Emotional Baggage

"Infertility is a loss that others often don't acknowledge, which can leave you feeling that you don't have the right to grieve", Dr. Ken Doka.

Life throws us a whirlwind of emotions with this journey. Most of us will go through this each month of our cycle and then pick ourselves up and go through it again in the next month. Then there's the added stress of getting older and conception becoming much harder as you race against your own biological clock to get pregnant. A lot of people relate infertility emotions to the Kubler Ross model of the 5 stages of Grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. 

At one stage the emotional strain broke me and I became weak, I had to dig deep inside me to keep being hopeful and to keep trying every month. I was claiming emotional bags one by one and it just become a whole heap of overweight and oversized emotions to deal with. No one knows the pain of infertility until you go through it yourself.

This is my emotional baggage.

Sadness:

Every morning I woke up feeling empty, even though I have so much to be thankful for, I wasn’t content with life. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t speak. It’s as if I had lost someone that never existed! The only thing that felt good was lying in bed all day, hidden from the world. I had to take time of work. Working as a health professional it was often hard interacting with pregnant women, forcing myself to put on a friendly customer service role without crying so much inside. The day I got the call for the IUI results, I was at work, and I was thinking to myself how am I going to carry on working while holding my tears back to every customer I speak to.

 I felt sad in so many ways. Sad that I may not be able to give my parents grandkids. Sad that I'd never be able to surprise my husband with pregnancy news. Sad that I may never get the opportunity to go on maternity leave. Sad that I may never get to go on a walk whilst pushing a pram. Sad towards my empty womb. I was grieving the loss of a baby that I may never get to know and never get to see who it may look like or if the baby would have similar traits to me or my husband. Sadness is a powerful emotion and can take over you as a person and over your life. Though over time it has gotten better for me, it will always be a wound continuously needing to be dressed.

Frustration:

Every monthly period was a slap in the face. Having only one chance a month to try and conceive, then trying again month after month with negative results is frustrating. More frustrating when you are told there is no explanation. Desperation starts to kick in. I tried all sorts of conception lubricants. I was eating oysters regularly. I made sure my husband wouldn't work with his laptop on his lap. Then I started trying some of the conception myths like leaving my feet up after sex and telling my husband to stop cycling. I even Google searched 'best sex positions to conceive'. With all the frustration it would start putting pressure on my husband who would then go through performance anxiety, and then that started getting frustrating.    

The moment I’d start getting cramps, breast tenderness and back aches I would be begging God to please let it not be my period. Though deep down I knew it was my period arriving, even with a speck of blood I would be in denial. I would Google 'pregnancy symptoms in the first month' and hope that’s what I was going through. I would be so careful to not even take Ibuprofen for the period pain, just in case. Every month I would remain dormant like a volcano and soon as I get my period I would just erupt with emotions. What was the point of me even having a period if I was never going to have a child? The monthly frustrations lead me to chuck all my unused pregnancy tests in the bin. I would be desperate to see that double line on a pregnancy stick that I'd start blaming the brand of the pregnancy test if it came back negative.

I have now eventually got to the stage where getting my period is a little less emotionally painful nor do I rely on Dr. Google for any information. I'm not sure if that was healed by time or whether it's just writing out my emotions on this blog, but my husband and I now live a life where we are not letting conception take over us. We eat and drink whatever we want. We cycle much more. We have sex the way we want.

 

Resentment:

It is hard to go to a shopping mall and see coffee groups with their kids, or pregnant women shopping for baby items, or mums taking their babies out for a walk in the pram. Who knows if these women had their own difficulties to get pregnant? To me it just felt like they all had it easy. Most of my close friends had no problems conceiving so a lot of the time I felt alone. It was a topic that they couldn't possibly relate to or understand. Although I was happy for my friends, it was hard to feel happy without feeling sad at the same time. Even people I knew that didn’t want kids were getting pregnant. There was a tinge of resentment towards them as I felt I lived a healthier lifestyle than most of them. Resentment is a very hard emotion to go through. You feel it, but you don't want to be that person that takes the positivity of something so beautiful away from someone else.

I have seen friends, customers, colleagues abuse their bodies with bad diets, excessive drinking, smoking and drugs and seemingly still manage to get pregnant with ease. It was probably a bad trait to keep comparing myself to others, but what can I do? It came to me naturally in this circumstance. It's funny in a world where everyone is different, everyone has a different story, I ask myself why do others get the gift of children and we don't? I'm still learning to just focus on my life and not worry about what others have in theirs.

 I also felt the overwhelming sense of unfairness of those who I deemed are unfit to be parents, those who constantly neglect and abuse their own children. Those of you who have watched documentaries such as ‘The trials of Gabriel Fernandez’ would agree that parents like Gabriel’s should never have been given a second chance to take care of him. This is just something in life I'm never going to comprehend.

Acceptance:

The nights were the worst. I’d lay in bed for hours crying. Should I accept that I may never get to have a baby? What do I do with my life now? I’ve planned most of my life around this and now there’s so much anxiety and uncertainty. I would actually Google the words ' why am I not getting pregnant?' in the hope of helping me deal with the acceptance.

 Counselling was suggested to me, but I didn’t have hundreds of dollars to go through with it. I felt a sense of guilt in addition to everything else I was feeling. There are worse things going on in the world and worse things people are going through but I kept telling myself I’m only human. I try to change my mind set. Maybe we are not supposed to have our own. Perhaps we have a different calling in life. I wanted to gain something in life instead of wasting it in bed all day feeling sorry for myself. I regret focussing so much on having a child for the past few years I had forgotten the world around me. Though I say this, I still need those days of isolation. I took up several activities such as sketching, learning a language, reading more books, trying out new recipes, trying to start a charity and getting back into sport. These now keep me occupied and fill up most of my days.  Some days I feel positive but then I hear about another friend or relative getting pregnant and it takes me straight back to square one. The thing is, it could happen for us one day, but it may also never. I guess I'll always be reminded of this in some way, and I guess infertility pain will be a continuous struggle for me until I have a child. Like my husband's Nan always says when life gets her down "just get on with it". Though it's hard I try to live by this motto. 

l always wondered if other women going through this felt the same or was it just me. One tool that helps me get through is talking to other women going through the same experience. All different journeys but the same goal. It helps to grieve with people that understand. You are allowed to feel how you feel.

"When you think things are bad, when you feel sour and blue, when you start to get mad... you should do what I do... Just tell yourself, Duckie, you're really quite lucky! Some people are much more... oh ever so much more... oh, muchly much-much more unlucky than you!"

- Dr Seuss