The first few months that you’re trying to get pregnant are so much fun. You’ve googled everything you need to know to get your timing right, and the prospect of becoming a parent with your person makes them 10x more attractive to you. It’s fun work.
Then, you hit month 6 of trying, 9 or 10 if you’re made of steel. You’re chill, and you remind yourself that it can take healthy couples up to a year to get pregnant. But on the inside, the dread begins to set in, so you summon your friend Dr. Google to tell you EVERYTHING that could be wrong. You inhale message threads about others trying to get pregnant, and you learn a whole new vocabulary of acronyms:
TTC, 2WW, NTNP, AF, CM, EWCM, BBT, FRER, DH, BD, BC/BCP, GSD, BFN, BFP CD, CP, DPO, DPT, EDD, HCG, HSG, IVI, ICSI, LB, LH, LP, O, OPK, POAS, SA, VFL, VVVFL, SMEP, IUI, ICSI. This is a language I have become fluent in. They’re acronyms to speed up the process of explaining your fertility story, or asking questions. They’re a sort of right of passage for those of us without the genetics to simply have sex and get pregnant. Because the minute you can’t get pregnant, you begin to crave any little bit of control that you can, and relating to strangers on the internet somehow feeds into that need for control.
Every month, especially since we moved to Chicago and met with our reproductive endocrinologist, I tell myself I’m not going to hope anymore. That I’m positive I can’t get pregnant without medical intervention. And EVERY SINGLE MONTH, my hormones get the best of me. I pull up my fertility app, do the the math, inner high-fiving myself for getting the timing right, and I hope again. I question every change in my body or cravings. I begin to brainstorm and question how long-distance baby showers work, now that we live someplace far from both the majority of our friends and family. I tear up thinking about whether I can have the self control to announce it to Ben in a cute way, or if I just call him relentlessly at work the minute I get a positive test. I cut out fish from our weekly menus, and become extra rigid about my prenatal vitamin.
And every month, there it is. My uterine lining, reminding me again that it is inhospitable to the babies swimming in my imagination. It’s a never ending cycle of hope and despair. Because I can’t help but hope. Hope that all the prayers of our mothers, and random strangers on the internet, will have converged to create a perfect little human. Hope that we won’t have to dish out money for our science baby (although we are SO SO thankful for insurance coverage for fertility, there is still a cost associated to making a science babe this way, that doesn’t exist with, you know, free sex). Hope that we’ve waited and endured and grown into the family we needed to be, and now we get to reap the benefits.
Despair. Despair because here I am, carrying this grief for another month. Having waited and endured and grown. Here I am, after another text-book beautiful month of trying to get pregnant, and my body is literally convulsing in pain because it isn’t housing a baby. As if I didn’t try my very best. Despair because I have to deal with another month of the double-whammy of jealousy for the people around me stepping beautifully into parenthood, followed by a soul-crushing shame-train for ever entertaining those thoughts.
The thing I want people outside of grief to know the most, is that it comes with me everywhere. Grief is with me when I get in the car and drive behind a minivan with a family of stick people on the back. Grief is with me when I begin to make all my own stocks and broths at home, because the soup aisle at my Fred Meyer’s combined it with the baby goods–so I naturally avoid it like the plague. Grief is with me from the stage at my church where I lead worship, and I watch couples become pregnant, and hold their babes in church as I sing “from my mother’s womb, you have chosen me,” and I wonder if any babe has been chosen for my womb.
I don’t get to dictate where it comes with me, but because I’ve lived almost 27 years on this earth, I know where and when it is not welcome. I think this is one of the biggest reasons I didn’t speak about my grief for a long time. Our culture (and this is even more prevalent in faith spaces) is so dependent on happiness, that any break from optimism is quickly met with well-meant, but often silencing tactics:
“it’ll happen as soon as you stop stressing about it”
“just have faith”
“trust God’s timing”
“have you tried…”
We’re so uncomfortable with sitting with people in hard places, that we brush over their open wounds, and try to usher them out of sight and out of mind. Changing the subject so that we don’t linger too long, and are reminded of our own griefs, frustrations, and un-met desires.
