Awards and a land mine (updated)
1) At 9:52 pm, I got my 10,000 hit on this blog. I know, lots of sites get more than that in a day. But I’m excited. Thanks for reading.
2) I’ve been nominated for Best New Blog in the Koufax awards. It’s an honor just to be mentioned, and I know I have absolutely no chance of winning, but it would be nice to get a vote or two.
3) With this post, I’m nominating myself for the "Land Mine" award (part of Feministe’s Anti-Awards, Part Deux)
I want to make a confession: even after having read a bunch of the fabulous infertility and assisted reproduction blogs out there, like Chez Miscarriage, and I wasted all that birth control, and a little pregnant, I don’t get it. I still don’t get why people put themselves through such emotional, physical, and financial torture to conceive and bear a child. I adore my sons, and am very grateful that they’re in my life, but if I hadn’t been able to get pregnant, I wouldn’t have made the sacrifices these women (and many others) have made. That sort of baby-hunger is as alien to me as James Boylan’s conviction that he was a woman.
As an outsider to this world, someone who has never had to deal with infertility, I can’t help but wondering whether assisted reproduction has increased or decreased the net amount of happiness in the world. On the one side are those people who’ve successfully had children with the help of modern medical miracles. But on the other side are the people whose heartache has been drawn out for months or years as they ride the reproductive rollercoaster, and those who must endlessly second-guess themselves, wondering whether things would have been different if they tried just one more time.
I’m calling this a land mine because, as Jen at Buddha Mama and I have discussed, it’s hard to talk about the choices that we make without it seeming like we’re implicitly criticizing those who have made other choices. And that’s truly not my desire. I’ve actually started to post about this before, and then stopped, for fear of giving pain to people who are already dealing with more than their share of grief. But I think it’s worth talking about, to open a dialogue, as well as to paint a fuller picture of the diversity of parenting experiences. I want to tell people that you can be a good mother even if you don’t have that sort of passionate need to be one, even if you could imagine having a happy and full life without children.
****
I’m updating this to try to respond to some of the comments I’ve been getting from some of the visitors I’ve received via Uterine Wars. Let me start by thanking you for taking the time to comment, for being willing to engage in dialogue. I appreciate it; I know it’s not your job in life to educate me.
A few of the commenters have written that you didn’t imagine or couldn’t have imagined making the choices you’ve made, until you were actually in the situation. That’s a powerful (and slightly frightening) statement about the limits of our ability to put ourselves in a different situation. I hear you, and I’ll be more careful in the future about saying what I would or wouldn’t do — I can only say what my best guess is, from the perspective of who I am now.
But some of the commenters implied that I’d definitely make the same choices they are making if I were in their situation. I still reject this statement; there are many other women who are in their situation who make different choices. Heck, there are many woman who make a deliberate choice not to have children, regardless of their fertility status. That’s part of what makes life fascinating; we are all different people and make different choices.
***
One more thought. I am truly sorry to have caused pain, and I can tell, from both the comments and the referring posts, that I have. I started this post saying I was making a confession, because I believe that my inability to "get it" is a failure of empathy on my part — although some of you are telling me that no fertile woman will ever "get it." Saying I "don’t get" your choices is different than saying I think you’re making a bad choice.
January 13th, 2005 at 3:42 pm
First of all, congratulations — I think 10k hits is awesome.
I haven’t had problems with infertility, though my second took a several months of trying. I remember when I was huge with my first, there was a beautiful, slim woman in the locker room of my gym. She congratulated me on the baby. I thanked her but said I was wishing I could look like her. She was kind, she smiled and said that she spent $50,000 and years trying to get pregnant. Certainly made me stop wishing I was thin.
I can’t imagine the pain of wanting a child. I’m not sure that trying various methods really draws out the pain, though. One can only accept something when they are ready and when they’ve given up the hope that the next procedure will work. I suppose by lengthening the hope, it draws out the pain, but I think the pain would be there regardless.
January 13th, 2005 at 3:56 pm
Congratulations on the Koufax awards. You should hit 20,000 even faster.
January 13th, 2005 at 4:42 pm
Another comment regarding drawing out the pain: I don’t think failing to conceive was really any less difficult or drawn out in the days before fertility medications were available. My mother in law spent a decade hoping and praying for a child. I doubt the shortage of medical treatments made it hurt less each month when she realized that once again, there would be no baby. Incidentally, she finally conceived my future husband through the use of an early fertility drug, so in her case, they clearly increased her net happiness.
