Reply to How have you maintained close friendships with friends struggling with infertility/loss?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It is also helpful to recognize that infertility is, in many ways, like any other serious illness.  The most noticeable, public effect of the disease is not having a child.  But, there are many other serious consequences to any prolonged medical struggle.  Besides the obvious effects of continually grieving losses and feeling terrible from the medications, I had to turn down jobs and promotions over the six years that I went through infertility because I had to go to the doctor's office three times a week for months at a time.  In my profession, that disqualified me for many jobs. This illness made me fall behind my goals at work and feel less professionally successful.  Also, it was expensive and meant that my husband and I put off other things in our lives, like home repairs and savings goals. It also put us out of sync with our peers and our families when friends and siblings moved on to the next phase of their lives and we felt stuck in a rut.  One of the most irritating, if small, consequences is that people tend to treat childless people like they are whatever age that person was when they had their first kid.  So, you are 36 but people treat you like you're 25 in all areas of your life, even areas that have nothing to do with kids.

There seems to be small contingent of people on DCUM (and in real life) who seem to think that people struggling with this illness don't have a right to feel bad about their struggle. I don't get this thinking.  It is like saying that you can't feel bad about having cancer unless you actually die of cancer.  Of course you can.  You can go through a long struggle with cancer and come out the other side in full remission and still be changed by the process of going through cancer treatment.  The same is true of infertility. You can make it through to the other side and have a baby, but you are still marked by the journey.  I am definitely not the same person I was before this happened.  In some ways I am worse off, have a bit of scar tissue that makes it hard for me to quite the optimist that I once was.  But, in some ways I am a better person.  I am more compassionate that I was, more able to give people the benefit of the doubt when I don't know their backstory, much more careful to try to include people on the margins of my social life because I know what it is like to be left out.  I think that anyone who has been through a big trauma/illness gets a bit more perspective.

I don't think I lost any friends because of infertility, but I have always been careful in picking friends and only have a few very good ones. I was always immensely happy for them when they had children because I would never want anyone else to go through what we went through.  But, that doesn't mean that I wanted to hang out with them at their mommy and me group. I did bow out of child-centered activities sometimes.  Good friends are always understanding of this need for separation.   [/quote]
That is a wonderful summation of infertilty. Thank you.[/quote]

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