The prospect of children plays a central role in many of our lives. When they don’t materialize after years of planning for them the impact can be doubly devastating.
Imagine that maddening music that plays on the phone while you’re on an endless customer service call waiting to be helped. Only in this case, your wait time is indefinite.
That’s the way it is with prolonged infertility.
I remember using the hold music as a metaphor to describe the limbo I once felt trapped in.The music began playing with our decision to start a family, and against that soundtrack, we did what most people do, we factored in the children. Do any of these ideas sound familiar?
• I’d like to get a sporty two-seater, but where will the car seats go?
• I can’t take that job – it’s not a parent-friendly environment.
• We’d like to take that extended trip but we really should start a college fund – it’s only a matter of time before the babies arrive, and everyone tells us education is getting ridiculously expensive.
• Let’s buy this house. It’s in a neighborhood with good public schools.
For those battling unexplained infertility, it’s amazing how many aspects of daily life get shaped awaiting an outcome that may not actually happen. Echoing my exasperation, a woman wrote to tell me:
“Strangely this ‘hold music’ is one of the aspects of infertility that seems most difficult for me to convey to my friends: why we are so hesitant about changes, small and large. Everything has so much weight, from signing up for a class to buying new furniture to planning next year’s vacation. When you’re struggling to find balance, any change feels enormously risky.”
Looking back on that decade of my life I see how I adjusted my expectations, bit by bit, as we made more and more discoveries about our inability to conceive. ‘Our children,’ however, remained a guiding force in planning our lives. Endless tests, consultations and treatments later, and little by little my life became all about battling infertility … for the children.
In time, the hold music became so familiar that we stopped hearing it altogether. Infertility is so much like Waiting for Godot. There’s nothing but waiting, waiting, waiting.
• Now don’t forget you can’t be out of town on these dates. I’ll be ovulating.
• The treatments are going to cost HOW MUCH?
• I can’t quit and take that exciting startup job. It will own me body and soul. We just can’t risk it.
• Sorry, we’d like to join you on that getaway but we can’t make any plans. We’re at the mercy of the clinic’s scheduling.
• We have to cancel hosting Thanksgiving dinner at our place. I’ll be in the post-embryo transfer waiting period. The doctors explicitly said I can’t push myself.
Once it became apparent that fertility medicine would not be the magic elixir it’s so often promoted to be, you could say I left the receiver in the other room with the door shut. That way the hold music didn’t seem quite so loud and new thoughts arose:
• I’m kind of emotionally exhausted. I don’t want to think about what comes next.
• Can’t we just ‘be’ for a while? I don’t want to think about life without our children.
• Sigh. I get it... We won’t be conceiving any children.
The quiet could be deafening. Part of coming to terms with unexplained infertility, I’ve come to realize, is understanding just how pervasive it is in controlling not only your body but your heart, your life, your future, your plans. It’s not easy to let go after so much has gone into the planning for children who don’t arrive.
That hold button. It’s just so difficult to disconnect entirely, isn’t it?
As another woman wrote:
Wow. You know, I didn’t even really realize that I was doing this, but I am. I constantly have the “what ifs” playing in the background. What if I am pregnant when we have plans to go to New York over the holidays – should we cancel? What if I get pregnant next year, I surely should save my sick time now. We are actually in the middle of a remodel (adding a bedroom) for the baby…the baby that may or may not ever enter our lives. Even the two week wait makes me pause before eating sushi or drinking wine…
I agree with one of the other comments: I wish someone could just look me in the eye and tell me if it was going to happen or not. It would make things so much easier.
Preparing indefinitely for an outcome that infertility hijacks throws many of us for a loop.This entry in my journal summed it up:
When the fertility industry didn’t deliver and I was no longer in a rigid cycle watch, a monitored protocol I felt like a prisoner expelled after a lengthy sentence. I hardly knew how to act, what exactly to do.
What I did next felt really uncomfortable ― at first. I blinked hard staring into the bright white space trying to focus.It was once my eyes adjusted that I fully recognized the inertia.
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