Looking all around....

I look all around and everywhere I look my friends are expecting or have a complete family. Even those friends that struggle with infertility, many of them are finding their way.

I haven’t been on blogger much this summer between our vacation to Iceland, to the death of Danny’s grandmother, to my brother’s wedding. It was difficult. The moments I did get on blogger I was happy to see that many of you have been successful with your treatments.

A few great friends from home found success as well through luck, IUI’s and one is even pregnant with twins after three failed IVF’s. Regardless of how your family was created I am still very jealous of all of you. I’m not talking just a twinge, like when your SIL buys a brand new vehicle that you’ve always wanted; I’m talking the kind that makes you want to cut all ties with that person. Severe a friendship….. just like that. That seeing them so happy makes your heart ache, like really ache.

A long and wonderful friend of mine is now pregnant. She explained to me what it was like to be that “other” person . The one not suffering from infertility. She said that once she found out she was expecting I was one of the first people on her mind. But it wasn’t excitement. It was “Oh my god, how do I tell Marnie”. And low and behold when she told me, I cut our friendship off. Not because I wanted to but because I just couldn’t deal with it. I couldn’t.

How is this fair to anyone? The guilt that surfaces from these uncontrolled feelings is overwhelming. I have no control of any of this. I question my decision to be open about our infertility on a daily basis. That explaining to the fertile world what it’s like to not be able to reproduce is useless. That thinking something is very different than feeling something. That nothing I say could even remotely compare or help one understand the daily struggles I go through. Not only in my professional career as a teacher but in the subdivision I have chosen to live in with all those wonderful young families around us.

I received an email from a university friend who has struggled with secondary infertility for awhile. In her email she explained that she had cut herself off from many friends since she felt they just didn’t understand how it felt to be in her shoes and she didn’t know how to explain infertility to them. I almost felt relief when I read that. That me severing ties from people that I love so very much was okay. That hibernation was an option and I wasn’t the only one choosing it. Danny doesn’t think it is healthy. I think of it more as “safety”.

Isn’t all of this crazy? Can’t infertility be considered a disease that can never be fully cured? A wise person who had struggled to create their family for years once told me that pregnancy doesn’t cure infertility. It eases it but never cures it. The damage is done over years and years of disappointment, loss, anger, desperation and heart ache.

I guess you can say I’ve been jaded.