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?

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!

I’d like to offer up my congratulations to the ITNB blog hosts for stating outright that “Stories that end with a child can be found elsewhere… if you want to find those type of comments, there are plenty of other forums out there for that purpose.”

Amen! My husband and I have had a theory (long before we found out we were infertile) that when people have babies, they sort of lose their frontal lobes, you know that part of the brain the helps you understand other people’s theory of mind—that perhaps not everyone is quite as enamored with your little one as you are. This phenomenon can manifest itself as anything from a 3 year old running amok during a funeral service to the endless clucking of mother hens about this birth weight and that milestone. We had postulated that perhaps the deep breathing of Lamaze, a few sleepless nights, or strong diaper fumes had somehow asphyxiated the brain cells of previously grounded and reasonable people. We had not considered that the force could be so strong as to extend to people whose child-rearing gong show was prefaced by a lengthy struggle with infertility. I expected more from these people.

I expected that the ability to empathize and relate to the struggles of the infertile would most easily be mastered by someone who has (to borrow Melissa Ford’s metaphor) previously been an inhabitant of the Land of IF. In fact, this is not so. As I take my own private and painful journey through infertility, hoping to quell my loneliness in the warm blanket of shared experience, I google and ogle my way through infertility blogs. In my thirst for descriptions of the patience and emotional angst of infertility, I find myself constantly barging straight into someone’s online shrine to their miracle child. Pictures of said miracle baby (replete with birth weight and milestones) abound. Sorry, wrong room, my mistake!

My plea to the newly (and happily) fertile: Please, when the infertility door in your life closes, and for god’s sake shut down your infertility blog! Flex those frontal lobes and recall for a nanosecond how it felt to have no baby in your arms. Then, by all means start a new blog where you and your precious gift can cavort about in virtual nirvana without creating awkward and painful moments for the rest of us online who are still here. Infertility is clearly not your focus anymore, stop throwing it in our faces!

What is behind this behavior? This is another of my theories, but I think infertility is an inherently inwardly focused experience: we keep it secret; we scrutinize our levels and counts; we listen for every cramp, every twinge; we work in our bedrooms; we live in our underwear; we search (literally within ourselves) for answers. We look and we look and we forget that we are not alone. When people say goodbye to that time in their life, I assume it’s like childbirth, you forget the pain every time you look at the child—and that’s good. It’s why my friend who was in my position at one time thought it was a good idea to go out for coffee so she could surprise me with her 5-month bump! But no matter how good your memory, how big your frontal lobes, how inspiring you think your story is, it is your story, not mine and you have no business blogging about your parenting experience on a blog with an infertility tag line.

ITNB would like to thank Paige for this Blog Post the nice congratulations and her welcome feedback. We couldn’t agree more!!

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 .

Looking beyond the comments that are off-the-cuff (see the article Why don’t you just adopt? posted below), lets delve further into some conversational pieces that arise now and then. Two specific examples that we have encountered illustrate our point.

First, we have a couple of close friends (have drifted as of late though) that went through infertility problems and tried IVF. Both were successful on their first try. Originally this gave us hope because they did the treatment prior to us starting our journey. At first, they were very sympathetic, understanding and full of useful information in regards to process. Now that we have gone through the medical ringer a few failed times, the relationship and conversations have changed. A snippet of the last in-person contact we had went like this;

Successful IVF Couple: “So how are you guys doing / handling everything?”
Us: “We’re trying to get by you know…(distant)”
Successful IVF Couple: “We totally know how you feel.”
Us: “Did your treatments end up with you having children (sarcastic)?”
Successful IVF Couple: “Yes, but…”
Us: “Then you don’t know how we feel because you’re not in our situation, it worked for you. You got your children (upset).”

While they might understand the medical process aspect of what we’ve gone through and what we are still going through, at this point they have passed us by in emotional feelings going from bad to good. We are stuck with bad.

Our friends and family might have the best intentions and only a small few might inquire as to our feelings just to be nice. Reality is that since they’ll never understand, why should they bother to take time to hear us out completely? On a more negative note, do they really care at all?

Second example; we have some relatives that have actually said, “We cannot pretend to understand what you’re going through.” That is true enough. We have tried to explain to folks that want to listen how we are feeling emotionally over and over again. Lately it’s not worth the pain. Every time we have to talk about it, it just takes us down another step on the depression ladder. If they wanted to really understand more, they would do their own research online or in books as infertility battles are very well documented. Maybe since it does not affect them directly, the motivation is not there. Maybe it is a time issue.

And why wouldn’t they have the time to research our feelings and issues? Oh yeah, they’re busy with their kids.

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?

We cannot tell you how many times we have heard yarns spun about the following;

“My friend struggled to have a baby for years then decided to adopt. They found out they were getting a baby and that same weekend found out they were pregnant!”

Or.

“I heard about a couple who were told they could never have their own child; low and behold they just had their 3rd one last Christmas.”

Or.

“They just kept having miscarriage after miscarriage, they gave up. Then, finally on their 10th try, they had a lovely daughter.”

Or.

“I had a good friend of mine who was also diagnosed infertile; they could not find the problem. Turns out she just needed to relax, so she went on vacation and they got pregnant.”

While these stories are quite common, we all have probably heard variations on all of them. Which ones are true compared to which ones are urban legend is yet to be seen. We personally have not met anyone from these tales who arrived at the storybook ending.

Even though our trials read like a great tragedy and while our ending has not been completely written yet, please stop trying to write it for us.

We already know that folks who have children have absolutely no clue when it comes to giving support to their infertile friends. They really don’t get it do they? When the above question is asked of us it seems like they’re saying “Well, you tried, just take the next logical step and get your family started.” Other things it appears they are saying are, “We have our own child(ren), so for you adopting will be just like that,” and “Adoption is an easy thing, so get on it.”

Sometimes you get a variation of the question in more of a presented story kind of way. For example, “A friend of mine at work just brought her adopted child into the office, he/she is beautiful.” That basically is telling us to adopt as well.

What we as infertile couples actually hear and think when we are asked that question is really this; “Too bad you’re barren, time to go a different direction, never mind that you will never have the birthing room experience nor get the nine months of planning a nursery etc…” It is this insensitivity to our emotions that we just don’t need to add to our current pile of mess. It appears they think there is a switch that you can just flip that would take us from trying to have our own biological child to an adopted one in the blink of an eye.

Maybe adoption is part of our overall plan or at least it may have been discussed as an option. However, for us to consider adoption just because someone asked us a short, simple question is outrageous. Never mind that the person asking is clueless about our current infertility woes and all the processes we’ve been going through for however many years, but they are also clueless about all the time, effort and possible disappointment that would be involved in a potential adoption. I wonder if these folks were thinking about having a home study done while they were pregnant?

The above question, which is common, is one of those sticky subjects that you just don’t ask of infertile couples. You just don’t ask it period. There are many more we will get into down the line. This one and 5 others made a top 6 list at a great website called the Infertility Warrior blog. The full list can be found here.

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?”