When The Eye Can’t See, The Heart Can Still Hold

Today I want to do something that may be strange to some of you, I want to talk about infertility. Infertility and mental health may not appear to be related at first, but I can promise you they are. For any woman or man that has ever been told you are not able to have children, you will immediately understand the connection. And for those of you who have not been told you are infertile, have not had to see the look in your doctor’s eyes as they tell you this life-altering news, have not had to tell your significant other that you will never be able to have a traditional family, stick with me and the connection will become clear.

This week is National Infertility Awareness Week, and infertility actually affects one in eight couples in America. With that number being so high you wouldn’t think we would need an awareness week, but it can be a tricky subject to talk about. Whether it is the woman, man, or both who are infertile, it changes the relationship you have with your significant other, and it changes you. I know it changed me when I was told I could not have children.

I was diagnosed with a genetic condition when I was in the 6th grade. At that time I was told many things that I did not understand (I was only 11 years old after all) but the one thing that I did understand, the one thing that stuck with me more than any other, was that I would not be able to have children. Even at 11 years old I knew what that meant. Growing up I was given many dolls to play with, always referred to as my ‘babies’ by adults. Adults would smile when they saw me cradling a doll, making comments like “oh how cute, she’ll make such a great mother one day.”  These comments ingrained in me a sense of purpose. If I am told for as long as I can remember that I will be a great mother, that must be what I was meant to do in my life. Our parents don’t mean any harm when they gift their female children dolls and EZ bake ovens and their male children trucks and toy toolboxes, but they do. This is part of our culture whether we recognize it or not. Even if parents are very conscious of the roles they demonstrate for their children, and the toys they gift, children still learn traditional gender roles from school, aunts, uncles, grandparents, friends, and their friends families. And because of these inherent lessons I had been unintentionally taught, at 11 years old I understood, that having children was expected of me as a female. So when I was told that I could not have children I did not know how to respond, and I did not know how society would view me, the childless woman. When my mom and I received the news, she cried, and I cried, because we did not know what else to do.

Luckily though, nobody in today’s modern society would expect an 11 year-old to have a child of their own. So I was able to go a few years without having to discuss the issue with anybody outside of my immediate family, who already knew. If we had been living in medieval Europe though, I would probably have been married at 11, and expected to produce a child within a year. Then once it was discovered that I could not have a child I would probably be burned at the stake as a witch. However, luckily for me, we do not live in medieval Europe, and I was able to safely make it through adolescence without a single threat of childhood marriage or being burned for my infertility.

Once I was an adult, I was able to better understand what infertility meant, and come to terms with it in my own way. I became comfortable with the thought of adoption, and explored the possibility of egg donation and other paths to motherhood. I framed it in such a way as to almost be grateful for my infertility. I bought pregnancy tests for my friends who had pregnancy scares, and were afraid they would become mothers before they were ready, and I secretly thought how glad I was I would never have to be in that position. I was able to use the infertility as an excuse of sorts to delay thinking about whether I wanted children or not. Every time I would be asked seriously if I wanted kids I didn’t have to think about the answer. My body had made my answer up for me. I said something like “Oh I can’t have my own kids naturally so I would think about adoption or doing IVF (fertility treatments) down the line but that would be a conversation I would have with my future significant other so that’s not something I’m focused on now.” I thought I was being so open-minded and proud of how I viewed all the available options. But what I was really doing was delaying a decision and putting it off on some unknown spouse I may or may not have in the undetermined future. After all, this was the 21st century. Why should women have to make all the decisions about family matters anyway? Shouldn’t it be a joint decision? It sounded just feminist enough to hide the fact that it wasn’t really feminist, and it was a cop-out. Try telling that to my 18 year-old self though, and she would not have listened.

One of the hardest parts about not being able to have children is trying to figure out when to bring up the topic to a romantic partner. This is something I failed miserably at. When do you bring it up? Will you scare him off if you bring it up too early? Would he be mad at me for waiting too long? Do I even bring it up at all? What if he never wants to see me again? What if he only wants to see me again because he knows he doesn’t have to worry about getting me pregnant? I had all these thoughts and then some constantly running through my head. I began using this as almost a screening tool for boyfriends. Were they compassionate when I talked to them about the issue? Were they sad? Disappointed? Were they simply just happy they didn’t have to ‘wear a rubber?’ (I didn’t know much and still don’t but I do know this is a wrong answer). I tried framing the conversation in many different ways, at many different points in a relationship, and again thought I was so smart and evolved because my significant other and I could have such a serious conversation. What I failed to realize at the time was that using a conversation like this just to test a person’s response to it was a very young and naive response. This conversation can be a great way to see if you and your future significant other view the issue similarly or not, and it can be a way to get yourself hurt if you aren’t careful about how you approach the topic. I didn’t know any of that at 18 though.

