A Tale of Countless Pregnancies

Originally Posted: April 2015

It’s National Infertility Awareness Week. It’s a topic of which my husband and I are all too aware.

Having spent years trying to conceive our eldest, I can tell you that infertility is a very quiet and lonely business. Some people go through rounds of invasive, painful, and physically exhausting procedures. Some, like us, eventually give that up.

Some, like us, experience the loss of children they are almost superstitious about even believing are finally there or getting excited about – but they were there, for days, weeks or months until they no longer were. And while they left our bodies, they didn't leave our hearts and we grieve.

Some, like us, are eventually able to conceive children naturally and carry to term, delivering the dreams that we had stopped even daring to dream. Some never realize that dream.

But all, no matter their particular path, experience it differently. It is a very personal struggle, full of guilt and bargain and pleading and grief and hope and loss and denial and indifference and embarrassment and anger and submission. Some marriages survive it, others don’t.

Few people will come out and tell you they are dealing with it, as the world constantly celebrates new life all around us, and they feel left out of the world around them. And so while I won’t give you an exhaustive list of things to not say to people without children – with the one exception of “just relax and it will happen”, which is likely to garner you the finger, a black eye or bad juju sent your way for the next thousand years - I will ask that you take time to keep these people in your prayers. They may not choose to share their struggle with you, but your acknowledgement of the very real heartbreaking struggle that those facing infertility go through - no perfect words required - is appreciated.