This is infertility.
Infertility is tears, pain, longing, and a feeling of emptiness few can understand.
It’s so much more than having a lifelong dream taken from you, which is painful enough. It’s hating yourself, it’s hating your partner, it’s moments of hating those who you love most, sometimes it’s even hating god.
Each month my eyes swell up with tears because of another negative month, another disappointment, more time and effort wasted. Every single failure feels more like a waterfall of all the failures before it.
Each month reminds me of all the months of negatives, of all the tests, the lifestyle changes – all for nothing.
It sometimes feels like getting buried under an avalanche of anger, loss, and disappointment with no way to dig yourself out, more devastation piling on each month. There are many times through this journey I feel so suffocated and isolated I can’t breathe, just like being trapped beneath the fallen snow of an avalanche.
I wait in doctors’ offices over and over again, stripped to nothing, being poked and prodded with no answers or solutions. Each suggestion is more painful and expensive than the last. Eventually, you get to a point where none of them are good.
Infertility: A Decade of Waiting, Miracles, Loss, And Hope
You are choosing between two evils, two hard paths, none that 100% lead to a baby.
Every path you take will lead to tears allying the way, and likely a lot of pain emotionally and physically for everyone in your family.
You go through it all thinking ‘it’ll be worth it to hold my baby in the end’. But that thought in itself causes pain because even that statement isn’t as simple as it seems for a woman battling infertility.
See, one of the hardest things to overcome with infertility is the constant failure and the FACT that success is not guaranteed. The hard truth is that here I am, four years down the road with few answers, lots of tears, sometimes filled with anger, usually filled with sadness, but still no baby in my arms to make it all worth it.
At some point on your infertility journey, you might have to get off the trail because your worn soul can’t take the still steep road to come.
After fighting, and praying, and giving everything you have, the possibility of you never holding that baby in your arms is always terrifyingly real. The cold, hard truth is, in the end, you may never get to hold that baby you fought so hard for.
It’s a truth that friends and family discuss like a dirty secret – a baby is not always guaranteed.
On top of the daily emotional and physical pain of infertility, there’s the big picture of sadness you have to endure. Infertility forces you to let go of lifelong expectations and dreams in addition to short term ones.
The way you pictured your life, your family, will change-not by choice, but simply by time moving forward without you getting pregnant.
You will be forced to give up time and money for fertility treatments you never wanted. You will be forced to give up your body, your heart, your mind, your life to infertility – needs you never bargained for.
And even then, when you’ve given all you have, you may still come out of this empty-handed. Which to me is maybe the scariest thing of all. That at the end of all of this, after all these years, all this money, all these tears that we will walk away empty-handed.
Which leads me to the question no one struggling to conceive wants to ask themselves – where does it leave us if we fail?
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