The following reflection was written by Forsythia.

 

“The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing… not healing, not curing… that is a friend who cares.”
–Henri Nouwen

As I evaluate the losses my husband and I have accrued through our infertility journey, the most obvious one to me is the death of our dream to have biological children. There are so many other losses attached to that, from seeing our features in a child’s face to what the process of conception looks like.

But as a new mother to an adopted son, there is another great loss that haunts me. It is powerfully devastating: a heart-aching loss I never anticipated. I am reminded of it especially in the daily text exchange between me and my best friend, Dogwood.

She is my go-to on any manner of baby-related subjects:

Did you ever have trouble with your newborns being gassy or straining to poop?

At what age/weight did you move up to the next level of car seat, and would you recommend the one you have?

Did you use essential oils on yourself like normal even while breastfeeding?

And also the person with whom I share every sweet revelation or difficult moment:

HE’S SO COZY I COULD SNUGGLE FOREVER 

How silly all my fears [about adoption] seem now

He was rotten all night

She’s always there with a word of wisdom, solidarity, encouragement. The way she loves my son is breathtaking. Her willing, joyful, tireless involvement in this new stage of my life is a priceless gift.

This is a gift that I did not, could not, give to her.

When she was becoming a mom for the first time, I was in the early stages of discovering our infertility–in that brutal period of adjustment where expectations are shattering, dreams dying, hope dissipating. My husband was years away from the emotional stage of processing that I was in and I felt utterly alone. I was in shock and struggling with grief, and every new pregnancy or birth I encountered threw a giant spotlight on my wretched emptiness.

So when Dogwood called to tell me she was pregnant with her first child, it was indescribably painful. A hot wave of dread crashed over me. Tears flooded my eyes. Through a constricting throat, I managed to congratulate her and tell her I was happy, lying because I was ashamed of how I felt and because I believed it’s what she wanted to hear. Somehow, I kept my composure until we hung up, and then I called the only friend I knew at the time who had experienced infant loss, the only friend I could think of who might understand the weight on my heart. On the phone with her, I sat in a dark bathroom, trying to keep my tears secret from my husband as I sobbed uncontrollably into the receiver.

Soon after, Dogwood made me confess what my true reaction to her news had been: even then she knew me so well that concealing my feelings from her was impossible. That was one of our first and biggest fights; it was what I had feared would happen, but strangely, not for the reason I had feared it. Instead of being upset because her pregnancy had brought me pain, she was upset because I was pulling away from her, trying to hide my true self from her. I believe that this conversation set the tone for our relationship over the years to come. It was when Dogwood told me “I’m all in.”

I wish I could say that her willingness to walk alongside me in my pain made me more open to her joy. Perhaps it did in some ways; nevertheless, it did not make me able to be emotionally present in her early days of motherhood—with her first nor, sadly, her second child.

These days, as I eagerly send her a question regarding the daily rituals of parenthood, or text her a picture of the son I can’t seem to stop photographing, it is ever in my mind that she never had the luxury of sending me such messages. There were no phone calls or texts venting new mom frustrations, and I knew she was careful about expressing excitement and love for her children to me.

Infertility comes with an astronomical price tag. In the thick of it, I was giving my friend everything that I felt able to give to her, and only now do I see how little that was comparatively. There are parts of Dogwood’s life that I completely missed; a season of her growth and experience as a person that I will never know. The grief of infertility took this from me, and I will never get it back.

I have no way of knowing to what degree this loss led to gain in our relationship: how much the honest working through of our pain, frustration, sadness, and joy has contributed to my longing to know her more and more. I cannot separate the two—I wish I could for her sake. But perhaps we’re not meant to.

I cannot now, nor ever will be able to express my gratitude towards Dogwood, and to all the others who allowed infertility to take from them so that they might have more of me.

The following reflection was written by Dogwood.

