Tag: Infertility

Wanted: Child-​​Free Infertility Support

I wasn’t plan­ning on post­ing any­thing on my blog today; didn’t have any­thing sched­uled to post. In fact, I had other plans to work on another writ­ing project I’ve been work­ing on.

But then I saw some­thing on my Face­book news­feed in response to a RESOLVE post­ing. And, well I just had the need to address it on my lit­tle cor­ner of the world.

You see, I sub­scribe to RESOLVE’s fan page so that I can get the lat­est infer­til­ity news that they post on Face­book. It’s been use­ful in remind­ing me to vote for my favorite infer­til­ity book and my favorite “What If” post from NIAW 2010. And it tends to post arti­cles from their web­site about var­i­ous top­ics deal­ing with infertility.

Since I’ve sub­scribed to RESOLVE’s page, I had seen mul­ti­ple arti­cles in regards to treat­ment options for Infer­til­ity rang­ing from IUI to IVF; donor eggs/​sperm, sur­ro­gacy. But never had I seen any­thing about child-​​free liv­ing … until today.

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You *bet* I “like” this!!

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Which of course, I imme­di­ately “liked.”

Of course, that was swiftly fol­lowed by the first commenter.

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Name erased to “pro­tect the un-​​informed” …

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<sigh>

Some­times peo­ple don’t get it. And what’s sad is that some­times it’s peo­ple within our own Infer­til­ity Community.

As I’ve men­tioned before, there are rea­sons why child-​​free liv­ing is right for Hubby & me.  We have delib­er­ately and care­fully thought through our other options, includ­ing adoption.

It’s so easy for every­one to say “just adopt” when there are thou­sands of hur­dles (both tiny and large) to over­come. It’s finan­cial. It’s emo­tional. It’s stressful.

I can tell you for myself that I could eas­ily open my heart to a child; eas­ily let a child into my life. But know­ing the heartache I’ve expe­ri­enced from infer­til­ity, I just don’t know how much more my mind and body … and quite frankly, my spirit can han­dle. It’s already been shat­tered to pieces and glued back together many times over.

It’s a mat­ter of how many more times do I want to put my hand in a pot of boil­ing water and not know if my hand will be able to grasp onto some­thing … or if I’ll come up empty-​​handed and burned yet once again.

As if the infer­til­ity diag­no­sis isn’t dif­fi­cult enough, we’re faced with oth­ers who con­stantly feel as if hav­ing chil­dren by “what­ever means nec­es­sary” is more impor­tant than sim­ply mov­ing past some­thing that in my heart, I’ve already grieved. It’s like pulling a band-​​aid off when the wound is just about healed; mak­ing it seem to the infer­tile cou­ple … that has invested a lot of time and energy (not to men­tion money) we spent on hav­ing chil­dren … was all for naught.

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Even Ellie & Carl from “UP” decided to live Child-​​Free after Infertility …

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I just find it frus­trat­ing that even amongst our own Infer­til­ity com­mu­nity that there’s a lack of sup­port for those cou­ples try­ing to decide if a Child-​​free life is the right choice for them. It’s as if it’s taboo to speak of mov­ing on with your life sans-​​children.

Even in the RESOLVE Infer­til­ity Sup­port Com­mu­nity boards, there are only two com­mu­ni­ties of which you can choose. One is “Find­ing a Res­o­lu­tion for Infer­til­ity” and the other is “Liv­ing After an Infer­til­ity Resolution.”

Now when I signed up, I log­i­cally chose the lat­ter group. After all, I had found my res­o­lu­tion to live child-​​free and I wanted to find oth­ers that came to that deci­sion as well. Except, well … except when I started to see the mes­sage boards, I didn’t spot one sin­gle dis­cus­sion about child-​​free liv­ing after Infertility.

So, okay … then I went to the “Find­ing a Res­o­lu­tion” com­mu­nity; think­ing maybe there might be some dis­cus­sion about mak­ing the deci­sion to live child-​​free. Nope … struck out there, too.

