There is a fantastic
website called Mama Mia, which has articles on many different issues –
societal, health, fashion, relationships, etc.
One of the stories in
the past week was on a celebrity who has had a baby after 20 rounds of IVF and
at the age of 49. I wrote about this in a blog entry last year. She and
her husband were interviewed after the birth of their child and one of the
comments was “nothing good comes from giving up.”
When I read this I was
deeply upset and angry at this comment. I wrote the following on Facebook to
share my distress with my friends and family:
“Sorry - feeling hurt right now. I'm glad
that Mary Coustas has had a healthy baby after 20 rounds of IVF, but her saying
that "nothing good comes from giving up" is a bit of a kick in the
guts to those like me and Kirby who have had no success in having children -
even with IVF. I guess it's different if you have endless money...but we don't
have a spare $70000 to spend on trying and trying again...and, yes, we still
have lots of good in our lives, even though we "gave up". We have
each other, we have our nephews and nieces, we have our fur-kids...we have
lives that are different to what we thought we would have, but we still feel
blessed. But we still hurt sometimes, and we do have the endless wound of
"what if", and statements like this feel like someone is sticking a
needle into that wound and jabbing it around. Okay - rant over!”
My distress has diminished greatly, and I
have been amazed at how my comment has been received.
Many of my friends and family have shown
their support through liking my Facebook post, commenting that it is not fair
that we can’t have children, and even sending hugs over the internet if they
are live far away from me. I realize just how blessed I am that I can speak my
mind, from a place of pain, and receive comfort and love from my friends and
family.
I also posted this comment on Mama Mia, and
many of the responses to my comment, as well as many (though not all) of the
comments by other people, have made me realize that I am not alone. Sometimes I
feel like my thoughts are nasty – that I am terrible for thinking what I do,
and that I am even more horrible for writing down my thoughts and making them
public.
But, I’ve realized this week that what I
write, what I have written above, speaks to many people who are struggling with
the same thoughts and feelings.
Sometimes it seems like such a lonely
journey in which I feel like a villain for what I think and how I feel, but I
have realized I am far from alone. And I’ve realized that I am not a villain. I
am just human.
