Infertility and acceptance

This is one of those personal topics that I tried to keep separate - I'm not exactly sure why though...

I am an infertile woman, I am married to an infertile man.  Neither of us has been told that there is absolutely no hope, neither of us have been told that we should just give up - the chances are immesurably slim (when adding both our problems together), but the doctors try to keep our hopes up and refuse to tell us that it's not possible...

Infertility is a curse - a huge, horrible curse that lies across our sex-life, our marriage, and our happiness.  We've been coping with it a long time now, and we've actually become quite adept at managing our expectations, but the reality remains that it's just not going to happen for us, save for a miracle (and I don't really believe in miracles, despite how hard I try).

I spent a lot of time tonight commenting on an article at The Guardian. It was an amazing article, and well worth a read. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/06/i-know-the-pain-of-infertility-and-talking-about-it-helps.  We need to talk about infertility, we need to appreciate that there are stages of infertility, that there are stages of acceptance.

For those suffering through infertility - you need to know that it's not your fault, you need to know that you are worthy, you need to know that you're not being punished.  I spent so long thinking that I was being punished, that if I could just be good enough, worthy enough, I would be rewarded with what I really wanted.

It's not about worth - other than the self-worth you apply to yourself.  Your worth is not measured by how fertile you are.  I have a lot to offer this world, but I did once think that I could only measure that worth by my fertility, by how much my potenital children could learn from me.  I am so much more than that - I can be so much more than that.

I absolutely want to declare at this point that I have experienced very nasty, horrible thoughts towards those more fertile that I am. It was very hard not to - because I assumed that I was less worthy, because if I had been worthy enough, if I had been 'mother-material' then it would have happened for me too.

It just doesn't work like that, does it? We all have our burdens to bear. My burden has been infertility, perhaps a greater burden would have been to be able to get pregnant, only to realise that I wasn't, or couldn't be, the parent my child needed me to be. More than feeling unworthy in myself, I'm not sure I could have handled the realisation that I wasn't enough for my child, for the one person in the world I was charged with protecting. Surely that would have been the harder task...

I'm still not completley happy being childless, but I have come to appreicate that you can't always get what you want - and there is value in that lesson too.