And now, for something totally serious.
Over the years I have picked up a rather strange habit of reading infertility blogs. I am not entirely sure why (considering that the vast majority of infertility bloggers and blog-readers are infertile themselves), but I think it has a lot to do with my mother’s experiences, for which I have tried to find a measure of bodhisattva-esque understanding—-being with her suffering, I suppose. I started from the perspective of being a child during her miscarriages, thinking back to what I remember of how she dealt with the grief. Most poignantly, I recall the baby she lost in the fifth month, the one she blamed me for because I refused to go to the store and get her prenatal vitamins. Perhaps in this process I am recalling my own suffering as well, which brings me to where my brain is, in situ.
It should come as no surprise that recognizing how my mother’s infertility negatively affected her parenting skills seriously disrupts any burgeoning compassion that I have for her. When I was a child, my mother turned into a broken shell of a human being right when I needed her the most; when I became an adult, she sabotaged my nursing relationship with my firstborn son by giving him formula behind my back when I left him in her care. Upon arriving home about three years ago while my mother was visiting, I was asked, in front of my horrified children, if my husband had caused my miscarriage that had happened in 2005. When I finally recovered enough to incredulously ask just why she had come to that mistaken conclusion, she passed the blame on to my children, saying they had told her that he had. That was the last time I allowed her in my home.
I realize that I have a certain level of intolerance for the way (some!) people suffering from infertility seem to think the world at large should be modified to accommodate them, an aim that seems to be achieved by limiting their saturation with all things pregnancy and child related. I also have a hard time dealing with the sense of entitlement that (again, some!) infertile people seem to feel–that if you have been lucky enough to be fertile, you somehow are supposed to be humble, forgiving the slags that are made against you for the fertility you happen to have.
This presents a conundrum, because I want to feel compassionate. I understand that all of these women, including my mother, are suffering. There is no way that I could fathom the depth of their pain, but somehow, I wish I could impart to them that they sometimes stir up problems for women who have done nothing more than possess a functional reproductive system. I have had difficulties dealing with infertile women I have worked for, who turned into completely different (volatile? monstrous?) people when they found out I was pregnant, and Mr. K has suffered in the workplace for bringing news of his wife’s pregnancy to his infertile female employer. I should note here that is incredibly depressing that infertility is so widespread, that in our lifetime we could have this many interactions affected by the undertow of how infertility changes worldviews.
And yet….I keep reading. At first I thought it was just an absurd way to absolve my feelings of guilt over my own fertility, by penitently poring over stories of hope, grief, and loss. I uncomfortably considered whether I was subconsciously gloating at my own luck, or perhaps if I was finding a justification for having had children in my late teens and early twenties when I was at the peak of my fertility, as if children were a consolation prize for having skipped out on all those years of clubbing. Presumably, it is a mixture of all of the above….I might not have a fantastic career and lots of money, but I became the mother to six beautiful and healthy children–something I know that the writers of the blogs I read would trade all of their degrees, investments, and nest eggs for.
In retrospect, I guess it is the reflection that is the most important. I might not always be able to articulate how I feel to other people, but I certainly should be able to be honest with myself, right? I am not proud for the moments where I have read about a woman in her 40′s trying to have kids and I have shook my head, clucking to myself as I mentally patted myself on the back for having been sensible enough to produce children when I was most fertile and had the healthiest eggs instead of pounding chemical birth control or having abortions because the “time wasn’t right.” Intellectually and emotionally, I understand that I never really had a grand plan for childbearing, and my good luck was just that–luck. I happened to meet a dedicated life partner of equally fertile stock, who has been as laissez-faire as I about the number of children we produced.
But ultimately? I am not thrilled with the way some infertile women have affected my life. I also wish there was more dialogue between fertile people and infertile people, instead of all the spiteful responses coming out of online infertile communities like STFU Fertiles. At the risk of sounding all touchy-feely about the whole thing, I wish we could all just get along, sans the chorus round of kumbaya. I appreciate the obstacles placed in the way of my compassion, because I know it makes me work harder, but I wish it didn’t have to be this way…with the fertile/infertile divide.
