Today is my day off this week. I planned on work­ing on spe­cial project for most of the day (details still forth­com­ing in a future post), but first I had to head over to my par­ents’ house to pick up more stuff for said project.

I for­get what it’s like to be out dri­ving around 10:30-ish on a week day. Mostly because 10-​​hour work days are spent indoors work­ing furi­ously at my desk. So yes, I for­get about the old folk out dri­ving about 20-​​zillion miles below the speed limit. Or the mul­ti­tude of ser­vice cars and trucks that zoom around you as if there was no one else on the road.

Or in my case today, watch­ing at least three dif­fer­ent groups of women walk­ing around push­ing baby strollers.

Okay, so not all of them were push­ing strollers. Some of them were hold­ing their pre-​​preschool kids’ hands as they walked. And oth­ers, well … they were preg­nant. It was that image of push­ing the baby stroller and/​or being preg­nant that reminded me of what I don’t have. Or rather … not nec­es­sar­ily what I don’t have, more than what I haven’t been able to experience.

In this case, it’s not about being preg­nant or hav­ing a child. It’s more about the abil­ity to form friend­ships with other women who are at the same stage of life that you are. A tribe of women, as a good friend once men­tioned in her blog, that I can bond with and share.

I’ve always said that not hav­ing a sis­ter to grow up with has lim­ited me in my abil­ity to form female bonds. There’s some­thing to be said about hav­ing another female (about the same age) around to learn how to act and react to dif­fer­ent social sit­u­a­tions. Whether a woman is close to her sis­ter or not, this rela­tion­ship still teaches that woman about the female mind in ways that another “sister-​​less” woman can­not expe­ri­ence or understand.

I tend to think that this is one of my biggest flaws within my per­son­al­ity. This social inept­ness, when it comes to form­ing rela­tion­ships with other women. Up until Hubby & I started try­ing to start our fam­ily (and fail­ing mis­er­ably), I would say that I had a fair amount of female friends. Ones that I would call up and make plans to go shop­ping or out to eat just so we can hang. Being in a pro­fes­sion dom­i­nated by women also helped form these friend­ships. But the longer Hubby & I went with­out hav­ing chil­dren, the more iso­lated we became. And that’s because these female friends went on to start their fam­i­lies and began to relate more with other women and cou­ples that also had chil­dren. More and more, I began to have less in com­mon with these friends.

Oh, I know not to place all the blame (if any blame at all) on these friends, who are now more like acquain­tances. I know that friend­ship goes both ways. And I know that there are the times that I just didn’t make the effort to con­tinue the friend­ship. But I also know that there are the times that I just couldn’t be the friend that they needed … my own pain, in my opin­ion, would have caused more of a rift in that friendship.

There’s another part of me that I believe has lim­ited my abil­ity to form long and last­ing female friend­ships. And that is being a first-​​generation Asian/​Filipino-​​American. (And for clarity’s sake, this means that my brother and I were born here in the US, while my par­ents were both born in the Philip­pines.) Grow­ing up in my house­hold always meant you had one foot in the tra­di­tional Asian mind­set, while your other foot was learn­ing to sur­vive in the Amer­i­can cul­ture and way of life. The tra­di­tional Fil­ipino way meant that fam­ily and God (fol­lowed closely by edu­ca­tion) always came first and any­thing else, such as friend­ships and after-​​school activ­i­ties came in a dis­tant last. And although the “Amer­i­can” part of me always wanted to make tons of friends and be involved in lots of activ­i­ties, the “Asian” part of me held back con­sid­er­ably. Mainly because when I looked out­ward at myself and my fam­ily … I always knew that I was “different.”

So how about form­ing friend­ships with other first gen­er­a­tion Asian– or Filipino-​​American women? Believe me, I do have those few friend­ships. And quite hon­estly, they’re prob­a­bly the ones that have lasted the longest. I strongly believe that this is the case, mainly because we’ve stepped out­side of our “Filipino-​​American” selves and truly know one another, out­side of our per­sonal issues (read: Emily’s infer­til­ity). That is sim­ply because we’ve known each other for years. And we’ve bonded. And if they’re not fam­ily, then they are cer­tainly the clos­est thing I have to fam­ily (with­out, of course, all the dysfunction).