Forsythia and I have a unique friendship: one of those once-in-a-lifetime connections. Our souls just recognize each other. She and her husband battled infertility from the start. She was never on birth control and was surprised many times at the beginning of their marriage when she was not pregnant. I remember the first time I witnessed a reaction to a negative pregnancy test. Forsythia had come over to hang out with my roommate and I at our tiny college duplex. She had stopped at the drugstore on the way to pick up a test. She told us when she arrived that it was just a precaution; her period could come any day and she didn’t think it would be positive, though she hoped it might be. We changed the CD, sipped iced tea, caught up on each other’s lives. Then, it was time to look at the test. We were all very excited at the possibility of a baby for our first married friends! We had a lot of hope that it would be positive, though there were questions of how they would provide and make room in their lives for a baby. I’m sure I held my breath as she walked out of the bathroom holding the little white stick. Sure enough, it was negative.

We all felt it–the loss of hope. Little did we know that my friend and her husband would never conceive a biological child. I could never have imagined what it would be like to walk alongside my best friend as she watched her dream of being a mother slip away. I was still a young woman and those thoughts were not in my realm of imagination at the time.

Watching Forsythia experience one loss after another was unbearable. I did my best to stick with her through the ups and downs of her and her husband’s uncertain journey towards parenthood. What this looked like was mostly listening and mourning with her. I shook my head at the awful things people would say to them about having children, and held my breath when mutual friends announced new pregnancies.

During this time, my husband and I received news from my doctor: “If you want to have biological children of your own, you need to do it now” (I was 24 at the time). They had discovered endometriosis in my uterus after an extensive myomectomy. We wanted children, but had planned to wait a few more years. I knew I wanted to be a mother and that I wanted to see my husband father our children, so our plans changed and we started trying to get pregnant as soon as I was recovered from my surgery. I got pregnant after trying for 2 months. Sharing this news with Forsythia was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. She and her husband were in the trenches of infertility: telling her that I was pregnant felt like sticking a finger into her open wound.

I was unprepared for motherhood; I was thrown into it by the circumstances of my health. I was excited and full of joy and could not share any of this with my best friend. Up to this point in our friendship, there wasn’t much we hadn’t shared. It felt strange and alienating to hide this really important part of my life from her. I had made many transitions in life with her by my side–graduating college, beginning a career, marriage–and now I was transitioning into motherhood without her. She could not come with me. I could not expect her to be happy for me.

My husband and I had moved back to our hometown shortly before getting pregnant. It was a lonely time for me for many reasons. I had my family, but I had no community–no one to walk with me into this very scary world of motherhood. I needed Forsythia. She was unavailable. I didn’t get to send her videos and pictures of my son doing absolutely nothing (that’s what most of those first pictures and videos are, after all). I couldn’t call her to vent about wishing my husband would hear the baby crying at night before me, or about the marital fights that this caused. I couldn’t ask her to come see us in the hospital after my son was born. I couldn’t call her from the hospital to tell her that I wanted to go home, or that I wanted my baby to latch properly so that my nipples would stop bleeding and my milk would stop clogging. I desperately needed her to hear how I was wronged by hospital staff and our doctor–how they stole the first hour of my son’s life from me. I needed her to cry with me and sit with me in the confusion and pain. She couldn’t. Her loss became my loss in an unexpected way.

Instead of sharing my life with her at this time, when we spoke it was mostly about what was going on in her life, and any part of my life that my son didn’t intrude upon. She did what she could; she asked about him when she was able to bear it. But I never dared go into much detail for fear of hurting her more.

Our friendship survived this dark period. I missed her and I know that I could have used her support during those first years of my kid’s lives, but I was able to forgive her for being absent at such an important time for me because I understood that she wasn’t able. I knew that if she could, she would. I trusted her heart.

Infertility does not happen in a vacuum. The pain, confusion, and loss of infertility will reach as a far as it is allowed. I willingly stepped into Forsythia’s pain. Of the losses I chose to endure, losing our friendship was not one of them, because I knew that the heartache was only a season. We are so apt to believe that what is now will always be. That is the lie we tell ourselves, a lie we must reject. As Forsythia and I faced loss together, I embraced hope: that she would be a mother; that we would walk that road together one day; that there was meaning behind the pain we endured. I gripped tightly to these beliefs for my friend, whose heart did not have the strength to believe them, but also for myself: what I was giving up was not in vain.