January 13th, 2005 at 5:17 pm
Congratulations on your nomination.
I once said the same thing to my friend going through IVF. I said to her that I respected what she was doing ot accomplish her dreams but I do not think I would ever go that far to have children…I would just adopt first.
But here I am three plus years later adn still childless. What I thought I would do (adoption) will still probably happen but I am desperate to feel life grow inside of me, to give birth to a chld that was of the man that I love the most and myself..a miraculous mixture of our love. THis dream which seems to grow stronger the longer I do not have it also seems to dim as I get older because as we all know …tick tick tick.
I am not sure we ever know what we truly could get through or strive for in any sitaution unless we are there. It is compassionate to try to fit into another’s shoes but of course that shoe never really fits.
So here I am years later adn deciding from where I will get the 20,000 dollars for a chance to see my husbands eyes on a child that came from my body. I imagine in a dream far off that my husband places his hands on my belly and looks deep into my eyes in a knowing that we have created life between us. For this dream I will do anything.
January 13th, 2005 at 6:01 pm
Try to imagine life without ever knowing your sons. Without feeling them grow inside and getting to see if they have mommy’s eyes, or daddy’s nose. And “just” adopting is not easy. It is as costly or more than most fertility treatments. There are jungles of red tape to get through. The process can take years and be just as heartbreaking. So the emotional and financial torture of adoption could be equal to that of infertility treatments.
January 13th, 2005 at 6:28 pm
Of course you don’t get it. Enjoy your sons and consider yourself lucky. Don’t say “If it were me…” because it isn’t. And if it was, odds are you’d be as ANGRY as I am with you when people make insensitive statements like you have today!
January 13th, 2005 at 8:03 pm
I can imagine a full and happy life without children, and yet I’m still doing IVF. These are questions we struggle with every day. But I don’t think you can say how you would have felt and what you would have done had you not been able to get pregnant. You just don’t know until you know. I never thought I’d do any of this stuff either. If you would have told me a year ago that I’d be doing my second IVF I would have bet you any amount of money that you were wrong.
January 13th, 2005 at 8:15 pm
I grew up raising my own brother, due to bad parenting, absent parenting, and the what not that needs not be discussed here. Let’s just say that I was so sick of raising my own brother that I didn’t want kids. (I was still a child myself at the time.) I resolved that if I had married by 30 I might consider it, you know, to be kind to the husband or lesbian partner or whatever. True martyr I was going to be.
And then I found myself having my uterus scraped clean of non-endo growths (of no known source, so basically a ‘mystery’ bug that was destroying my body) and was told, rather bluntly that if I ever wanted to have a child come from my womb, I best get started NOW. At first it didn’t bother me…what the hell did I care? And really, what if they were wrong?
Well, they weren’t wrong. And I faced an enormous hurdle in discovering what I really wanted in life — and it was what I never had myself, a real sense of family. So the partner and I decided to go for it, having already married, and what the hell, we thought! 42 months later, and finally pg with what looks like it might be a possibility of a child, here we are.
We did go down the adoption route. It is hard. It is gut-wrenching. There is nothing like turning over your life to 2 people to scrutinize and then deem you ‘capable’ or not. Your finances. Your health. Your relationship. Your sex life. It’s all on paper for roving eyes to see. That’s easy? The cost is enormous, financially, emotionally, physically as you endure test of faith after test of faith. What if, 12 days into the child’s life and your ‘proposed’ adoption, the mother changes her mind? After the child has already been tenatively signed over to you? It’s gut wrenching. Adoptions fail just as easily as my own pregnancies.
There is NO easy in this world. There are NO justs.
Good for you for having 2 healthy sons, born easily, I presume, with few complications. Glad you enjoy motherhood — before my brother became a teen, I too enjoyed it an awful lot. Maybe that’s why I struggled so hard to become a mother, myself. I had a glimpse of what you have and I wanted it just the way every other ‘normal’ fertile mother wants it. I don’t see how having that urge and having to work a little harder warrants any sort of criticism on my life. Some women get pg 10 times without even trying; some get pg once with 10 years of trying. I didn’t think there was a ‘norm’ these days.
Why are we so different? So we don’t fit into your rubric of motherhood and parenting or becoming parents…your point is? You’re better than us somehow? Because your vagina wasn’t wonky? Or your cervix knew how to stay shut? Your don’t have adult acne and hormone problems? Your husband can shoot more wigglers than blanks? I fail to see what you have a problem with…especially since we’re all uniting with the same goal — to parent children.
