Tag: Sadness

An Advent Calendar for the Involuntary Childless

Infertility Honesty

My Christmas Conundrum

I remember vividly my first mother’s day which came about three months after our final failed treatment. My heart was so heavy breathing felt like bench pressing. The intensity of my pain deemed the question “Will I survive?” more than legitimate, my need for self protection fell just short of having to inhabit an actual cocoon.

But recently I found myself thinking, there’s an efficiency to mother’s day the winter holiday season is entirely lacking. Albeit one of the more hard hitting emotional blows that exists, it’s mostly one hit and you’re done. A bit of lead up, nauseating commercialism and some violating conversational recap here and there, but a seasonal noose it is not.

This winter holiday/Christmas thing however is a bonafide MARATHON. And the longer something goes on, the more deeply it begs the question “what to do?”, and in cases of being childless not by choice, “what NOT to do?” Our fourth holiday season out of our final failed treatment and I still have no real answers. Read more →

Old Life, New Life

Infertility Honesty

And the confounding abyss in between

Walking into my first social outing since a virus attacked my autonomic nervous system 5.5 months ago, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Though much less than a few months ago, my nervous system still tends to over assimilate sound and does not adjust smoothly to darkness. Not to mention I’m still dealing with a slowly waning level of dizziness and lightheadedness. And then there’s the fertile world whose presence is, of course, immeasurable. Read more →

Truth, Death and Mother’s Day

Infertility Honesty

“It’s a pronatalist world and we’re just living in it……”

I knew entering a nail salon the afternoon before Mother’s Day was not the brightest of moves.  It’s about as smart as adopting an indoor porcupine, actually.  I live in permanent mockery of my “poor little first world problem”, as I’ve been known to call it – yet my trips to the nail salon have turned fodder for many a blog post.  For the involuntarily childless infertility survivor, women + mindlessness is never good.  And so off I went, in part because my sweet cousin had just passed away, I was a little shell shocked and knew I’d be on a plane in a couple of days, and in part to treat myself. Read more →

Pain In Progress (Part 2)

Infertility Honesty

A flashback to this past June, I guess this should have been part 1. But that’s not how I roll.

This past late spring, a peculiar thing started to happen. My physical symptoms of the losses and trauma I had endured started to wane while the “typical” on goings of life became less of an abrasion to my nervous system.

Whispers of normalcy shone through as if they were new inventions. One day while food shopping, my first reaction to a baby crying on and on in Whole Foods was an internal affectionate “aw, someone’s having a fussy day”. It was only 20 minutes later I started to become mildly triggered, which was hardly noticeable in the face of the absence of the gut wrenching feelings of death and despair a baby’s cry used to incite. Read more →

The Social Unacceptability of…….

Infertility Honesty

…..THE “WHY DON’T YOU HAVE KIDS?” QUESTION

I’m behind.

I’ve got a long list of posts to complete, some half written, and some that haven’t even made it to keyboard. I haven’t finished my post on that forsaken day back in May which I’m sure no one wants to hear about anyway, and I have yet to write about my personal National Infertility Awareness Week adventures from the end of April. I’ve realized my Why Don’t You Just Adopt Post, smartly called for from all of us by Klara, is not really a can of worms for me but rather a whole friggen boatload, so yeah, that could get messy. Sure, I can do messy, but I need TIME. In my dreams I wanted to make a condensed, easy to read list but we all know THAT rarely happens around here. So between that and the Obama interview given by John La Pook a few months ago that I absolutely have to mock, it’s no wonder I feel a bit inundated. And things were about to clear up so that I could get on this until…..until I went to the nail salon today. Read more →

When Your Trauma and Loss Doesn’t Count Round 2 The End

Infertility Honesty

Why this infertility survivor is NOT off to see the wizard…..

Continued from Round 2 Part 1

Tired of disenfranchised grief yet?  That’s ok, me too.  We’re almost there….

After the group reading for the show Long Island Medium, things continued to head south after my unexpected mini reading with Theresa as I was waiting for my friend to be interviewed with the other interviewees.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I made eye contact and said to a man who had tragically lost his wife. And I truly meant it. Although he had to have heard my conversation with Theresa loud and clear, he, flanked by his three healthy children, looked at me, nodded, and said thank you. No “and I’m sorry for yours as well”, or “best wishes to you”, or anything. Nothing.

On the way out by the bar, I observed another woman connecting with this gentleman. Even amid this bastion of loss and pain I am still off to the side as usual, unable, through no fault of my own, to connect with anyone. Read more →

When Your Trauma and Loss Doesn’t Count, Round 2 Part 1

Infertility Honesty

Why this infertility survivor is NOT off to see the wizard…………

 

What? You thought I was done?

Alas. I’m an obsessive person who had a long disenfranchised grief – infused week and half. These days in my world that seems to equal a lot of words.

But buck up little campers, there are only a few days of my random escapade through disenfranchised grief central left to unfold (until I leave the house again anyway)…….

***Fellow children of the eighties, name the movie containing the illustrious quote “Buck up, little camper.”***

And now for another good thing that came out of the eighties. As I fumbled through my recent experiences, I found myself thinking, “I’m so glad this is like, a THING. What if there was even nothing to look up? I’m really grateful someone put a name to this demon.” Disenfranchised grief was first identified by Dr. Kenneth Doka in 1989, thank goodness, and he has been writing about it ever since. “I define disenfranchised grief as grief that results when a person experiences a significant loss and the resultant grief is not openly acknowledged, socially validated, or publicly mourned. In short, although the individual is experiencing a grief reaction, there is no social recognition that person has a right to grieve or a claim for social sympathy or support” (PsycINFO Database record © 2014 APA, all rights reserved). I’m looking forward to reading his second anthology on the subject, “Disenfranchised Grief: New Directions, Challenges, and Strategies for Practice”. Read more →

Nail Salons Proven to be the Pit of Hell For Infertiles

Infertility Honesty

“Hey Honey, look……it says here that getting your nails done is one way to ease the stress of infertility! That’s what the pamphlet from the fertility clinic says, so it MUST be TRUE!”

Years ago this notion held exciting prospects. Now an infertility survivor and IVF veteran, Sarah Chamberlin, resident of Long Island, NY, is well aware of all of the “expert” tips for surviving one of the greatest life crisis’ a person could be stuck with.

It is just days before their first Christmas grieving the loss of their children as Chamberlin slogs to the nail salon to get her nails done for her husband’s staff party. Now all the wiser from five IUI’s, one surgery, and five rounds of IVF, she claims to take a “more realistic view” of things. “Yeah, this’ll help, this’ll help like taking a nap helps one recover from a nuclear explosion.” Read more →

HEALING?

Infertility Honesty

In search of the anatomy of an emotional wound

In a strange way I’d rather be here. Done with fertility treatments that is. I’m no longer rendered a shadow of myself by slews of mentally and emotionally debilitating meds. I’m no longer the future’s bitch, living in an impotent present where all of my actions and energies are given to something over which I have no control, something that “might” happen in the future. I’m no longer dissolving in the barren sea of ART, no longer treading water in the finite shades of gray and maybe/maybe nots that are human reproduction, amidst the attempt of the ego inflated medical profession and delusional patients desperately trying to make it the black and white subject matter that it isn’t.

When pursuing assisted reproductive technology, life for the most part takes place behind the gates. A significant part of my nature happens to be that I don’t like gates. Like a hungry writhing race horse I felt myself, toward the end of baby making, twitching and thrashing around, ready to lurch at any chance of a way out. It wasn’t only that I couldn’t stand it, it was also that I was going after something that in my heart of hearts I knew was never going to work. Read more →