TO BLOG OR NOT TO BLOG
🌷I have wanted to be a mom my entire life. I loved helping with my baby brother, Alex (see introduction picture), playing with my dolls (which had to have ALL the real baby clothes, bottles, you name it,) and loved, loved, LOVED being around babies. I never imagined NOT having children. I never imagined that the ability to have children would be an uncertainty. I never imagined that carrying my own children would be an impossibility. In other words, my reality is nothing I could have imagined and certainly nothing for which I was prepared.
I have been plagued with so many questions: Why didn’t I know to demand that ultrasound? How do I go through this pain? How do I grieve my son? How do I ever relate to people that haven’t gone through what I have gone through? When will this nightmare be over? Why didn’t the doctors care more? How can I have healthy embryos and no baby? Why is this happening to me?
Alongside these unanswerable questions has always been this feeling of intense isolation and loneliness. Like I am the only person feeling this pain.
Over the past few months, as I have shared a bit more about my experience, many people have shared their fertility stories, and shared their intense feelings of sadness. This really got me thinking – miscarriages alone are extremely common. Statistically, as many as 1 in 5 women will experience one. This statistic is not the shocking part. The shocking part is thinking about the number of women walking around with this pain – and not talking about it and thus, feeling so fucking terrible.
We are taught how to share death and hard times and support those going through them. We are not taught how to share infertility struggles nor how to support someone who is.
As I start this blog and embark on a pregnancy with the most amazing woman I know, Kimmy, I question how this will all turn out. I hope I get to look back in a year, holding a baby, and think - what a journey! But that’s the hard part about all of this infertility crap, there is no guarantee. What I can guarantee is, there are a lot of people struggling with infertility that I hope can find some solace (and maybe a few laughs), as I share this journey.
When my husband and I first got married, we KNEW we wanted to have children together, but we both said, if it doesn’t happen “naturally”, we’re not going to force anything. We would NEVER do anything as extreme as IVF….much less have someone else carry our baby! Bahahahahahahah.
If I have learned anything in the past two years, it is the following: one, once you become pregnant, you’re a parent. You can’t go back. Once Phil and I were pregnant in 2022, whether we knew it at the time or not, we would do ANYTHING to make having a child a reality. Two, no one explains how desperately you can want and how desperately you can NEED to be a parent until you are faced with the very real possibility of it not happening.
So where does this leave us? I don’t really know. What I do know is after two years of infertility hell, I got to see two lines on a pregnancy test yesterday (and yes, I wrapped it in a plastic bag and brought it home from Kimmy’s house, and I will look at it every night before I go to bed), and for that I am grateful, and with that, I am hoping that the next nine months brings a baby. 🌷