Could my life have been full living a childless life? Sure. Had I not had my fertility taken away from me and challenged. Maybe if I had never seen a doctor about the pelvic pain and the reality of what came with it, I might have actually lead quite a calm life. I could have loved my nephews and other people’s kids and been done with it. But I had it taken away, and in that moment of loss, I finally found what I had always been searching for. As cliche as that sounds (and will sound to someone like you).
Congrats on your nomination and good luck with the new contest, or whatever it is.
Just another average, embittered infertile
January 13th, 2005 at 8:54 pm
Just imagine someone took your two sons away and erased your memory of them. Then, you see a snipet of what you could have, (did have) and then tell me what YOU would put yourself through to get them back.
January 13th, 2005 at 9:05 pm
You don’t get it, at least you’re honest about that. Why are you trying to debate it if you don’t understand the complexity and the pain? It’s not simply about baby hunger, it’s about not being able to take for granted the physical process of having a child.
You have two children; did you put much thought into their conception before they were born?
Did you ever question your ability to have children?
How old were you when they were born?
Were you looking ten years down the road and seeing you and your husband alone?
The issue around infertility is not the kind of mother you are or will be, it’s about asking your body will do what is expected. And when it doesn’t do that you will go as far as you can to make it work. Each person’s level of tolerance is different, just as is each person’s income.
Some women can put themselves through more because they can afford it, some women go through hell physically because they want to be healthy. Some women have life threatening symptoms come upon them out of the blue and just fight to survive.
There is no simple explanation except to say that you cannot understand infertility unless you’ve walked a mile in the shoes of one struggling with it. Some very painful, ill-fitting shoes.
There is no other way.
January 13th, 2005 at 9:55 pm
The other commenters have covered so much that I have little to add. A few thoughts, though.
Perhaps you’re missing a piece of the picture: Those of us with fertility problems are physically impaired, just as someone who’s, let’s say, missing an arm is impaired. If you were missing an arm, wouldn’t you find the money to get a working prosthesis, wouldn’t you find the willingness to undergo expensive surgery to repair the nerve damage?
Or, to consider it another way, if you knew that your children’s lives might be saved by some painful procedure to yourself, I think you’d accept that pain in a heartbeat, wouldn’t you? The difference is that women unergoing IF treatment are asked for that pain up front.
No, I agree, you don’t have to have a deep, all-consuming desire to be a mother to, in fact, end up being a wonderful mother. I’d guess that most of us know women who were very conflicted about becoming parents but have done a superb job. For me, the desire to become a mother has only grown stronger in the face of infertility, and continues to gain in urgency as each month goes by. Perhaps it works that way for most of us who are not fertile.
–Bugs
January 14th, 2005 at 12:28 am
There’s not much to add here — I think the women above have touched on many of the factors that influence our decisions to keep trying to have biological children. But one thing that wasn’t mentioned is that most of us aren’t making these decisions about whether or not to pursue ART on our own — more often than not our husbands/partners are part of the process as well (or should be, right? I mean that’s what a partnership is supposed to be…). It’s easy enough to get a peek into other people’s lives and try to imagine briefly (and if you haven’t spent many sleepless nights thinking about this then it is ‘briefly’) what _you_ might do, but what would your partner have done? Might he or she have had different dreams and desires that also needed to be considered when making these decisions? Dreams that maybe he or she never really acknowledged/took seriously/knew existed until they were taken away? It just gets way more complicated when there are two people involved, as well it should — it’s the juggling of our own needs and desires with those of the people we love that pushes us and challenges us and keeps us all growing.
One last thing: just wanted to chime in as one of many who declared as a young seemingly-fertile woman that I’d never do anything like ART. Ever. But we did. It didn’t work, but I don’t regret having done it… infertility has taught me lots, but especially that we just don’t know what life will throw at us, or how we’ll respond to it. So hold on to your convictions and your best guesses, because that’s about all any of us have. Oh, and the hope that we’ll deal with whatever comes our way with strength and grace and maybe come out the other side a little more empathetic.