What frus­trates me is that I’ve already felt “dif­fer­ent” than the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion by not being able to con­ceive a child; be a woman in all sense of the world … be able to pro­cre­ate.** Now that Hubby & I have cho­sen a less tra­di­tional path … it seems as if the pool of cou­ples out there, that are will­ing to talk or write about this cho­sen path is much, much smaller. And maybe they are out there in droves, but infer­til­ity is no longer the pri­mary focus of their lives.

Maybe I’ll be there at some stage of my life, but right now I’m not. And right now it would be really great to find some other sup­port out there to get through those moments. You know … the ones where I begin to ques­tion that deci­sion again? The times where I feel pres­sured by oth­ers to “keep on try­ing” or “just adopt”?

Yeah, it’d be really good to have that sup­port. In droves. Just like the rest of the gen­eral Infer­til­ity Com­mu­nity. The same com­mu­nity that helped me feel less iso­lated when I oth­er­wise felt alone.

And hey … if you stum­bled onto this post and are liv­ing Child-​​Free After Infer­til­ity and find your­self want­ing addi­tional sup­port  out there*** … well, con­sider this blog or my Face­book page a place where you can hang your hat.

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** And yes, I’m aware that being a woman is not lim­ited to whether or not I can bear chil­dren. I’m just using this state­ment to elicit an example.

*** Because there are resources out there; like Pam’s Silent Soror­ity site and, in par­tic­u­lar her blog, A Fresh Start.

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Related Links:

RESOLVE’s Liv­ing Child­free Arti­cle

RESOLVE’s Infer­til­ity Sup­port Community

Emily’s post about mak­ing the deci­sion to live Child-​​free

Emily’s Thoughts on Adoption

Emily’s Rea­sons for Liv­ing Child-​​Free After Infertility

Emily’s List of Child-​​Free After Infer­til­ity Bloggers

Emily’s Face­book Page

2">Infertility Bets On Hold, Part 2

(If you missed Part 1, click here … )

While I’ve pretty much begun to resolve those par­tic­u­lar grief issues, there’s still that lack of strength that I feel I need in order to go through the entire adop­tion process.  Because it takes some­one who really has enough strength to climb over the prover­bial brick wall get­ting in the way of hav­ing a child. And specif­i­cally, I’m talk­ing about all the rules and reg­u­la­tions and inves­ti­ga­tions into your pri­vate lives just to raise a child that is not bio­log­i­cally your own. Quite frankly, I know that I don’t have what it takes to go through that.

Why do I say that? (And Kelly … hope­fully, this will help answer the ques­tion you posed to me at one time … ) Well first of all, I just know what I’m capa­ble of han­dling emo­tion­ally, and I know that I wouldn’t be able to sur­vive any fur­ther dis­ap­point­ment or heartache. Or as my new favorite quote from Pam says:

It got to the point where the poten­tial for more heart­break was more over­whelm­ing than the glim­mer of very small hope.

The sec­ond rea­son I feel as if I have lit­tle strength is because I have lit­tle con­fi­dence that things will come rel­a­tively straight­for­ward and sim­ple to us.

Not that I expect adop­tion to be an easy path. If we did decide to adopt, I have this very strong sus­pi­cion that we’d have so many more walls to climb. Give me a chance to explain … and I’d absolutely love to hear what oth­ers have to say to con­tribute to this discussion.

Let’s start off with Domes­tic Adoption:

  • Hubby & I both Asian Amer­i­can; Fil­ipino Amer­i­can, to be specific.
  • How often do you sup­pose any Poten­tial Birth Moms (PBM) would look at our dossier and — just by looks alone — think that we’d make great par­ents when their child will (most likely) not look at all sim­i­lar to the adop­tive cou­ple that they’d hope to raise their child?
  • Or that the PBM might worry that their child would face more bar­ri­ers hav­ing Asian Amer­i­can parents?
  • How often are Asian Amer­i­can babies given up for adop­tion; espe­cially if the PBM is also Asian or Asian Amer­i­can? Cul­ture dic­tates that fam­ily is impor­tant. If the child is not wanted in the imme­di­ate fam­ily; chances are that there is another fam­ily mem­ber (aunt, cousin, third uncle twice removed) that is will­ing to raise the child. Unfor­tu­nately, that’s a sit­u­a­tion that’s likely never going to hap­pen to us.

