Hello, 30something woman on baby forums and infertility groups. May I call you Jessica? You don’t know me, but I was once where you were. I had finally met the man of my dreams, the guy I wanted to build a life with, the father of my future children. I felt so lucky!
Then after a few years of near-unbearable amounts of physical and emotional pain and expense, it became clear we could not make a baby. No way, no how. End of story. Not gonna happen. So WRONG. So unfair. So unlucky.
It was the most horrible thing I’d ever been through. It almost broke me. I was so deeply hurt. Angry. Jealous. Lost. Devastated. I couldn’t take much more. I wanted to be a mom. Was that so wrong? People do this effortlessly — even accidentally! — all the dang time.
Eventually, we set foot on the path of adoption. Surely after all we’d been through, the gods would bless us with an easy path. Surely we deserved something simple and doable. After all that bad luck, things had to even out, right? Please god, just bring us a baby. We will be the best parents ever. I promise promise promise.
After years of “manually” trying to conceive, John and Katie Kelly put their bodies, wallet and marriage through the ringer of modern infertility treatments.
Twenty years ago I was living this movie. I’d met my Mr Wonderful but we weren’t making babies. We had to get help making babies. We never did make babies. My ovaries became my most thought-of organs and my marriage was tested to its core. It was a painful chapter of my life in so many ways — physically, emotionally, financially, and relationshipally.
Not many people knew what we were going through back then. At the time, infertility felt like a shameful and dirty secret, so we endured our journey largely alone, relying only on each other and close family.
It’s not easy for a human to be completely consistent in their views. I wonder if we all have a hint of hypocrisy in us, no matter how much we try to arrange our beliefs into a cohesive schema.
We notice this in sports when we are hyper-vigilant and hyper-verbal about referee calls against our team, but we accept without question calls against the other team.
We notice this during election time, when we excuse behavior of the candidate from our party even though we excoriated the person from the OTHER side for doing something similar just a few years ago. Which we my have conveniently forgotten.
We find ways to justify.
(UPDATE: Witness your position on the recent Supreme Court vacancy. Would your stance on what the President/Senate should do remain consistent if the tables were turned?)
I got to thinking about consistency in the realm of reproduction. Let’s take, say, abortion (nothing like a little light banter to start a post!). Continue reading How Consistent Are Your Views?→
open adoption expert, educator, writer, podcaster, speaker