January 14th, 2005 at 7:33 am
I’ve been reading these comments with a lot of interest. I think that there’s something that folks haven’t concentrated on – the baby hunger thing from another perspective. There’s an inverse relationship between ease of conception/pregnancy and baby hunger, I think. As someone with ridiculous fertility who accidentally got pregnant – the first time I had unprotected sex, thank goodness I was as careful as I was up until then – at a very inconvenient time, a good 5 years before I would have otherwise been thinking about kids, my first pregnancy was filled with a lot of ambivalence. Yes, I love my son and would throw myself in front of a train for him, but I was a reluctant convert to motherhood at the time it was thrust upon me.
My cousin is about 8 years older than I and struggled with infertility for 5 years before deciding to adopt. Our kids are about the same age. When talking to her about it one day, I told her that I didn’t know if I had the capacity to adopt a child and love him/her as my own. She responded that that drive to become a mother is so very strong that any of that stuff is overcome.
In thinking about it afterwards, I felt a little cheated – much the same way that I felt cheated that my first big love crashed and burned and made me cautious and I didn’t have that first-love recklessness when I met my second big love, my husband. I wondered whether having had the baby-hunger would help me be more patient more during those times when my kids are incredibly frustrating, if the memory of having wanted them so badly would somehow carry over into the mundane bits of parenting and make me appreciate it a little bit more.
Not quite sure what the point is here, but maybe it’s that for those who stuggle with infertility, if a pregnancy does come to full fruition after the struggle, having had that baby-hunger might significantly add to your own experience of parenthood, even if it’s not necessary to be a ‘good mom’.
January 14th, 2005 at 9:44 am
I’m feeling very judged today.
Infertility is a intensly painful and personal loss. With it, comes much sadness and self-blame. We judge ourselves much more harshly than the fertile world can comprehend. Your articulation of that judgment intensifies an already painful loss.
I must say I’m a little disheartended to read your post regarding your perception of those of us who struggle with infertility. Pursuing ART is a medical decision between a woman, her partner and her physician. Reporductive choices deserve the same respect and privacy other medical decisions receive.
I would never question a cancer patient’s choice to die at hospice free from drugs, nor would I judge the decision to pursue every possible course of treatment, even the long shots.
Reproductive choices are personal. Period. At the risk of sounding the slightest bit bitchy (or a whole bunch, whatever): Is it really that hard to refrain from judgment?
January 14th, 2005 at 11:35 am
I just wanted to chime in. I am struggling to have a baby and have so far taken fertility drugs in an attempt to help my body function correctly. I am very close to making the first major decision about assisted reproductive technology. After more than two years of research and talking to women online who have gone through ART I have made some decisions about just how far I am willing to go. I have decided that I am willing to try IUI, am not sure about injectibles yet and will probably not go so far as IVF. I do see adoption in my future whether I am able to have a biological child or not. My goal is to be a mother not to give birth. Not everyone feels that way.
The benefit that I have had as opposed to some other women is that I found out about my infertility at a very young age. I have had 12 years to learn about it and think about it and decide what is right for me, for my husband and for our family. To others infertility came as a big shock and they are having to come to grips with it at the same time they are making some very difficult choices.
I understand you are not judging the behavior, just trying to understand it. Maybe this is one of those things you just won’t understand and that is a blessing in your life.
I don’t blame you for making the statements that you made. That is what blogs are for, self-expression, but please note in the future that when you make comments about others choices there is always a potential to cause those people pain.
January 14th, 2005 at 11:39 am
When the babies don’t come as easily as you thought they would you and your partner make the decisions one day (or one cycle) at a time. Everyone has their own reasons, everyone draws their own line. Sometimes we keep crossing it and re-drawing it, much to our surprise, sometimes we turn away before ever reaching it.
What do YOU define as “such torture”? How much money/pain/heartache is too much FOR YOU? That is all that matters.
I am not infertile, “just” a woman who lost four pregnancies in less than 2 years. This fifth one, I think she will make it (one month to go!) Do you think I ever DREAMED that this would be my experience? Perspectives change. My husband and I went from thinking “are we ready to have a baby/be parents” to “are we ready to lose another one, can we take it?”. Strangely enough we were, and kept trying. We had a little taste of the joy to come during the previous pregnancies — if it is a small proportion of the inverse pain we have experienced it will be worth it. To me. Other women draw their line elsewhere. None of us has a crystal ball.
