Why Do You Put Yourself Through All of This?

Today I was crying on the phone to a friend.  I told her about my breakdown yesterday and about how crazy I feel, waiting to get started on our egg donor cycle, knowing that there is a chance that the cycle will fail.  She said “Why do you put yourself through all of this?”  And with that, I had to get off the phone.  I’ve been asked that question more times than I can count over the last couple of years.  Sometimes by well-meaning women who dealt with infertility many years ago, but didn’t have the technology available to them that we now have available to us.  Sometimes by family members who have no idea what it is like to deal with infertility (I have 42 cousins…fertility is not generally a problem in my family).  And sometimes by my own fertility friends who have changed the direction of their journeys toward adoption or child-free living.  Each time, no matter who is asking the question, I get upset.

How do you explain why you put yourself through the emotional ups and downs of infertility?  How do you explain why you would choose to spend thousands of dollars and give yourself countless injections of medications that make you crazy for a chance of getting pregnant?  How do you explain that you are choosing to give up a genetic link with your child in order to have a chance of having a child at all?  I can’t think of any explanation that adequately addresses the dreaded question “Why do you put yourself through all of this?”  Maybe I dread this question because the question itself implies that there is or should be a choice involved, and, for me, for now, there just isn't.  I have to keep trying.  I can't help it.

For me, the thought of not having a child is much like one of the saddest quotes I’ve ever read from a fairy tale. 

“The little mermaid knew this was the last evening she should ever see the prince, for whom she had forsaken her kindred and her home; she had given up her beautiful voice, and suffered unheard-of pain daily for him, while he knew nothing of it.  This was the last evening that she would breathe the same air with him....An eternal night, without a thought or a dream, awaited her.”  

                                                ~Hans Christian Andersen, “The Little Mermaid” (1836)

Giving up on having a child would feel like that….entering an eternal night, without a thought or a dream awaiting me.  I’ve alienated friends and family who disagree with my choices regarding ART, spent lots of money on ART, lost little pieces of the person I used to be throughout the last couple of years, and endured an untold amount of physical and emotional pain because I yearn for a child of my own, just as the little mermaid yearned to be with her prince.  The very idea of giving up on my dream now, of walking away after everything I've put into this endeavor, is more unspeakable than anything I might endure in the pursuit of motherhood.  

Not everyone feels the way I do, and I respect that.  In fact, I have numerous friends who have chosen child-free living post-infertility and they ALL say they wish they had made the decision a long time ago.  They’ve found happiness.  I applaud them.  Maybe one day, I will end up being one of them.  But for now, I want to hold on to my dream.  I am not ready for it to be over.  The thought of giving up my dream takes the breath from me, and I guess that is “why I put myself through all of this.”  Because I must.

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.