I have to give credit where credit is due at this point in the story, and thank a past boyfriend of mine who had more conversations with me on this issue than any other person. For his sake I’ll refer to him here only as D. D and I were in love, and wanted to build a life together. With that came all the major conversations you have with a significant other. We had all those conversations and then some, from the light hearted ones debating which Game of Thrones character we would bring back from the dead, to the serious ones about children. The fictional future significant other who would make my decision for me was no longer quite so fictional. He was real, and very clear about what he wanted in his future, and his future included kids. This made me think seriously for the first time about the answers to my own questions. All the time I had been asking boyfriends about their views on kids and infertility, I had forgotten to stop and consider my own true feelings. Maybe this speaks to a larger problem that nobody thought to return the question to me, that everybody just assumed I would want to have kids in the future, that it was okay for me to put off this large decision because I was waiting for a significant other. But no matter the case, or how right or wrong, it took D and his bright view of his future to make me truly look at mine. When it came down to it, I realized that since I had been focusing on so many other areas of my life, I realized just how comfortable I was not having children of my own, or even at all.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be a mother, I still do. I simply realized that I was able to find satisfaction in other areas of my life. I would absolutely love to adopt, but only when I am ready. I would want to have a stable career and home life, and the ability to support a child financially. The adoption process in America is a large and daunting process. I wanted to hold off on adoption until I had a significant other to share the joys of raising a child with, and also to have somebody to help me fill out the massive amounts of paperwork involved. I did not want to rush into it just to please the old women at the supermarket who would come up to me and D and tell us what cute babies we would have, and not just to give my grandmother the great-grandbaby she would love to have.

Love you grandma, but if I have to be asked about children one more time at thanksgiving I’m leaving you with all the leftovers this year!!!… okay who am I kidding… I always take home thanksgiving leftovers.

For me though, I was able to make the decision to adopt, even though I wanted biological children, because I knew the health risks that came with a pregnancy for me. Besides avoiding stretch marks, cellulite, and weird changes to my boobs, the risks a pregnancy would bring would not be worth it for me. D knew this, and he understood, and now all that was left was talking to his family.

All of a sudden my personal health was somehow an acceptable topic of conversation. Distant relatives of distant relatives of D’s family and mine would sit across the dinner table and tell me I was ‘not a real woman,’ whatever that even meant. Grandmothers meaning no harm other than a simple lack of understanding and the history of a different generation would tell me how it was ‘such a pity I would never have a family.’ Yet I was still capable of marrying. I was still capable of adopting. And I was still capable of creating any family I chose to create. If I voiced these opinions however, they fell on deaf ears. I was one of those ‘modern women’ who prioritized career over family, as if that made me a villain somehow, as if I had a choice in the matter. Once I started discussing my desire to eventually adopt, the response was usually something like “oh but that’s not the same” or “would you be concerned the baby wouldn’t look like you?”

One time D and I went to dinner with a friend of mine who had adopted a baby. She and her husband were caucasian, but she had adopted a hispanic child. There was a group of women at the table next to us, and at one point they were loud enough that I could hear them talking, and I heard one woman say “There is no way that baby is light enough to belong to them, they must not be that child’s real parents.” This comment broke my heart, and is exactly why women fear the stigma that comes with adoption.

Even now when I fill out an official form, I notice the signature line. When you fill out a form, especially for minors, the signature line reads “representative, parent, or legal guardian.” Knowing that I would eventually be a ‘legal guardian’ instead of a parent, an ‘other’ less desirable class, is a small distinction, but a powerful one.

Eventually I had had enough. My personal health was mine and mine alone. Doctors could not ask me to put my health at risk just because they had this notion that all females carry a desire to be mothers. When I eventually adopt I will be every bit a mother to that child as if it was my own child, because it WILL BE my own child. I refused to let anybody else have input on this decision. The only exception to this was D. We were trying to build a life together, and because of that I wanted to have his input. He never pressured me, he never asked me to sacrifice myself for our future family, and always told me the decision was mine. But I saw the way his face lit up when he was around kids. I heard the way he talked about them. I saw the way he interacted with them, played with them, and laughed with them. Even though he was as considerate as I could have possibly asked for on the subject, knowing that I would never be able to give him a child of his own broke my heart.

In the end however, my body had already made the decision for me, no matter how I felt about it. I had no healthy way to carry a child of my own, and I had to come to terms with that. D understood, and while we eventually broke off our relationship for many other reasons I always wondered how much of a factor this was in that decision. Infertility is a very sensitive topic to bring up to anybody. But ultimately it affects the couple deciding to start a family or not the most. Whether it’s the girl or the guy that are infertile, whether it’s genetic or self-induced by somebody getting a vasectomy or their tubes tied, the decision is one that belongs to them and them alone.

I do think it is harder to be a female who is infertile than it is a male. I have my own experience which by nature can only be one sided, so I cannot claim to speak from the male perspective. However I think we would be naive to have a conversation about infertility if we do not also have a conversation about gender roles and the social implications that come with having children or not. Child-bearing will be a different experience based on your gender but it does not have to affect your gender identity. Not being able to have children does not make you less of a man or less of a woman. Choosing to become infertile does not mean you are putting your career before your family. It simply means your family will be different than other families. Women or men who are unable to have children are not to be pitied for their lack of being able to ‘provide a family’. Women who chose to adopt should not be considered any less of a mother than women who bear a child naturally.

If somebody talks to you about this issue, consider the amount of trust they are placing in you by telling you about this in the first place. Nobody has a right to know this information about a person. The only exception may be a significant other you are sharing a life with, and even in that case it depends on how you have defined that relationship. Infertility is much more common than you think it is, and talking about it from a place of openness with a non-judgemental attitude is vital. No matter how you talk about it, it is important to remove infertility from gender identity. Just because I cannot bear a child does not make me less of a woman. If you take the lead of the person discussing their health, and respect their wishes of how open they want to be with this topic, than you will be fine. I only wish it had been D and I discussing this issue instead of him, his aunt, the lady at the supermarket, his great aunt’s cousin, and his third uncle on this grandfather’s side twice removed (Exaggerating slightly, but still, you get the point).

I hope this slightly long post (I’m sorry! You can burn me at the stake later!) has been helpful. I hope it provided some insight into what somebody with infertility is going through. Thank you for taking the time to read and learn.