Waking from the dream...

Last night, I was watching the movie, Inception, with my husband (for the third time) and a line I hadn’t paid much attention to before struck me as important, somehow.  In the movie, a character says “Well dreams, they feel real while we’re in them right?  It’s only when we wake up that we realize how things are actually strange.  Let me ask you a question, you never really remember the beginning of a dream, do you?  You always wind up right in the middle of what’s going on.”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that I have lost touch with reality to the point that I believe that I am actually in a dream right now.  But there is a similarity between the phenomenon being discussed by that character and some of my experiences with infertility.  And it’s the same phenomenon you see in fairy tales.  The characters’ lives, to the extent that they fall outside of the actual tale, are deemed irrelevant and are never addressed.  We don’t know what formed their motivations or how they ended up in their station in life.  We only know the role they play in that particular tale.  They wind up right in the middle of what’s going on, without any explanation of how it all began.  And after “happily ever after,” they fall off the grid.  Did Cinderella have acne as a child?  Did she ever have kids?  Did she get divorced?  Who knows because everything before “once upon a time” never happened and “happily ever after” is like waking up from a dream – Poof, it’s all gone from that point on…completely disconnected from the fairy tale.

So how does this apply to infertility?  Well, I have a lot of fertility friends and I feel so blessed to have them.  But I am realizing that we seem to be starting a friendship right in the middle of a shared journey and the focus is always on what is going on in our infertility struggles right then.  I don’t know much about most of their backgrounds or what their goals are after achieving motherhood.  I’m a Chatty Cathy (I’m sure you’re shocked given the brevity of my posts) and I think that most of them know very little about my life before infertility.  It’s as if we are stuck in a dream about infertility, together, and we will only realize how strange our relationships are after we get onto the other side of infertility.  I’ve noticed lately that when anyone asks me “How are you doing?”  I say “You mean like infertility-wise?”  It’s as if I can barely remember who I am outside of this journey.  And who meets someone a half hour before talking about where the progesterone suppositories go and the various ways to get them there.  At the time the conversation is going on, it seems totally normal.  It’s only after you step back that you realize how strange the situation is…like all filters regarding bodily functions and personal secrets get switched off, but all filters regarding everything mundane and normal get switched on.

And, like the line in the movie, it seems like people who get pregnant after dealing with infertility “wake up.”  The friends that I know the most about are the ones who have gotten pregnant.  After they get pregnant, I start hearing about their marriages and childhoods and careers.  Sometimes, I’m really surprised because who my friends really are barely resembles who I perceived them to be while we were both in “the dream.”  Once they are beyond the struggles of infertility, it seems strange to them to talk only about infertility related discussions, while I sometimes struggle with getting to a place where I am comfortable talking with them about anything else.  They are trying to extend their character beyond the pages of the fairy tale…as if there is actually a life after “happily ever after.” 

And then there’s the other end of the spectrum. Sometimes my fertility friends drop off the face of the earth once they are pregnant.  It is almost as if they view what they went through as a surreal nightmare that they can now wake up from and forget about because they have a baby in their arms.  I don’t blame them or judge them for that.  I imagine it might be hard to be reminded of the struggle of infertility when you have an opportunity to just embrace the joy of fertility.  But I wonder if the strangeness of our relationships assists them in cutting all ties.  I wonder if the fact that there is no beginning “getting to know you” stage to fertility friendships makes them easier to break off.

I have so many questions…and no real answers right now.  All I know is that I want “happily ever after,” but I don’t want to lose everything I’ve gained since “Once upon a time.”  I want to take the lessons and friends with me, and I don’t want to become irrelevant once the journey through infertility ends.  I don’t want to start a new story.  I want to build on the one I already have.