stopped stressing about it and caring so much, it would happen – something people always tell you.
I try to stay positive and tell myself that I will get pregnant and this is my month, but recently it’s been really hard. More and more of our friends, even the ones who were struggling with me, are announcing they’re pregnant. This should give me hope and on my good days it does, but on most days it just makes me feel hopeless and wonder why not me — why do I have to face this struggle and for this long? After four rounds of clomid and three IUIs, my doctor suggested we start considering surgery to fix my maybe blocked tube and IVF. That felt like such a crushing blow. I just didn’t think I would ever get to this point, and ever since all I’ve felt is sad. I wanted to give this month another try before going that route, and then I didn’t respond to my usual dose of Clomid and at the appointment where I thought we’d be scheduling my IUI, I was being prescribed a higher dose of Clomid and told to wait another five days. I know this is common, but I was convinced this month was different and now it seems like it’s different in a bad way. It’s hard to believe it will happen for me, even though I keep trying to tell myself to stay positive. I keep thinking about how sad I’m going to feel at the holidays when we’ll see friends and family and I’ll only feel like I have part of my family. I know I should be staying positive and telling myself that this nightmare will be over by then and I’ll be pregs, but after so much disappointment and setbacks, I don’t know how to keep the faith or to not think about it all the time.
And that kills me because I know it’s robbing me of enjoying everything I have right in front of me, including a beautiful, amazing, healthy son and special little family that we’ve built. Part of me wonders if this is the universe reaching me a lesson about patience and trusting the universe and timing of my life, but its like I’m still forcing myself to say and try to believe in all that and then I get stressed thinking because it’s not genuine, because I am still letting this exist like a dark cloud over my life, because I’m not really being patient (more like forced to be) and I question whether this will ever happen for me rather than trusting that the universe will provide for me and my story is unfolding exactly as it should that I won’t get pregnant because my lesson hasn’t been learned.
Sorry for such a downer post. When I started writing this, I didn’t think it would be so depressing. But I think we as women or humans really don’t always admit when we are dying inside, when we are struggling and when we are lost. We have so many people who rely on us to keep going, to take care of everything that it’s hard. But getting these feelings out, admitting I’m wrestling with them and that this is fucking hard is important because I want anyone else going through this or any other struggle to know that I am here too and it’s okay if you don’t feel hopeful, if you feel anger and despair, if you are at the end of your rope. This is hard – the physical and emotional toll are something no one really prepares you for and you can’t fully know until it happens to you. So it’s fine to throw yourself a pity party and cry in the bathroom and avoid your friends who are expecting even though you love them and are so happy for them. It’s hard and it’s unfair and it takes every fiber of strength to persevere and keep going and so you do what you need to do to get through it. I just hope when our baby finally comes that they know how incredibly hard I fought for them and how much they were loved even when I didn’t think they’d ever be mine.
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