Mov­ing onto Inter­na­tional Adoption:

  • There are stricter laws and reg­u­la­tions from var­i­ous coun­tries in effect.
  • Some spe­cific coun­tries, like Rus­sia and Guatemala, have either sus­pended or have placed holds on any adop­tions to the US.
  • Wait time. Even for Fil­ipino adop­tions there are cer­tain stip­u­la­tions on how and when a child can be adopted; when the child can come back to the US with the adopted par­ents. And quite frankly, I don’t think I can afford the three-​​year wait in order to adopt a child from my native country.

And finally other, all-​​encompassing barriers:

  • Age: Let’s face it. Hubby & I are cur­rently push­ing 40. And yes, I know that there are cou­ples out there that are rais­ing babies that are much older than us. But there was a rea­son why Hubby & I started try­ing to con­ceive within a year of mar­riage: I had always seen me as a younger mother; one that wanted to fin­ish hav­ing babies before the age of 30. There was a spe­cific rea­son behind that: my mother and I are exactly 3o years apart in age (sorry Mom!). Grow­ing up (par­tic­u­larly in high school), not only did I deal with a cul­tural bar­rier, but I also dealt with a huge gen­er­a­tional gap. Both my par­ents were pre–baby boomer, while I was most def­i­nitely a Gen-​​Xer. Even though after I turned 30, I knew that this was some­thing beyond my con­trol, adopt­ing now — espe­cially as the rules and regs of adop­tion have got­ten more strict — well, it no longer seems pru­dent for both Hubby & my sake.
  • Energy: Along with age, this is the sec­ond biggest con­cern that I have. And, if I was hon­est with myself, the flim­si­est bar­rier of all. Because, really this has to do with energy and sta­mina. It’s one thing to raise a child with the thought in mind that you’ll be young enough to (some­what) keep up with their needs. It’s quite another thing know­ing that I can no longer wake myself up in the morn­ing with­out hit­ting the snooze but­ton a dozen times. Would I be able to care for another life if I can barely care for my own? Like I said, flimsy … but I’m just being honest.

I don’t bring up these points to be neg­a­tive in any way, shape or form. I’m sim­ply stat­ing facts that appear to be the most obvi­ous bar­ri­ers for our indi­vid­ual case when it comes to adopt­ing a child. And that’s assum­ing that we would ever go down that route. And, as I said above, I’d love to hear your thoughts on what I per­ceive as barriers.

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As it is, I feel that we’ve already played our game of Infer­til­ity Roulette. We’ve already placed all the bets we wanted to at this time in our lives. And we lost that bet. With adop­tion (or h*ll, even if we ever decided to go through IVF again), I want some­thing I can be sure of … some­thing I can count on.

I hes­i­tate using the word “guar­an­tee” … since noth­ing in life is ever guar­an­teed, but after more than ten years of fight­ing the odds and now fac­ing even greater odds against us (age, finances, etc), Hubby & I opted to get out of the bet­ting pool.

And this is why, at least in my eyes, it’s never as sim­ple to “just adopt.” It’s never easy to go through another round of IVF.

This is why Hubby & I have decided to “cut our loss” … or in this case, “cut the strings” … and live child-​​free after infertility.

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Related Links:

Cut­ting The Strings

Infer­til­ity Bets On Hold, Part 1

Thoughts on Adoption

Infor­ma­tion on Fil­ipino Adoptions

Wiki Info on the Pre-​​Baby Boom Generation

Wiki Info on Gen­er­a­tion X

1">Infertility Bets On Hold, Part 1

(I guess I need to start off by say­ing, no … things have def­i­nitely not changed in my bar­ren world. And don’t let the title of this post fool you. Appar­ently I may have “freaked” a cou­ple peo­ple out by both the title and the pic­ture below … LOL!)

I’m not a bet­ting per­son. Which, when you think of the many trips Hubby & I have taken to Vegas, is quite humor­ous. All those casi­nos, and the most we played were slots.

