Infertility

Some friends were really lovely about it and really did try to help and would kind of talk to me about it and things. And other people were just absolutely hopeless. And I think you have to accept that people don’t really understand what you are going through, and people do say sometimes things that seem to you so crass and awful. But it’s just that they don’t understand. And they don’t mean to be unhelpful, or they’re not trying to be horrid. But I think sometimes it does really feel as if people are just trying to get at you. You know, people would say, I remember someone saying to me after our first IVF attempt didn’t work something about, “Oh, well, you could always adopt.” And I thought, “But, you know, this is only our first IVF attempt. Why are you saying this to me now?” And then other people would sort of assume that because you were having treatment it would inevitably work. And I remember saying, someone saying to me when we’d had our first lot of embryos put back something like, “Oh, well, you are pregnant really, aren’t you? Because the embryos are inside you now.” And, and to me that was just, I don’t know, it was just too unbearable to even think about. I thought it was a really upsetting thing to have said to me. But I know that the person who said it was actually trying to be really positive about it and, you know, upbeat and make me feel better. But I think it’s like anything, you know. People can’t necessarily understand unless they’ve actually been there themselves.

I found it quite difficult to expect support from my Mum for example. And Dads are Dads and my Dad was sort of in the background and sort of, I’m sure he was supportive, but he wasn’t really included in any conversations about it or anything. Like his role was to be a background person. But for my Mum there’s always that issue of she’s someone who’s wanting to be a Grandma who can’t be a Grandma, so like it’s difficult for her too. Which doesn’t mean that she can’t be supportive. But I was always aware, particularly like when I was pregnant, and it was just for a few weeks, my Mum would knit bootees and jackets and all sorts of things. So I knew how much, how important it was to her so you sort of, you want to protect your loved ones from sort of saying, you know she’d get the phone calls oh it didn’t work again and but actually I didn’t want to discuss it loads with her, because I knew that it was quite painful to her too. And probably the person I did discuss with most in the family would be my sister-in-law. And she’s like a nurse, and been a midwife so somehow it was a different sort, and I suppose she wasn’t quite, you know, she would have loved [husband] to be producing babies, but somehow it wasn’t quite as emotionally close to her as it was discussing it with someone like my Mum so you have to think about that sort of thing when you’re looking for support from your… I had to.

But it was just, you know, as soon as I found I started trying, everybody was pregnant. The whole world and his husband, her husband were pregnant. All the secretaries in the office, you know especially the nineteen years old seem to be at the drop of the hat. And you would have to go “ooh lovely.” And all your friends and that I found… that is kind of … I was horrifically jealous, puce with jealousy. Eaten up inside, bitter, twisted, angry, couldn’t look at a man with a beer belly without getting upset and basically quite hysterical about the whole thing. And I laugh now but it was extremely painful because I just felt so helpless and powerless and yet powerless is not fun and I found the worse thing, the reason we didn’t tell many people, was that the people you do tell, tend to pity you and I find being pitied actually the most disempowering thing of all. So there is a physical kind of stuff that you are going through which is a bore and a drain and you know, having to rush out of work and get a scan and what have you. But it was, for me, it was more the emotional and sociological impact of it that made me suffer the most.