Fuck You! I'm an Anteater!
I hope everyone is having a fabulous National Infertility Awareness Week and that the infertility fairy has been good to you. Or at least decent. Or at least bought you a drink before spitting in your dreams.
I figured that since I have, as of last February graduated infertility to join the ranks of doting grandmother (if you are a new reader to this blog, well, I’m sorry. It’s sorta like join into Soap mid-seasson. You have a lot of catching up to do, but in the end, it will be totally worth it. In the mean time, use these cliff notes to catch up.)
But now that I’m a bitter old lady doting grandmother, with an active little Monkey lovingly waking me each morning with a karate chop to the neck (seriously. WTF kid?) I have no need for the Infertility Community. Right? I’m not cycling. I’m not hoping. I’m not involved.
In fact, just watching the other woman move on without me, start new cycles, discuss fun side effects, #hope, #hope and #hoping, hurts me in my sensitive spots.
I should totally leave. Move on. Turn my back on the community. Nothing here but pain and reminders and remnants of heartbreak to trip over in the dark. After all… since I’m no longer one, not that I ever really fit in…
So I go to a party and drink some wine. OK. A lot of wine. Its a bunch of my husbands friends and they all have their reasons for cornering me to chat. Generally about their sex lives. Then one corners me, “So, we are starting IVF #2 tomorrow.”
Queue tears in public.
We had a long talk about her miscarriage and failed cycles and drugs and side effects and weight gain and…. and how nobody understands. Especially “the fertiles.” I know I certainly didn’t when I was one.
How one of her good friends asked her if she was praying for her baby.
You know. Because perhaps if she’s not praying hard enough or correctly, perhaps that’s the problem. Maybe she’s praying to the wrong god.
Which makes me go on a side rant about the “you need to pray for it” line of BS. Where does that end? Did she not pray hard enough when she was pregnant and that’s what caused the miscarriage?
Even as I sat there, tears in my eyes, listening to a woman pour her heart out to me when really, truthfully, had I left the community, I should have been listening to someone tell me how they like it when their husband pretends to rape them and is that weird? I realized, I had not left the community. I had been promoted.
I am no longer a fighter. I no longer have hope for me. I am a Matriarch Camp Counselor* of Infertility. I am here to listen. To offer support. To offer advice. And to carry you when you feel you can’t go on.
I will never leave.
* Edited. After I thought about it, Matriarch is WAY too stuffy a title for me. I’ve decided to go with Camp Counselor. Makes infertility sound like a fun away game instead of a soul crush. I’m a social director who is here to entertain, listen and tell you about those crazy things that are happening to your body. MUCH more my speed.
I know after all this I can never turn my back on the infertility/miscarriage/loss community. It's a life pain that scars my soul. The father of a friend asked her: "So, you over that being barren thing yet?" Fertiles cannot ever truly understand this. Some try and get pretty far because of a deeply developed human sympathy, an understanding of life-pain in general (they've had something else happen to them and have something in common) but many do not. I think you have rare insight here, based on the past.
I understand completely how you need to stop fighting sometime. Transitioning to another role and helping others is a way to put some color back into a world that turned grey on you. But I don't see you as a camp counselor. That's too naive, you've seen more than that. Unless you mean a counselor at a camp for teens trying to recover from abuse, trying to learn to live even though they haven't seen much good in the world yet.
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