Twenty-five years ago, my husband and I were young, healthy, and ready to have several children.
Life had different plans for us.
We were in our third year of marriage and had just bought our first home—a brick townhouse in a bustling metropolitan area. Our rear windows had beautiful views of the woods that separated us from the beltway. Most importantly, it had a small bedroom that would make a perfect nursery.
When we first started trying for a baby, I was excited to share the news with family and friends. What’s the harm in that, right?
Wanting to become parents and expand our family was a pivotal time in our lives. Many people look forward to this milestone, and for the majority, the process of becoming parents goes smoothly.
After trying on our own for a year, we underwent initial testing, and I had a surgical procedure for endometriosis. After healing and still not getting pregnant, we moved on to fertility treatments.
Fertility treatments.
They are expensive and exhausting, and injectable hormones give you a lot of the same symptoms as being pregnant. While I did conceive a few times this way, my pregnancies were short-lived . . . which led to more testing to determine why I was having early recurrent losses.
It’s hard to capture all the worry and despair my husband and I felt during this uncertain time.
Our doctors couldn’t pinpoint an exact cause, so we acquired a catch-all title: unexplained infertility.
This term made me feel even worse, as if something I was doing or not doing was the culprit, as opposed to a medical reason.
So I eliminated all possible causes of stress. I stopped eating refined sugar and consuming caffeine or alcohol. I started seeing an acupuncturist and ramped up my yoga practice. I journaled like crazy and joined a support group. I even changed jobs to eliminate my stressful beltway commute.
It turns out none of these were magical formulas. Infertility is indeed a very real medical issue, one that isn’t cured by simply lowering stress levels.
Meanwhile, time was passing. Friends were getting pregnant in spades, baby showers were happening, and babies were born. With each passing event, our lives were stuck in a holding pattern of doubt and sorrow.
People stopped asking about our struggle simply because they didn’t know what to say, or it made them uncomfortable. As a reactionary protective measure, my husband and I retreated from socializing as much.
Living in a fertile world that didn’t include us was painful, one where we felt invisible.
Questions lingered in our heads.
Why us?
Were we not ready for a baby?
Are we not supposed to have children?
And now, 25 years after we started trying, I’m realizing I still haven’t fully healed from this trauma.
While it was happening, I had that tiny glimmer of hope, even during year six of our long journey to become parents. Even when I told my husband, “I’m exhausted and can’t hold out hope any longer,” the hope was still there, a faint glimmer that was hard to extinguish.
When we adopted our son and I finally became a mom, this long-awaited role consumed me. It filled me with so much joy and purpose and put a big bandage on my grief and feelings of loss.
As my motherhood role winds down, I’m still working through these infertile feelings. Ones that got put on hold while I was busy caring for others.
Just like many forms of grief, the pain deep inside from infertility may never go away.
It may always be part of me, part of my identity, part of what makes me different from many others.
Employee
Emaline Ashe is an author who writes under a pen name out of respect for her teenage adopted son. She has a background in biology and lives on the East Coast of the U.S.