Altered Life

When an experience changes your life..it's hard to put your emotions into words and convey just how much one word altered your life forever. With infertility we are forced to revisit our losses many times over. The reminders of what might have been are everywhere, every day.

 Society does nothing to acknowledge or accommodate the infertile.. no, it's up to us to accommodate the fertile world. We are forced to adapt, to try to fit in whether it's uncomfortable or not. It's almost like a dirty secret.

As I grow older, I learn that the revisiting of our loss doesn't just come in the form of baby showers,  pregnancy announcements or nursing moms, they also come in the stories of  first birthdays, dance recitals, soccer games, Homecoming, Prom and first dates....we think about all of these things and so wish we could be posting/sharing pics of our kids on Facebook or Instagram instead of being the onlookers...there are days when I wish I had a funny story to share about what my kids did over the weekend or an achievement that they might have accomplished....things that maybe you wouldn't think we think about..but we do....all the time.

When the embryologist in the Czech Republic told us our embryos were among the best looking she'd ever seen, I naturally assumed they'd be brilliant, amazing children. The dreams I had for those sweet, little perfect  embryos were the same dreams that parents have for the children they tuck into bed each night.

But in the "fertile" world, dreams and aspirations for children-to-be don't count. The logic being if you didn't give birth or nurse a child, your loss, like your child, is imaginary. We are simply told to put our big girl pants on, get over it, get a puppy, find a hobby, and just stop thinking about it so much....Oh how I wish it were that easy...