The following reflection was written by Cherry Blossom. 

Once you finally have a child after years of struggling with infertility, you find yourself in a very strange place. It’s hard to describe because it’s a place that doesn’t really have a definition. And despite being on the other side of the struggle of infertility, it’s still a difficult and uncertain place to be.

Before you get pregnant and you’re stuck in the painful mire of frustration and anger and sadness that is infertility, you can connect to a community of people that are going through the same thing. You can lean on them, vent to them, gain advice and encouragement. Despite how badly I didn’t want to be dealing with an unexplainable inability to have a child, I found comfort and strength in the community of people who were struggling with me. It was a sort of an underground group as infertility is somehow still a social faux pas today, and that only served to knit the community closer together and it was my place to grieve openly and share the struggle of trying to find joy in the sorrow. Then it happened. I got what they all wanted, and suddenly that was no longer a community where I belonged.

I was lucky enough to have a successful round of IVF and my daughter was born about three and a half years after my infertility struggle began. It was so easy to think that once she was born all the little and big things I mourned for along the way would just disappear. I mean, I would finally be a mom and I would feel whole again and I would be just like every other woman with a baby, right? On the outside, that’s exactly how it looked. That’s what made the place I found myself in even stranger and much more uncertain and painful.

I struggled a lot with anxiety the first few months of being a mother and I did my best to hide it. How dare I complain about this truly amazing gift? No, I was not tired. No, I had it all under control. Yeah, right. I wasn’t completely alone as I had friends that were there for me in their own way. They were still struggling with infertility, so it was difficult for them. I longed for and badly needed a community.

I tried out some mom groups. I sat there with my baby and listened to them talk about being stay-at-home moms and discussing their plans for other children. I felt like a fraud. I didn’t belong with these women. I had such a different relationship with how I became a mother that I felt like I couldn’t join in with their carefree chatter or even confide in them on how hard parenting was. I felt like it wasn’t allowed to be hard for me. I had put so much more pain, tears, and money into getting my little one. How could I ever find my place with these moms? And it surely wouldn’t have been fair of me to go back to the group of women I found such comfort in during my infertility journey as they were still grieving.

So there I was. Stuck in between.

Family was also quick to forget the agonizing journey I went through to have a child. It’s not something they want to discuss or relive because the baby is here and everybody should be happy. That fact only served to reinforce my belief that I had to put on a brave face and just be happy and completely in love with motherhood and my baby. I felt like all the grief and loss meant nothing because I finally had what I always wanted. I wanted that to be true.

My daughter does mean everything to me. She has completely changed me and shown me a type of joy I didn’t even know existed. I am so incredibly thankful for her every day. The waves of anxiety and sadness for the loss still hit me, though. I observe this beautiful little creation I have been wonderfully blessed to watch over, while still bearing the scars of past and future struggles. Holding joy and sadness at once is an odd feeling.

I still struggle with connecting completely in community because there isn’t a clear and easily defined one to fit in. Maybe that’s okay. It isn’t easy feeling like I am stuck in between communities, but I am lucky to be reminded by the women that have entered my life during these difficult days and even before them, that I am not alone. While the pain isn’t as ever present right now, the bolder of anxiety is starting to creep up again as my husband and I approach discussions of trying to grow our family. The place I am in gets even stranger and scarier when I think about working through infertility in the shadow of my active little toddler.

Infertility hits on so many different levels. The anxiety that follows it can throw you into the past or the future. We cannot change things in these places. When I am able to look up and take a step back and see the women who are in my life, and who care for me and listen to me, I am able to realize what I have here and now. I still worry and wonder if I will be able to grieve any future loss with my old community of struggling women that once gave me strength and comfort. I don’t know that I’ll ever fit there again in the traditional sense. I also don’t know if I’ll ever feel like I belong to the normal mom club, whatever that means.

Through all of this I have found that community is never perfect. It doesn’t need to be. It’s in that imperfection that real connection is found. I realized that feeling caught in between was often made better by me simply reaching out and asking for help and letting my friends respond. The chapter I am in is scary and uncertain but also joyful, silly, and even graciously mundane. Such is life with a toddler and such is life living with infertility issues.