Isolation is a feeling and an emotion that we all feel from time to time. Whether we isolate ourselves because of pain or otherwise, we become more and more lonely as our infertility progresses along its path.

In a previous article we mentioned that sometimes we become estranged from friends and family because we just don’t want to face their children-filled realities. That’s fine, we suppose, but what about those folks that actually care and want to hear from us and want to try to help and understand?

All of us here in infertile-land have (or should have) a couple of close confidants that we keep very tight inside our inner circle. These are the folks (friends and/or relatives) that know when our next round of IVF is or if we are considering adoption or surrogacy. These people know some things our families don’t and they keep it to themselves sans gossip. They are so well versed that they seem to have gone through a part of that “sensitivity training” that we wish so many others would go through. They go miles above and beyond anyone else even made an attempt to. We can label these folks as true friends who care.

What happens though when these people start to drift away too? This, to us, is a sad state of affairs. The writing on the wall starts to show when the infertile couple becomes the only one’s reaching out by phone, email or otherwise. Communication is a two-way street, for sure, but since they are a source of our comfort, we generally are blind to the fact that it slowly becomes more one-way. Even though they respond when contacted, they seem not to contact first. Is there a pattern here? Anyone else seen this?

Since these so-called wonderful people have been our only in-person emotional outlets, are they now sick or fed up with this since it has gone on so long? Has our depressive tone run them off? Did they even care in the first place? Were they just keeping us around so that they can compare their much better off “having children” situation to our failures so that they can say, “Well, at least we’re not like the so-n-so’s.”

Are our contacts going to dwindle down to none? What then?

Since the holiday season is upon us, we would like to take a brief moment to acknowledge a known sore spot with those of us who are infertile. On an almost daily basis we are sifting through a larger amount of physical (snail) mail which has been growing post-thanksgiving. Tucked into these piles of online and store catalogs are the little things that seem to send those of us sans-kids into our dark places. Yep, we’re talking about Christmas cards.

However, these just aren’t any normal Christmas cards like the one’s you might receive from an out-of-town grandparent that has a $15.00 check inside. Nope. These are the cards that come as a postcard or in an envelope that display our overly fertile friends and their grouping of kids all in their holiday best. Most of these tend to be themed, quite poorly, to show how children are growing year after year. The worst ones may even include a family update newsletter but that is a rant for another article.

Not to say that this is an entirely awful thing to want to display your family in a photograph to keep up with minimal correspondence every holiday season, but to send them out to those of us who desire to have the chance to one day create these pictures for ourselves is bad taste. After a while of infertility most friends should be aware of our feelings and understand that viewing a holiday card with them showing off their children front and center can, unfortunately, make us upset. Especially since the holiday season already brings its own set of sad emotions.

Here is our plea; DO NOT SEND US ANY OF YOUR STUPID, STAGED HOLIDAY CARDS THAT FEATURE YOUR FAMILY IN A PHOTO OF ANY KIND. We do not care to see your entire family in matching red and/or green holiday sweaters in front of a phony snowy forest backdrop. We do not care that it took you all afternoon at Sears or Kmart or JC Penney’s photo department and do not want to hear the story of how the photographer coaxed all the kids into only one good shot. Please do not make us waste paper and postage by throwing these straight in the trash or better yet using the “return-to-sender” feature of our postal system.

A lot of us infertile folks may think this in our heads, but we wanted to say it out loud…Please stop rubbing it in our faces that you have children and we do not!

By NewsGirl, Guest Author for ITNB

Infertility is a very personal battle. And this struggle…this fight…this abyss of sadness is something we tend to keep to ourselves. We don’t share it with the people who we see everyday or those who love us most. We retreat to our computers where we find amazing support on message boards and blogs from people who don’t know us and wouldn’t know us if they walked right into us on the street. But this is a huge thing that we go through. It is physically and emotionally draining. (I’m not even going near the financial implications, see The Price of Money below.) It is a lot to keep from the people you love and share your life with, isn’t it?

The majority of people decide they want to have a child and get to make love to their partner in the privacy of their bedroom. They get to surprise the world with a pregnancy whenever they see fit to share it. We don’t get that. Those of us fighting this battle get phone calls and emails asking when our next doctor’s appointment is…when the next procedure or cycle will be. Our sex lives (or lack thereof) are out there for the entire world to know. (Doesn’t it feel like that sometimes?) We can’t have a baby the “old-fashioned” way. We need doctors and embryologists and anesthesiologists just to have a chance at having a baby. We get looks of pity and pep talks. (And who needs or wants those!? Or is it just me that gets really angry from that crap?) We get poked and prodded and used as pin cushions. We don’t get to surprise anyone with the news if …IF…we actually get pregnant. And we don’t even get definitive results…we have percentages of success based on age and a whole host of other things that are beyond our control.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve skipped lot…and I mean A LOT…of family functions over the past two years because I couldn’t handle seeing kids or because I had just gotten a BFN again (see Becoming Estranged below). In a way, it feels like I’m hiding from my life. I hate that. How much of your life have you missed since finding out that you were infertile? How much of your struggles with infertility have you kept from the people you see every day or those you love? Telling our loved ones may make this fight easier to bear but telling them comes with questions…the ones about when you decided to have kids… what have you done so far…are any of us ready to answer those questions? Do we even have to?

I mentioned all this to a good friend of mine who is also struggling with infertility. And in all her infinite wisdom she said to me: “If they ask questions, you can say with impunity, ‘This is a really difficult process for us, and we’d prefer not to talk about it. I hope you can respect our wishes.’ And who knows, maybe having the visible support of your extended family will help us cope? Maybe in keeping it private, we’re giving ourselves a heavier burden to bear?”