I learned quickly, to bottle my feelings up and release them in the bathroom at public events. I am a master of cupping my hand over my mouth to force myself to swallow a heaving sob. Preferring to tell people I have diarrhea, than the truth that I am overwhelmingly exhausted from carrying the grief of my infertility in spaces where I see everyone else’s fertility on display. I have cried in church bathrooms, grocery store bathrooms, friend’s bathrooms, goodwill bathrooms. When I am able to hold it together long enough, it usually all spills out around bed time, when Ben and I are too tired to address it well so we half-ass a fight, and we weep, and we go to sleep another night longing for our children.
Grief comes with me everywhere. I carry the weight of it, plus the energy it takes to suppress it when people don’t ask about it. When they ignore it completely because it’s a real party-killer. I carry the weight of longing for someone to check-in and validate that waiting is hard, especially when you’re doing everything right, and the waiting seems arbitrary compared to everyone else’s fertility around you.
It is a heavy thing to be the author of your grief story. To be the only one responsible for navigating it, and communicating it. It’s as if your grief poses to others the risk of looking into the sun. They want to know that it’s there, but not look too closely. Except your grief is not quite so dangerous as looking into the sun. It’s like looking at a picture of someone looking at the sun, where your job is to respond and be empathic to what you think you’re experiencing, without feeling the heat, or the specks in their eyes that change the way they look at the world.
I’m going to end this post here. Without any attempt to salvage the heaviness of it. We do that too much–we try to write a redemption song, when the real song of our hearts is about hurt and heaviness. I’m going to end it here, because we’re still in the thick of it. Although we’re getting more answers soon, and overall it has been an emotionally stable season for me, I’m still carrying my grief into every space I navigate. I don’t apologize for the space it takes, and I won’t put lipstick on it to make it appear heroic or like it’s closing in on resolution. I hope we are. But I won’t minimize this grief story to bring us into a space of comfort. It is not out of a lack of gratitude, or love, or hope that I share all of this. It is to honor the deep, healing work, of looking at our grief and saying that it’s real.
I’ll end every post about this story with this:
If you’ve made it this far: thank you. Thank you for reading into a story that can feel gritty, and hard. I’m sure for some folks, it’s simply uncomfortable. If you’re reading this as a fertile person, please know you should not be experiencing guilt. All compassion and learning is welcomed, but guilt can quite literally go to hell. I celebrate your fertility with you, and I’m so glad you have your kids.
If you’re reading this as someone who has struggled with fertility, I see you. I see you when no one asks how it’s going, but all you want to do is talk, because you’re bursting with grief. I see you holding it together at baby showers, and baby dedications, and work bathrooms when someone announces a pregnancy. Your pain is welcome here.
If you’re reading this as someone not in a position to become a parent, or with no desire to parent: you are welcome here. Thank you for taking the time to empathize and learn about something that may not be personal for you and your experience. I hope you are always, always, always given dignity for your circumstances and decisions.
Love, love, love,
Mary-Beth Johnson
Mary-Beth is a creative, food-obsessed, Georgia transplant living Chicago. She is proudly and fiercely Latina, and more specifically Chapina. In her day to day she is a food educator to students around Chicagoland aged 3 to 80+, both virtually and in-person. She is passionate about cultivating the truth that every person has an understanding of food that deserves being brought to the table, and that time in the kitchen can be sacred, passionate, and an act of love for self and others. Outside the kitchen you can find her at the intersections of infertility, chronic illness, and a deep love for the dignity of all humans. She hopes to create a space that is holistic about the role of food in the social, political, relational, and physiological dynamics of our world.
You bet I read it all the way through. Thank you for sharing your grief and your wisdom with us. I hear you and my heart goes out to you. And Ben, too. I’m guessing you are each feeling it and living it and processing it in your own ways as well as together. Lots of hugs to you both.