I mean, I’ve played poker and black­jack in my col­lege years; but seri­ously, all bets were based on pen­nies. Or cig­a­rettes, depend­ing on who you were play­ing with (<cough> Tim <cough>). But to place actual money that’s more than a dol­lar (okay, maybe $2 max for a slot machine)? Can’t see myself spend­ing that kind of money.

My odds with these tests were never good

Which, given the odds that Hubby & I were given when we did our one cycle of IVF, makes it ironic. We were given a 51% chance that we’d be suc­cess­ful in our pur­suit to become preg­nant. We knew the odds were only 1% more on our favor. We had hoped to win this bet — a bet in which we put a boat­load of money into the pot — and we lost. And I was devastated.

That’s not to say that I regret ever hav­ing done our one cycle of IVF. Because even back then I knew that this was some­thing Hubby & I had to try in order to feel as if we tried every­thing in our quest to repro­duce. I’m just sim­ply say­ing that the results of that bet, that one IVF cycle, was enough for me to know that I could never place another bet on another IVF cycle ever again.

So yes … the next log­i­cal step would be to go for adop­tion, right?

Except adop­tion isn’t a sim­ple thing to just “think about.” First, there’s the process of griev­ing the fact that I can’t have a baby. That alone is noth­ing sim­ple. That process involves never being able to expe­ri­ence preg­nancy. In my case, it involved never being able to see two pink lines in a preg­nancy test.  And it involves feel­ing as if my body’s failed, not only me and my Hubby (espe­cially my hus­band), but our par­ents and our sib­lings. And our sib­lings chil­dren, too.

Then there’s the other part that I needed to grieve; which is out­lined in more detail in this recent post. It’s griev­ing the fact that we will never be able to have our own bio­log­i­cal baby.  A child that we could pass our genes to. A child to pass the Fil­ipino tra­di­tions we were taught grow­ing up; and find­ing a way to blend both our Amer­i­can and Fil­ipino sides together. A child to carry on my Hubby’s last name.

And while I’ve pretty much begun to resolve those grief issues, there’s still that lack of strength that I feel I need in order to go through the entire adop­tion process.  Because it takes some­one who really has enough strength to climb over the prover­bial brick wall get­ting in the way of hav­ing a child. And specif­i­cally, I’m talk­ing about all the rules and reg­u­la­tions and inves­ti­ga­tions into your pri­vate lives just to raise a child that is not bio­log­i­cally your own. Quite frankly, I know that I don’t have what it takes to go through that.

(Part Two con­tin­ues tomor­row … )

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Related Links:

Thoughts on Adoption

Baby Pic­ture

ADdressing Infertility

Recently, the New York Times wrote an arti­cle about a new real­ity series that TLC began air­ing strictly on their web­site. “A Con­cep­tion Story,” a Web-​​only show fol­lows the lives of 6 women as they try to con­ceive over the next seven months. Which, see­ing that this is the same net­work that airs “A Wed­ding Story” and “A Baby Story,” makes per­fect sense.

Meet Kris­ten, one of the six women in “A Con­cep­tion Story”

I mean really … what bet­ter way to bridge the “gap” between the Wed­ding Plan­ning and the arrival of a new­born baby by film­ing a show about Fam­ily Planning?

No. Really … I’m not being sar­cas­tic. Even though at first I was hes­i­tant to watch the show, I must admit that curios­ity got the best of me. While it’s cur­rently just wrapped up it’s sec­ond month of video entries, I’m actu­ally invested in watch­ing these six women’s stories.

For those that were as skep­ti­cal (or per­haps jaded?) about watch­ing ecsta­tic BFP (“big fat pos­i­tive” … as in a pos­i­tive preg­nancy test) announce­ments via the web, I’ll spare you the heartache to let you know, as of today, there has been only one per­son who saw the two pink lines thus far. And it’s a cou­ple that had been been try­ing to con­ceive for close to three years.