Frankly I don’t give a shit about “net happiness in the world”. I only care about my family’s net happiness, and we probably won’t know what that is until we take stock of our lives on our deathbeds. I don’t know where you get the confidence to know what you would have/would not have done if you hadn’t easily conceived your children? Frankly it’s a bit smug. Most of us actually going through some kind of IF needing to make difficult and real choices, not hypothetical ones, certainly agonize over and second guess our plans regularly. They are not thoughtless or impulsive decisions.
Elle
January 14th, 2005 at 1:04 pm
Thanks for being open-minded about this and not getting angry with me for linking to this post. I thought it was an interesting perspective, a question I’m sure many people have but are afraid to ask. We infertiles are, as a group, very sensitive about the situation we face and the choices we make. It is such an incredibly personal struggle, full of twists and turns and very hard emotional decisions, so that any question about the process seems like a question directed at US, not the situation.
I made the decision to walk away from the pregnancy quest and towards adoption after losing my third pregnancy. The decision I made was right for me, but not the right one for everyone else. Adoption is more than just wanting a kid — there are issues involved you can’t even imagine from where you are sitting. The decision to do ART likewise is driven by more than just “I want to have a baby” — there are so many factors I don’t think we’d ever be able to list them all.
I am glad you had the courage to ask “why?” — I think what is hitting my readers hard is that you formed an opinion of how you would react before hearing our reasons. Truth be told, you DON’T know how you would react, because it hasn’t happened to you (and I hope it never does). You think “I would do this” because of where you sit now, without truly understanding the emotional aspect of being completely unable to do what is a basic biological function. Likewise, I will never fully understand your perspective, because this HAS been such a struggle for me, I have no idea what I would think of the baby-quest if it had been effortless for me. All we can do is try to understand the other’s point of view.
January 14th, 2005 at 6:32 pm
I really don’t know what to say.
You’re no more callous and ignorant than any other fertile out there. You decided to say what you thought, and unlike most fertiles who make these sorts of comments, you’re actually hearing what we infertiles actually say to ourselves and each other and our partners, but would never say out loud to you.
Must be quite the shock.
Is it painful? To be so judged?
I hope so. Because that’s what so many of us go through.
Every.
Single.
Day.
So, take a look around yourself. Check out your friends and family and ask yourself, who doesn’t have children yet? How come they have only one child? Who doesn’t send holiday cards with pictures of the family? Who finds convenient excuses to miss parties and family get-togethers? Who switches topics when it’s all about the babies? Who says ‘congratulations’ with unsmiling eyes?
I’d like to end this comment with something witty and erudite and meaningful, but all I can show you is my pain, and my anger, and my sadness, and hope against hope that even if you can’t understand, you’ll at the very least start to respect the choices I’ve made, and will continue to make, although, to be honest, I doubt it.
Oro, trying to conceive for 7 years and counting
January 15th, 2005 at 12:57 am
It’s ok if you don’t get it. But please. Give us the credit for having thought about our choices a whole hell of a lot more than you.
January 15th, 2005 at 10:10 am
I was planning to make a supportive comment on the original post, but I’m afraid to now, based on some of the anger and pain expressed in the other comments. I commend Elizabeth for being honest and I commend the commenters for being equally honest about how they see her post as ignorant, callous, insensitive, etc. However, I don’t think she meant it to be. I think she was simply saying, “I don’t understand.” and attempting to open up a discussion and she certainly did. I can say that I’m not sure how I would feel if I were infertile. Would I have been more “hungry” for a baby than I was? Would I go to the extremes that infertile couples go to in order to conceive? I don’t know. I suspect, as Elizabeth says, based on my feelings now, that I would have adopted or perhaps remained childless. If I had remained childless, I do believe there would have been a hole there, almost like the death of a child. I did have two miscarriages on my road to having two healthy children and I feel their loss in some way. Perhaps that loss is alleviated a little by having children and I would feel the loss more if I didn’t have kids. Again, I don’t know, because that is not my situation now. I think those of us who are fertile recognize infertility as a complex issue. It is a physical condition, but it is so tied up with emotion, needs, desires, conceptions of identity and many more emotional states that I probably can’t imagine. When I think about it, I think a lot of so-called “women’s issues” are complex for all those reasons. They often seem to circulate around the woman’s physical presence and what people perceive as her body’s raison d’etre. And I think that means that we have to keep talking because there are lots of ways to perceive a woman and we have to make sure not necessarily that we understand them all, but that we’re aware that there’s not one way for a woman to “be” in the world.
