Varieties of Infertility Experience

It’s not a good idea for me to blog in the morning instead of going to work, but if I don’t do this now, these ideas and feelings will rattle around in my head and heart and distract me all day.  They may do that anyway, but at least now I’m making an effort.

It turns out that there are new frontiers of my sadness.  I’ve been approaching another one, and last night I arrived.  This will be hard to explain, but last night, the reality that I will never have another child took on a new and deeper resonance.  Previous sadnesses felt intense — sometimes so intense I wondered how I could bear it — but perhaps because they were so intense they stopped and went away.  But now there’s some kind of feeling in my bones or in new parts of my brain that this is really and truly permanent.  I mean I knew that of course, I knew I would never have another child months ago.  But until now some renegade part of my mind or spirit was holding out, or hadn’t gotten the message.  Now it’s true, and real.  This is perma-sad.  This is the sadness I’ll feel about it until I die.  It has finally arrived.

I wonder if the previous emotions were about the trauma of infertility treatment and the agony of the years leading up to the treatments in which Daniel would not decide whether to have another child (years in which our fertility may have leaked away, unnoticed, so that when we needed it, it was gone).  Infertility treatment, even if it works, is an awful thing.  It makes sense to me that it has its own period of grieving and working through.  I think I’ve done that.

Or perhaps not.  I am coming to the first anniversary of the short, expensive, and agonizing period of treatments.  Maybe this feeling is just a continuation of the treatment trauma.  Almost a whole year has passed, and I’ve done all this work, and I can’t I be released now?  I’ve been such a good girl, can’t I go home or to the place where that never-born (never-conceived, even, poor love) baby is waiting for me, and we can all join her and have that other life that we’re supposed to be having?  Yes, that’s it.  I feel like I’m in exile, or in a place of punishment.  Is it over yet?  (No, love, it will never be over.)  How can a year have passed without a miracle?

Some precipitating events: yesterday was parent-teacher conferences at Milo’s school.  One of Milo’s teachers is pregnant (with her fifth.  Yes, fifth), and he’s very excited about this.  We congratulated her and told her Milo was so excited, and she said, “Yes, he seems to really love babies.”  And for a few seconds, the question of why we didn’t have some more babies for him (and us) to love just hung there.  Maybe I was the only one who knew it was there.  But I felt it.  It was real to me.  I want to know, too: where is that other baby?

Milo last night, feeling oppressed by homework, said, “Sometimes I’m sick of being the youngest in the family.”  What me meant was he wants the freedom of a grownup.  But I heard it differently.

My career coach and friend just had her fourth child.  We’re going to the baby naming (baptism-equivalent) on Sunday morning.  It’s churlish of me, but I will point out that I’m missing my favorite workout class to go.  I love the class because it reminds me of what my body can do, and how great it feels to have a body that can work so hard.  So skipping it and being reminded of what my body couldn’t do is a whisper bitter.

Last night I felt so sad.  I had this desperate fantasy of my brother having a child, the child’s mother leaving, and Ethan and my mother (because my mother saves E from all kinds of stuff) deciding that Daniel and I should raise the child.  I wanted it so much I had to concentrate on breathing.

This morning, the woman who cuts my hair came to the house (crazy schedule, a haircut for me and Milo at 7am, but she works this way and my roots were showing, so it seemed like a good idea).  I was flustered because Daniel had broken a compact flourescent lightbulb last night, and I came upon the mess this morning and was in full-on hazmat remediation mode.  As I was cleaning up, I thought, “Wow, it’s a good thing I’m not pregnant, because I’d be flipping out right now because of the mercury.”  And I said to her, “Y’know, it breaks my heart that I couldn’t get pregnant after Milo, but when I’m cleaning this up, I’m glad not to be pregnant.”  Women talk to their hairdressers that way, right?

You know what she said, right?  She said, “Well, I’ll tell you some news: I am pregnant, with a girl, due in September.”  She has a one-year old and is the mother to her husband’s teenage son from a previous marriage.

Note to all fertile people: When someone says words like I, heartbreak, can’t, and pregnant in the same sentence,  it’s bad form to announce that you yourself are pregnant.  Could she not have waited?  I see her every four weeks.  I’m not her ob/gyn — I didn’t need to know today.

And worst of all, I think my angel Milo heard what I said about not being able to have another baby.  I thought he was upstairs and out of earshot, but he had just gone into another room.  He was clingy and off-balance this morning, which he could have been for 100 reasons.  But of course I have to believe that it’s because I infected him with my sadness, and made it his somehow, that he heard something about me being sad and he can and can’t understand it and now he is sad, too.  In some ways I want him to know.  I want him to know how hard I tried to give him someone else to love and be with.  He’s sort of asked about it before, in an indirect, not knowing the words or even the right question, way;  and I’ve answered, sort of, by saying that sometimes people can’t have children when they want to, like Sarah in the Bible.

I didn’t want to have another baby because I thought Milo “needed” a sibling.  I’ve seen too many siblings to believe in the story of eternal affection and mutual support.  I wanted another baby for me.  But Milo would have loved a baby so much (at least until it was clear how much that baby would demand of Daniel and me.  Then he might want to reconsider).  He used to lobby for a baby and a dog.  He’s a realist, so now he’s waiting for the dog.

And all that’s happened is that I’m now both sad and very, very late for work.