(Sniff…sniff) That is so great! (sniff…give what you hope is a silent, choked-back sob) How far along are you? (low moan that you muffle by placing your hand over the phone) Yeah, I imagine it would suck to be 8 months pregnant during the summer (make clicking noises to simulate call waiting) I really have to go now, but we need to get together so I can hear ALL THE GODDAMN DETAILS.

Click.

Sob.

Run into bathroom and sit on the floor next to the toilet. Try not to look in the garbage can and see the wrappers from the last two BFN pregnancy tests. Check caller-ID next time the phone rings.

Question Four–how do you prefer to be told when someone has pregnancy news? By the happy couple? By a mutual friend? Over the phone? In person? At the beginning of a long car ride up I-95 on 4th of July weekend when you’ll be trapped in traffic with the pregnant woman (who will be complaining about how she has to pee and how you can’t imagine how badly she has to go to the bathroom and how you are sooooooooooooooo lucky that you’re not pregnant during the summer because morning sickness when it’s hot outside is the woooooooooooorst) for the next 6 hours?

And it’s okay to answer that your ideal situation would include the hypothetical pregnant couple bringing you all the booze from their liquor cabinet since they won’t need it for the next 9 months (woohoo! Free alcohol for the SQs and SPJs). Check back Friday afternoon to hear how we prefer people to break the happy news.

And by “prefer” we mean the only way you’re going to get the response you crave from us.

Lest someone believe that all Stirrup Queens and Sperm Palace Jesters (SQs and SPJs to you) know the right thing to say, we experience the same lack of words when confronted by someone else’s fertility loss. Our book will have many ideas of what NOT to say/do, but since comfort is subjective, I’m not sure we can make the inverse list–the right thing to say, the right hug to give, the right phone call to make. I think if we keep the mantra: it’s all about (fill in name here) and not about me, we do okay. Not great. Not wonderful. Okay. But, then again, I’m come from the mindset that the only thing that will completely assuage the pain is to not be experiencing it at all. Therefore, nothing said or done will completely take it away.

Last night, a friend revealed that she had recently had a miscarriage. And I, a Stirrup Queen through and through, could not come up with anything comforting to say. Beyond listening. And a hug. The magical me wanted to conjure a parade of elephants into the living room, marching over the gorgeously shiny hardwood floors to deposit her baby back into her tummy to cook for many more months.

It’s hard when you realize that you are no more magical than anyone else you encountered during your IF experience.

I’m so sorry, sweetie. I wish there was something I could do for you. Something to help the healing move even faster. I can’t–and I’m so sorry about that too. I’m here with information if you need it. I’m here with an open ear if you want to talk. I’m here with a car that can drive downtown and pick you up for some extremely mindless female bonding that includes alcohol. Or…at the very least…chocolate and coffee (wait, chocolate and coffee? I mean, we will sit down and eat an entire chocolate cake IN ONE SITTING). I can’t put the baby back in your belly no matter how tightly I hug you. I’m sorry about that too. Hang in there. Know that the entire self-aware portion of womanhood has your back.

I’m currently pausing from reading through the stories submitted for question three to put down some thoughts. I was struck by the person who said that people don’t understand that the tears are not self-pity but rather an expression of pain. I’m reading Joan Didion’s book at the moment–The Year of Magical Thinking–which chronicles the loss of her husband and daughter. She has a wonderful passage in the book about self-pity and the American contempt for anything construed as “self-pity.” That people are complimented for holding it together (another person wrote us directly with a message straight out of the non-infertile world: you handle your infertility better than another couple because you can attend these events when they can’t) rather than publically grieving. For getting on with their lives. For putting others first. She talks about the words used in conjunction with self-pity. Wallowing. Boo hoo poor me. Indulging.

There are some who would say that you can’t compare the loss of the ability to reproduce to the loss of a spouse. Certainly the emptiness of someone who was there and is now not vs. something that was never there except in the form of hope is difficult to compare. But for me–and I think for many of us–that loss is so huge, so real, so tangible that we really do go through a mourning period. My cousin died close to when another cousin was getting married. The wedding couple offered to postpone the wedding for the sake of family. The parents of the child who died said the celebration must go on. When the time came for the wedding, the sister of the child who died asked her parents to dance. I remember her father rubbing her arm and saying in this soft, sad voice: “I can’t dance right now, sweetie. My heart hurts too much.”