January 15th, 2005 at 4:30 pm
Dear Dialoging Wonk Mom:
In the realm of the grief of infertility, abstract yardsticks of utility are more or less useless. Applying the Hedonic Calculus to assisted reproduction is a good way to do away with any possibility that you will ever “get” what takes infertile individuals and couples down the road of A.R.T. The promotion of happiness in the world is frankly not the central issue for people embarking on the “reproductive rollercoaster.” A.R.T. doesn’t even really mitigate the pain of infertility – the issues infertility creates usually continue beyond a successful assisted pregnancy.
It seems remarkable (and revealing) that fertile mothers are discussing infertile womens’ “baby hunger” – a phrase that I’ve never seen any of the blogging infertiles you mention (Get Up Grrl, Julie) use to describe what they’re going through. While you might think of yourself as being neutral inquirers, it’s hard to imagine a more loaded or dismissive way of conceiving of and articulating the emotions of infertile women. Conjures up the old diagnosis of feminine hysteria, no? Short hop from “baby hunger” to the oh-so-common and maddening refrain, “if you would only relax about it you would get pregnant.”
Unfortunately, the pain of infertility is more than about the loss or absence of children. It generates all sorts of layers of pain – grief over a loss of a possible identity (for example in your blog tagline above you identify yourself as a mom first and a wonk second), the challenge of reconceptualizing one’s infertile sexuality, changing visions of the future and assumptions of how one will experience middle and old age, navigating the expectations and disappointments of partners and other family members, and the daily task of finding a place in a society that assumes parenthood is a desirable norm. (As an exercise in empathy, try to imagine that you want kids but your body can’t manage it. Every time you do conceive you miscarry – at 3 months. And maybe your husband once confided in you that all he wanted in life was to be a good father. Flip through the channels on TV for an hour or go to a film or read a novel and note the number of positive references to parenthood and motherhood in particular. Or try to imagine how you would feel when your boss pulls you aside and insists that you help organize a co-worker’s baby shower, even though you’ve politely declined. Three times.)
Laura hopes that we can all get beyond a place where motherhood is naturalized and defining of women – I can assure you that nearly every infertile woman I know has had to (often painfully) redefine themselves as women over and above their reproductive capabilities. This is a group that is forced to confront these particular and fundamental feminist issues more, I think, than even than my friends who teach in gender studies programs.
The universe seems less orderly and outcomes less predictable when one is struck by tragedy of any sort. It’s impossible to say what one might sign up for until you wake up one day and you’re an isolated infertile awash in a sea of seemingly crappy and ungrateful parents. One might risk horrible side effects from the use of Lupron in IVF or one might adopt from the 3rd world and hope that the child wasn’t kidnapped from his or her mother by human traffickers. There is no solution to infertility. A.R.T. and adoption are tools for confronting it and trying to gain agency, but because infertility isn’t just about a child, neither route will make the pain of infertility ever really disappear. You are right to disagree with those who think that, in their shoes, you would follow the same route to reproductive technology that they did. No one can say what you or anyone will do when faced with infertility because infertility _fundamentally_ changes who one is prior to coming face to face with it.
You say that you want people to realize that “you can be a good mother even if you don’t have that sort of passionate need to be one, even if you could imagine having a happy and full life without children.” There is a huge difference between being able to have children and choosing not to and not having that choice at all. Having choice is having power.
As a side note, if you think men are competitive about masculinity then you haven’t seen women be cruel by complaining to infertile “friends” about unplanned or unwanted pregnancies that are a result of their great womanly fertility. It’s a rather bizarre form of condescension but I’ve seen it remarkably frequently.
As you say, a dialogue requires more than “I don’t get you. Explain yourself.” So how have you responded to tragedy in your life? Have you always been a strict Utilitarian in your life choices? What choices have you made that others might not “get?”
Yours,
A man in an infertile couple.
PS: I have a great recipe for roast leg of toddler for any “Baby Hungry” women out there.
January 16th, 2005 at 4:13 am
One more thing.
“I want to tell people that you can be a good mother even if you don’t have that sort of passionate need to be one, even if you could imagine having a happy and full life without children.”
Please tell me that it wasn’t your intention to exploit the pain of infertile women (and men) just to comfort fertiles who don’t maybe feel wholly committed to motherhood? Is this the reason for the “baby-hungry” label? To insinuate that women who might want babies more than you are just downright crazy? Because that would be just …
January 16th, 2005 at 9:50 am
Just a note to BabyHungryMan:
Fantastic response. I’d like to contact you before quoting you at length on my blog, but your email address is not a real one. Please feel free to contact me instead, if you have any objections.