The rest of the Asian/​Filipino-​​Americans … def­i­nitely dif­fer­ent story. Espe­cially as it relates to infer­til­ity. Lori­beth recently shared an arti­cle from Newsweek on her blog. While this article’s pri­mary sub­ject is about infer­til­ity and the lack of treat­ment in devel­op­ing coun­tries , there is a small focus about the ostracism of infer­tile women in these coun­tries. Here’s a lit­tle taste of it:

The stigma that infer­tile women face can infil­trate every aspect of life. They may not even be invited to wed­dings or other impor­tant gath­er­ings. “Peo­ple see them as hav­ing a ‘bad eye’ that could make you infer­tile, too,” says Inhorn. “Infer­tile women are con­sid­ered inauspicious.”

Other peo­ple sim­ply “don’t want to have them around at joy­ous occa­sions,” says Frank van Balen, coau­thor (with Inhorn) of “Infer­til­ity Around the Globe” and a pro­fes­sor in the depart­ment of social and behav­ioral sci­ences at the Uni­ver­sity of Ams­ter­dam. Their rea­son­ing: “they could spoil it,” he says.

The thing is … this arti­cle doesn’t just per­tain to these women liv­ing in that par­tic­u­lar coun­try. This arti­cle reflects just about every­thing that I’ve, as an infer­tile, encoun­tered here. In the US. Amongst fam­ily and friends. Within my culture.

That arti­cle basi­cally summed up the rea­son why I started this blog in the first place. Because what I write here is every­thing I feel about myself and every­thing I could never say out loud.

This blog was meant to help me work my way through my infer­til­ity issues. It was a way for those fam­ily mem­bers and friends who would always ask us why we still didn’t have chil­dren know why with­out me or Hubby hav­ing to spill all the details out loud in which I would inevitably cry. It was a way for me to feel com­fort­able telling my story, with­out hav­ing the other per­son feel uncomfortable.

But appar­ently even by just writ­ing these things, I still make cer­tain peo­ple very uncom­fort­able and there­fore ostra­ciz­ing myself even moreso amongst my fam­ily and Filipino/​Asian friends. Cer­tain actions have made it quite evi­dent over these past few weeks. Cer­tain things have forced me to eval­u­ate exactly whom I want to be clos­est to me at my most dif­fi­cult times.

It’s because of those actions, I have debated about tak­ing down this blog. Or mak­ing it strictly password-​​protected for those who would be gen­uinely inter­ested in fol­low­ing my rants.

But then I thought … how many other Asian-​​American /​ Filipino-​​American women or cou­ples are out there that are going through sim­i­lar things that I’ve expe­ri­enced? How many are out there long­ing for some sort of bond with oth­ers going through some­thing just as painful? How many more of us are out there that feel ostra­cized and alone?

I know what it was like to meet all of my infer­til­ity friends through blog­ging. And even though we might not share the same cul­tural con­sid­er­a­tions … I do know that they are going through the same (or sim­i­lar) hurt and anger and pain that I’ve gone through while trav­el­ing on my IF journey.

And it’s because of you girls I’ve felt less lonely … less ostra­cized. I’ve felt as if I could go out to meet you for a “vir­tual walk” at around, oh … let’s say 9 pm … (when most of us are known to read/​blog the most) and bond.

So I decided to keep my blog “password-​​free” (except maybe for the occa­sional post). My hope is that this blog is still a way to com­mu­ni­cate with those peo­ple who want to con­tinue with me along my IF jour­ney. But it is also my hope that it be avail­able for those Asian– and Filipino-​​Americans (as well as those that are not … Asian, that is) trav­el­ing down the infer­til­ity road alone and look­ing for some company.