I work at an agency that provides mental health services to kids and families. I also work with over 90% women, 80% of them are mothers, and a good chunk of those mothers have become so in the time that I’ve been trying. Granted, my math may not be totally accurate, but I know it feels like we are always having baby showers and special announcements at out staff meeting about expected babies. I also know that a handful of other women at my office have struggled with similar issues to what I’m going through. Many have shared their stories and hopes for me. For that I am grateful. But we are still the minority. The majority of women at work were popping out babies like rabbits. At least that’s how it felt.
I tried not to feel resentful or jealous, but how could I not? No one wants to admit they are jealous. No one wants to feel jealous. We make up all kinds of excuses, “No I’m not jealous, I’m just reminded of what I don’t have.” “No, it’s not jealously, it’s just a surprise that it was so easy for them.” “I’m not jealous, I’m sooo happy, they totally deserve to be soooo happy.” Forget that. It’s jealously. Pure and simple. It’s not like I’m choosing to be jealous. In fact, it’s one of the uglier emotions to feel and is totally useless and just creates more anger and self-loathing, and thus more jealousy. A vicious cycle of ugly. And I want to be happy for other people. I want to go to baby showers and buy cute clothes and talk about names and rub people’s bellies. I was able to for a while, but there comes a point where another baby shower or pregnancy announcement became overwhelming and upsetting for no rational reason. I noticed myself avoiding pregnant women in public and staying out of the staff kitchen at lunch so I didn’t have to hear the complaints from new moms about having to pump in their office or being kept up at night by their newborns. I wanted to pump. I wanted to be tired from caring for a baby instead of crying for a baby.
I hated that this process had made me this way. I felt angry all the time. Displaced anger at my mom for asking a question about a pregnant friend. Anger at my husband for not being more eager to have sex when I was ovulating. Anger at myself for being the kind of person who is jealous of another person’s blessings. I’m not normally a jealous person, so this new…personality trait was not only not very becoming, it sucked. I sucked. I felt snippy and nasty and bitter. Infertility turns you into a person you never would choose to be, and it takes almost all your willpower not to give pregnant strangers the stink eye.
But how could I expect to feel at this point? After a year plus of trying and not getting much help from doctors it just seemed like every month was this desperate futile attempt. And every month I did everything I was supposed to do. And I waited and I tested and I hoped, and then some bitch at work or in my condo or in my circle of friends would announce they got pregnant, “without really trying.” Giggle giggle laugh laugh, OMG! And I say bitch with the most sincerest of apologies. I’ve become a terrible person.
Noah kept telling me what happens to other people has nothing to do with our lives. People in Wyoming win the lottery and it doesn’t affect us. Friends land great jobs, move into awesome homes, and take fabulous vacations and we are super happy for them. But somehow this feels different. I just couldn’t explain it to Noah, who saw the red flags of my increasing baby obsession.
I would come home screaming when I learned of a new pregnancy. I tossed baby announcements in the trash, with not so much as a glance at the sleeping new born or his tiny feet. I was paranoid to go to dinner with couple friends in fear that someone would say, “We have something to announce.” I just couldn’t handle it. And Noah couldn’t handle me. I was paranoid, isolating, and angry. He started shielding me from baby news, which was kind of easy since I’m not on Facebook or other social media outlets. I can’t imagine if I was linked in to social media, I would be snooping around like a crazy person counting all the people I went to high school with who had babies. It’s so useless. I had other hobbies: yoga, pottery, bike rides and beach walks, cooking. But all I could really do was obsess about babies and think about how unfair it was that we couldn’t have one when we wanted one. How self-centered and self-pitying.
Infertility had gotten the best of me, and this was well before we even really started on our infertility journey. I was hard to talk to and difficult to be around. Even when we did other things, I was still always thinking about why I couldn’t get pregnant.
Noah also started to think about why this wasn’t working for us. The only thing more ironic than me working with kids and families was the fact that my husband, who usually produced reality shows starring professional surfers, musicians, or aging celebrities, was working on a show with twin sisters, one of which was several months pregnant when the show began following their lives. The second twin would go on to have a baby as well, and he would go through two births of his reality co-stars before we would even figure out what we needed to do to attempt pregnancy.
By day Noah would have to deal with a pregnant diva who was delusionally convinced she was the first woman on earth who ever had the burden of carrying a child for nine months. She demanded special foods and cancelled shoot days because of fatigue and started all sentences with, “Now that I’m about to be a mom…” as if she was the Virgin Mary. Noah shot her doctors appointments, her interviews with doula’s and midwives. The show organized and covered her baby shower and “baby-moon” and all the moments leading up to the birth. Noah was inundated by all the excitement and anxiety that surrounds becoming a mother and creating a television show around that, and at night he got to come home and hold me while I cried about how I couldn’t become one.
It all seemed so completely and totally ridiculous and unfair. And rather than banding together, our relationship felt strained. I constantly felt guilty about feeling so sad and angry and he constantly felt helpless and exhausted by his work and our life. By this point, we had been together for over ten years. We’d been through brief break ups, losses of grandparents, job transitions, my graduate school, being so poor we had to sit in the car in our neighbor’s driveway just to get internet on our laptops. We’d traveled to different countries and gotten lost in places where no one spoke English and we didn’t know which way was out. We bought our first home together and moved into it on a wickedly rainy day with nothing but garbage bags full of clothes. We’d been through a lot. And we were always able to go through tough times with curiosity and laughter, and confidence that we would figure it out together. Somehow, some way. But the constant stress of baby making was a different beast. This wasn’t a moment of crisis, but a continuous beating of our spirits that came like clockwork, every month. This wasn’t something that had alternative creative solutions, there was just one, and until that happened it seemed like this rut would continue to sink deeper. By the time I did finally get pregnant, I feared I would end up being a single mother.
We wanted to connect. We wanted to have fun. But I don’t think Noah could ever really feel what I was feeling. He wanted this madness to end. He wanted a to be a dad, to have a child he could play ball with. He thought it would be fun. I NEEDED a baby to feel like a whole person. I NEEDED to know my body wasn’t totally defunct and that we would get a chance to continue the human race. My need versus his want was hard, because he could never feel the intensity that I felt. We started arguing over stupid things. How frustrated I was that he wasn’t more interested in reading the websites and books I was reading about infertility. We fought about how he wasn’t that interested in my cervical mucous and about how he wasn’t as upset as I was when someone else got pregnant. I snapped at him when he rode his bike too much or when he worked with his laptop on top of his lap. I resented all that I was doing to keep my body healthy and functioning and how he didn’t have to do much. We fought about how much more I thought about all of this and how unfair that was. It was ridiculous and terrible.
And a moment came when we both decided this couldn’t totally be our life. Noah had faith that our time would come when it was supposed to, and ultimately, I had faith in Noah. So we planned vacations and weekends away. We went to rock shows and listened to comedy podcasts at night. I started cooking more and made a point of going on beach walks with friends. I began working part time at the agency to decrease my stress level and started a small private practice with a girlfriend so we could do different groups with kids.
Life went on. And it was just the two of us. And the more I observed how my husband reacted under stress—calm, calculated, compassionate—the more I loved him and wanted to make a baby with him. My desperate frustration continued but I did my best to spare him from it. And there were moments of relief, and dare I say it, fun.
Our ship seemed to be slowing sailing on.
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