The following reflection was written by Hawthorne.
For me, infertility loss cannot be neatly summarized or packaged. It’s a messy ball of loose nerve endings and raw edges that leaves you simultaneously emotionally overflowing and emotionally empty. There is no single thing for me that hurt the most, just many, many “small” things.
(Note that the following is a list from one perspective at one point in time and obviously oversimplifies some very complicated issues.)
Losses and Griefs:
-Being on the outside, excluded from the “happy, normal people” whose lives go just as planned and have no complicated feelings about babies or pregnancy.
-Feeling out of control of my body.
-Feeling physically, emotionally, and mentally weak, especially during infertility treatments.
-Feeling empty and barren in a way I think is pretty impossible to understand without experiencing it.
-Feeling the loss of privacy in having to go through medical treatments that felt humiliating and degrading to me.
-Losing the hope that there would ever be a little one who was the result of my husband and me: of our marriage and our lives together.
-Feeling utterly alone.
-Losing the dream of being a mom the “simple” way, with a child that undeniably “belonged” to us and owed no ties to anyone else (ie: his or her birth family).
-Feeling so much anguish over being the reason my husband would never get to see his own birth child when that was such a deep desire for him, and knowing that my past choices and pain were taking this from him.
-Losing the dream that sex would ever just be fun, simple, or easy, instead of the complex and emotion-ridden thing it is during infertility.
-Fearing the loss of joy around kids and babies when they have always been some of my favorite humans. (I am grateful for friends who encouraged me to push and fight through my hurt in order to stay with them, rightly telling me I would lose a big part of myself if I stepped away from kids and babies.)
-Knowing that no matter what happened, there would be no “neat ending” to my story.