January 16th, 2005 at 12:49 pm
Persephone
sorry, I posted the wrong email
I am baby_hungry_man@yahoo.com
thank you
bhm.
January 16th, 2005 at 8:02 pm
Would you go to extreme medical and financial measures to save your kids if they (G-d forbid) were seriously ill?
Would you use experimental and expensive medical advances to save yourself if you had cancer?
Folks do lots of things with their bodies, time, money and hearts that you wouldn’t do. And I guess you’ve paid your money so you have a blog and can weigh in on all of us who are doing or have done or will do things that alienate or confuse or concern you. But why? If you’re reading the IF blogs, you must see the amount of pain. It’s just pain, lady. It may be witty and dazzling and somehow threatening or mystifying to you, but it’s all about the pain. Really, just move along. There’s nothing to look at here. Just leave ’em alone. If you’re really that interested in putting more love out there in the world, stop the drive-by judgments.
January 17th, 2005 at 3:11 pm
Judging judgmental mothers
A few weeks back, Jen at Buddha Mama asked:… how do you even hold opinions, much less voice them, without being judged for being judgmental? Without people feeling upset that you are not supporting their point of view? For me,
January 18th, 2005 at 11:52 pm
Wow, so many people have spoken well about this.
I understand that your wish is not to hurt anyone, and that is very much appreciated.
I used to think people were crazy for going through IVF. I am at a place now where I could choose it, but have chosen not to. But it took me a very long time to make that decision.
Never say never.
Before I had my first miscarriage, I thought I could handle it. I knew it was common, even normal. I am a pragmatic person. If that happened I would just get pregnant again.
But weeks and months after seeing my dead fetus on an ultrasound (and I was “only” 8 weeks), I was SO not okay. Three miscarriages later I can tell you that nothing, nothing, has been more painful in my life than this. And I have a few other personal tragedies that to the outside world might appear worse.
I also think that saying “I don’t get it” is in many ways saying “I think you are wrong.” When I use that phrase that’s usually what I mean. For example, “I don’t get” why some of my neighbors don’t recycle when the city makes it so easy for them. Basically what I’m saying is that they really should recycle and I think that they are wrong not to.
Maybe it’s just semantics, maybe it’s not.
January 25th, 2005 at 6:03 pm
Well, first off, thanks for calling my blog fabulous. You may not even see this, as I’m posting here late
Your entry really made me think. Lots of folks above posted things that I think address this really well, but at the same time, one thing got left out.
Infertility is a process. You start out just having unprotected sex, and talking about baby names, and how you’ll decorate the baby’s room. Then the months start to pass by without you getting pregnant. So maybe you see your GP. Your GP says, hmmm. Maybe runs a test, maybe refers you to an infertility specialist.
Whichever happens, maybe you get the answer. For me, it was my hubby’s low sperm count. So they say, here, these pills will help. And they don’t. So they run more tests. Find more information. You decide to try inseminations. They don’t work either, so even more tests are done. This time, they find out you won’t concieve without IVF.
Remember, months now have passed. You’ve been thinking baby names for years maybe. The thought of stopping, of not having that baby, becomes impossible.
So you push forward. And suffer the pain of IVF, the pain of failed cycles, or the pain of losing a child (or two, in my case).
For me, now, my baby hunger is insurmountable. I’ve actually had babies in me–felt the kicks, heard the heartbeats–only to end up with no baby.
It creeps up on you. We all started out like you. We really did. Ambivilant, cautiously excited. Intrigued at the idea of parenting. But the longer it is denied us, the more powerful the longing becomes.
We don’t all sit up and say, “You know what, I think I’d like to go through incredible pain and suffering to have a baby.”
Just to also say about adoption: regardless of how wonderful my husband and I would be as parents, we do not have the financial standing to ever make it through an adoption process (even though someone like you–an easily fertile person–didn’t have to go through a screening process at all). Not to mention the fact that we are recovering alcoholics and addicts. No one would give us a baby. If we want one, we have to make it ourselves–whether in a lab or in my body.
Provactive topic, no?
January 31st, 2005 at 5:19 pm
I had a baby with a lethal heart defect. We were offered 3 choices: Norwood, transplant, or nothing.
What would you do if it was one of your sons?
You don’t know, do you? You just can’t.