It started with the newly-pregnant, formerly infertile mother of twins. She was complaining, bitterly, about being pregnant. I was amazed and saddened and jealous and scared by her comments.
How does that happen, I thought? How can we go from joy to discontent so fast? If I ever get pregnant, I’ll never complain like her, I thought. I’ll savor it. I’ll know the difference between minor inconveniences and major issues. I won’t hit the fast-forward on my good fortune, zooming ahead to the next loss or lack.
Except that I had already done just that. I always do.
I spent a lot of my twenties and thirties recovering from childhood abuse and trauma. My relationships were infrequent and unhealthy. I felt cheated. As I got better, I figured I would “make it up” down the line, like when you leave late for work but drive eighty miles an hour to make up the time.
What I really believed, deep down, was that I was owed. I expected smooth sailing once I finally got “there,” when the husband of my dreams finally came along. And when he did, although I felt grateful for the husband I had longed for, I did what I had always done: focused instead on the lack of children. I was forty and time was ticking, but I was confident I would get pregnant.
After all, I thought: I deserve this.
It didn’t happen that way at all. The next thing I knew, I was at the bottom of a really deep hole. It seemed like “everyone else” who got married at 40 was miraculously pregnant. Even when I started in with IVFs and procedures that should have worked at any age, I wasn’t. I was bitter and jealous. Disbelieving. How could this be my life? After all I have been through?
We kept on with the IVFs, and then, on my forty-fourth birthday, I had a positive pregnancy test. The first of my whole life. Finally. But the pregnancy lasted only four days. We kept on with more IVFs, and then we got another positive. But the ultrasound revealed something neither of us expected: the pregnancy was ectopic. I camehome from the doctor and vomited in the kitchen sink: my first experience of the morning sickness that I had both longed for and dreaded.
It was about this time that I started to really notice the former infertiles and their discontents. One was pregnant from her second IVF, and would often complain about how intolerable the little disappointments and discomforts of pregnancy were turning out to be. But in reality, I think she was disappointed that being pregnant wasn’t erasing the pain of her own losses in the way that she expected.
These women were showing me myself.
No babies are going to solve my problems, or return to me what I feel I am “owed.” I also could see myself becoming like them, weaving the inevitable difficulties of raising a baby into the ongoing story of my own disappointments. I can hear the echo of the deep hole left by previous wounds in my life, and I don’t want to live the rest of my life at the bottom of it.
So I’m here to talk about healing, which for me is how we climb out now – not when the babies come, not when the adoption papers are filed, not when the weight comes off and the scars heal.