You would never ask a mourner to dance or think they were engaging in self-pity if they declined to get down to “Brick House.” But women who are going through IF are expected to muster the enthusiasm and happiness required at a baby shower. Or a bris. They are expected to traipse down the aisles at Buy Buy Baby picking out the cutest frilly dress for a newborn girl. We are expected to put our own experience and sadness on the back burner in order to celebrate with another person who is getting exactly what we want.

We did a mix: skipped some events and attended others based on where I was in my cycle and the closeness of the friend. But I don’t think there was one event that we entered into light-hearted, with our own pain on the back burner. We cried getting ready for the party. I sometimes ducked into the bathroom while we were there to pull it together. And we cried on the way home.

At the same time, there were non-infertiles who thought they were saving my feelings by not inviting me to the first-birthday parties or other child-centered events. In the end, that just made me feel like a pariah–cast out of the community of womanhood because I couldn’t reproduce like all the other women.

So how can the non-infertile world win? They’re damned if they do invite this over-emotional self-pitying freak to their parties and they damned if they don’t. I guess it’s the fact that there is no way to win because there is nothing to win. You can’t assuage the pain of a person going through IF by inviting them to a party or having them hold a child or even patting their back and being a good listener. If you start from that understanding–that you will not possibly be able to say the “right thing” and fix the problem, then you already are helping. Because lower expectations of how I should be handling things or when it’s time to stop mourning or stop crying or extend happiness to another couple are needed because these things can’t be forced.

And don’t even get me started on the method I like used when told by pregnant people that they’re expecting. THAT is for a different entry.

A loooooong entry.

Because, yes, I do have a method.

Does it make me a small, self-pitying person? Feel free to respond. In fact, please do–I think I’ll hold off on posting another question until tomorrow since question three is still getting comments.

This question starts with an assumption (based on our experience and the experiences of others we know). This assumption is that (1) you possibly agonized over whether or not to go to a baby-centered event (first birthday, bris, baby naming, baptism) and (2) you were not invited to a few of these aforementioned events. If these two cases didn’t apply to you, we’d love to hear from you as well.

Question Three: were people understanding if you didn’t attend a baby-centered event? Did they even know what you went through emotionally to attend events or did you keep that to yourself? At the same time, if you weren’t invited to baby-centered events (to spare your feelings), how did you feel?

We sat down to get to work and truly, the white elephant in the room that needed to be spoken before we could even talk about the topic of the evening (which became Question #3 for tomorrow morning). We had one response for question two. A question in which we solicited positive experiences.

Was it the caveat that we desired stories where the words and wisdom came from an outsider? I think anyone who has turned to RESOLVE or infertility chat rooms has gotten a virtual shoulder to lean on during the process. We’re well aware that our insanely nice RE story is not the norm. But to be honest, we were really grasping at straws to come up with a story that came from an outsider. I know that there were friends who were great listeners. But I can’t remember anything specific that was said or done that helped us through IF.

There is definitely a chasm–and the other side is not this evil land teaming with pamphlet-waving psychos screaming that you’re going to hell for doing IVF (let’s just imagine that those people live on an island in the middle of the river that divides the SQ and SPJ from the non-infertiles. Luckily, for the most part, you can drift right by that island and ignore it unless you know people living there). That land is actually teeming with people who are “well-intentioned” who “want to help.” But they manage to stick their foot in it because…at the end of the day…they just don’t understand.

The problem actually lies in the fact that they won’t admit that they don’t understand. There are many places in life where people admit that they can’t place themselves in another person’s shoes. But when it comes to trying-to-conceive, most people of child-bearing age believe they have a leg to stand on when doling out advice or words of sympathy. I had a coworker
(well-intentioned) who told me that she could imagine what I was going through because it took them three months to conceive and those two months that they didn’t were torture. She was trying to be sympathetic. She was trying to relate. But in the end, if you haven’t been a SQ or a SPJ, perhaps you can never truly get it.

Though we’re trying to change that fact with this book. Providing ourselves (and you) with something we can hand off to the people in our lives who need to understand what we’re experiencing. I’m not talking about every friend. Those people I’ll just direct to library copies. But the people who matter. Who need to know how they can help. Those people will get a nice copy of our book, expertly wrapped in shiny paper. With a ribbon. Because we’re nice like that over here on our side of the river. At least when it comes to the topic of fertility.