And you know what? She is 100% absolutely positively right. How many of us suffer in silence daily only to cry to our computer screens because the people we talk to in cyberspace are the ONLY people who can even begin to imagine what it is that we are going through. We get by on virtual hugs instead of trusting those who can actually hug us. We go through the motions of every day life. We suffer through the intrusive and insensitive questions such as “Are you having kids?” We smile at family gatherings and hang out at the bar (there should always be a bar at family gatherings) because it’s easier then facing the kids that are running around laughing or the talk of so and so’s pregnancy.

But the question remains…are we making this harder on ourselves then it needs to be? Maybe we should have a little more faith in those we love? Maybe we should come out of the infertility closet?

For more articles by NewsGirl including the original of this article, please visit her blog I’ve Got News For You and follow her on Twitter @GotNewsForYou .

Avoidance. It is something that we infertile couples tend to do when situations arise that will be emotionally difficult to handle. Strong examples of this would be to decline any and all invitations to baby showers, children’s 1st birthdays, baptisms and the like. Turning these events down does not mean that we don’t care, but rather it brings us face-to-face with the reality of what we are missing and what we are not celebrating. The upset-o-meter tends to rise quickly if all we see are happy parents and happy children to boot.

After a while of non-attendance, we begin to lose touch with those folks that we used to be very close with pre-kids. Since our lives are going in different directions, or better yet, their lives are going in a forward direction and ours has halted, being able to relate becomes more difficult. Even if we were courageous enough to participate in these functions, conversations are difficult because we’re not sharing the same anecdotes related to children’s’ first this and children’s’ first that.

This estranged feeling is not limited to just friends with children. We happen to observe the same awkwardness within our immediate family. When a family member or relative says or does something insensitive to our infertile situation, we again crawl into our shell. These periods of non-contact can go on for months. Even when apologies and forgiveness are issued, there is still a sense of need to be walking on eggshells from all parties.

We are in charge of who we let into our lives. At this point, in the middle of all this madness, it might just be ok to keep the inner circle very small. There is the old saying that we should not run from our problems, we should face them head on. There is also something to be said about avoiding things that make us uncomfortable. Which one is more relevant?

By FertilityChick, Guest Author for ITNB

When I was younger I avoided doctor’s offices as much as possible. Basically unless it was annual physical time (and even those I tended to, ahem, “miss” – bad I know), or I was really, really, REALLY sick, I stayed as far away as possible. As a recovering needle-phob, I knew a doctor’s office was the very last place I wanted to be. In most cases the visit resulted in a blood test or an immunization. Man, if only I knew!

Sadly, my foray into the cruel world of infertility started with a lot of avoidance. We weren’t really ready at the time for a family. I was dealing with school and then the start of a career. However, in the back of my head, I had a sense something was wrong and wasn’t ready to face it. I knew multiple doctor visits were on the horizon and wasn’t ready to spend my life sitting in those cracked, vinyl chairs of the waiting room. Not to mention the influx of invasive tests (and needles!) that I knew awaited me.

The time came when my courage increased and I was ready to deal. However, that didn’t prepare me for the amount of waiting time I would endure! The grand tour of waiting rooms: visits with my family doctor, then the OB/GYN, later at the fertility clinic, the ultrasound lab, and the RE’s office. Now I even wait at the Naturopathic doctor’s office. (Yes, now I’m actually paying for someone to stick needles into me!) In fact, when doing a monitored cycle, I spend more time sitting in a waiting room than I do in my own living room!

Time in the waiting room has become a metaphor of infertility for me. It’s about waiting. Waiting to see the next doctor or technician. Waiting for the next blood test, the next ultrasound, the next round of acupuncture. Waiting, waiting, waiting. Waiting for follicles to grow big enough to trigger. Waiting for the right time to do the next IUI. And then of course the hardest wait of all: the two week wait. In essence, the wait to see if all of this waiting is finally over so that hopefully a new kind of waiting begins.

I’m still at the beginning of my infertility journey and now that I’ve decided to take the summer months off, I’m doing a different kind of waiting. Funny, there are moments that I loathe the waiting rooms; the despair, the desperation. Other times, I’m oddly comforted by others who are also playing the waiting game. The ones who smile knowingly and understand what I’m feeling.

This definitely isn’t what I signed up for. I’ve probably seen more doctors in the past year and a half than some people will see in their lifetimes. My only request is this: can we get more comfortable chairs and better magazines in these damn waiting rooms? Seriously folks, we’re basically here on a regular and first name basis!

For more articles by FertilityChick, please visit her blog What If? and follow her on Twitter @fertilitychick.

As we pass through the arc of life the old adage of “we are born, we grow old, etc…” is known to all. When we look at our own expected life milestones there are differences depending on the environment we grew up in. Typically some of the expected events in our lifetimes include; our first words, first day of school, first kiss/love, high school graduation, college graduation, first full-time job, first promotion, meeting our mate, getting engaged, getting married, buying your first home, having a child/children and so on as your children then repeat the milestones.

For the majority of individuals, these steps seem to flow with relative ease. However when you get stuck at one of these steps or one doesn’t happen in the timely manner that you prefer, everything else in your own life plan comes to an abrupt halt as well.

It appears to us that in our society there is a large emphasis on completing the majority of these life tasks. Included in this same emphasis is the overwhelming importance of having children and starting a family. While this is the grand wish of Infertile couples, it only adds to the burden and headache of the current situation.

Infertility treatments can go on for years. It is during these years that time seems to stop and all other milestones take a back seat. Life’s setbacks can occur at anytime to anyone, but Infertility hurts physically, emotionally and sometimes financially. We always find ourselves asking the question, “When will we reach that milestone?”