I was watching the American version of Being Human (because I’m a geek like that) when I heard a quote that resonated with me.
Sally: I’m never gonna know what it’s like to wanna protect my child and fail.
Josh: I don’t think it has to be your child. I think if you love someone - anyone that much - you’d surprise yourself with what you’d do.
I never thought I could get enlightenment from B Syfy show before this moment. The point is that I have been thinking the same thing. Put someone in the middle of tragic circumstances and the things they do for love will have them in therapy for years. It’s the things we do to save someone that have us resenting them and sometimes even hating to love them. Yes, that can happen when your child dies. You can even glimpse the pain Sally's Mother must have been in when she died (Sally is a ghost in the show). The Mom can't even stand to be near her daughter when she becomes a ghost out of her own guilt at not having been there when she was needed most. She was helpless, so was Sally and so are we sometimes.
When we are young we always want more so we take what we have for granted. When we get more experienced we so often see what went wrong that we still take what we have left for granted. We become blinded by what we are missing.
I am missing my kids, my fertility and my future pregnancies. Like so many women I can’t have kids but like Josh says love transforms a person. I’ve often wished I could sacrifice myself for the life of my child. Women tend to think that way when protecting their babies. The love of them transformed me and I never even took mine home.
But when you can’t have kids it can make it very difficult to see what you are capable of. As many infertile women experience depression and low self-esteem as those with cancer and cardiac problems. I’ve even heard one specialist suggest that IVF is more stressful than Chemo. If you are like me you may not have spent your whole life dreaming about kids. One day you find it’s all you think about. Before you know it your whole world revolves around fertility when it should revolve around the things that make you truly happy.
Depression creeps in. You forget things that you enjoy, put them on hold and eventually forget why you ever enjoyed them to begin with. You replace those things with a hope for a baby. Before you even realize what has happened that baby is the missing puzzle piece to your happiness. If you don’t have the baby you can’t feel happy. You need the baby like you need air.
Society doesn’t make it easy on infertile couples either. People ask about kids. They talk about them. They say stupid things and give ignorant advice. Each comment makes that puzzle piece in your heart ache. Even the things having nothing to do with kids make remind you of the missing baby. If you are seated at the bar in a busy restaurant it’s because you don’t have a baby. If you go to a graduation you think you’ll never go to your baby’s graduation. When you are playing video games you realize you’ll never share this with your baby. Any situation, even bad ones, can remind you of the baby. But there is no baby and there may never be a baby.
We all find things that help us cope but most of them eventually lead us to letting go of that possibility. It’s only negative to give up hope if we are giving up a chance at finding happiness. It’s acceptance that leads us to real possibilities. Anyone who tries to tell you that you are wrong for giving up is naive at best and more likely delusional from their own skewed sense of morality.
Asking someone to carry the burden of infertility with them forever is asking them to sacrifice their lives to depression. Deciding to find something other than kids to fill that gap is a positive step forward. Trying to get back to the things you used to love and rediscovering why you loved them can be a fun excursion from the negative cycle of life without kids.
From everything I’m learning I, like you, can come to a point where we have come to accept our life minus kids. There will be times of grief. There are always times of grief. It’s ok if you don’t want to get out of bed every once in a while. Don’t let yourself be intimidated out of spending your life in a positive way. No person, religion or political group should have that kind of power.
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