Which is another thing. Out of the six cou­ples we’re ini­tially intro­duced to, half of them have been expe­ri­enc­ing dif­fi­culty try­ing to con­ceive. The oth­ers that are just “start­ing” their quest to have a baby (or add another one to their fam­ily); well, it would appear that they, too, may be find­ing out that get­ting preg­nant isn’t quite as easy as the rest of the world makes it seem to be. Or as easy as the prover­bial “birds and bees” the­ory that we were taught in school.

Speak­ing of the birds and the bees …

About two weeks ago, I stum­bled on another arti­cle in an Austin** news­pa­per. It’s this arti­cle that led me to this web­site and the humor­ous, but spot-​​on videos about a Bird and a Bee deal­ing with infer­til­ity. If you haven’t watched them, I urge you to do so, if only to empathize with what any infer­tile cou­ple can encounter.

Both “A Con­cep­tion Story” and the “Increase Your Chances” vignettes  (also spot­lighted in this arti­cle in Salon, an award-​​winning online news and enter­tain­ment Web site) are prob­a­bly one of the first real adver­tise­ments high­light­ing the dif­fi­cul­ties in try­ing to conceive.

The Bird and the Bee

And when I say “adver­tise­ments” in rela­tion­ship to the TLC story, I do mean adver­tise­ment. Because although the sto­ries being told in “A Con­cep­tion Story” are in “real time” (as evi­denced by the jour­nals that these women write for the show), the whole she-​​bang is spon­sored by First Response, whose prod­ucts focus on all aspects of preg­nancy plan­ning. And it’s quite evi­dent the moment you click on the TLC web­site for the show, that they’ve invested a lot of money into adver­tis­ing their products.

But get­ting back to these adver­tis­ing cam­paigns, it’s quite refresh­ing to know that there are com­pa­nies*** out there that are will­ing to go that in-​​depth with the emo­tional side of infer­til­ity. Because, face it: thus far, any adver­tise­ments for infer­til­ity I’ve heard were for Infer­til­ity Clin­ics or Hos­pi­tal Net­works. And it’s typ­i­cally only a 30– to 60-​​second spot.

Yeah; that’ll never be enough time to go into depth about the mul­ti­ple lay­ers of Infertility.

As happy as I am about Infer­til­ity get­ting its fair share of air time, it’s sad to see that other peo­ple still may not empathize with what an infer­tile cou­ple go through both phys­i­cally and emo­tion­ally. All you have to do is look at some of the com­ments made in regards to such arti­cles that brought these ads to the forefront.

One per­son commented:

Couldn’t it be that if you can’t get preg­nant on your own that it means that god didn’t want you to have kids?

[Duh. Don’t think that I haven’t already thought about that. And oh, by the way … I believe if we’re talk­ing about one G*d, I believe it’s com­mon respect to address him/​her for­mally; not with a lower case “g.” I’m just saying … ]

While another per­son wrote:

The best way to become a par­ent is to chose to have your chil­dren dur­ing your most fer­tile years, not when you are old.

[Hmm … maybe some of us did choose to become par­ents when we were sup­posed to be most fer­tile? And so what if we started later in life? What does it mat­ter to you?]

And yet another per­son stated the obvious:

If you can’t have babies, why not just adopt?

[Because clearly adopt­ing a child is such a sim­ple task. And, unlike infer­til­ity treat­ments, there’s no finan­cial or emo­tional stress involved in the adop­tion process. NOT!]

But this one … for me, this one is the kicker of them all:

Infer­til­ity, espe­cially in devel­oped nations like the US, is prob­a­bly a good thing. I think it’s rep­re­hen­si­ble that big pharma and the med­ical com­mu­nity is encour­ag­ing peo­ple to have children.

That last state­ment is what prob­a­bly angered me the most. Even more than the “G*d didn’t mean for you to have kids” state­ment. To me, this state­ment has the poten­tial to dig deeper than the emo­tional tur­moil an infer­tile cou­ple can feel. As if feel­ing like fail­ure for not being able to repro­duce wasn’t bad enough … it is state­ments like that which can strip away any sense of sup­port that an Infer­tile can turn to out­side of the Adop­tion, Loss & Infer­til­ity (ALI) Community.

But that’s my own hum­ble opin­ion. Because really, when *I* look at both the “Increase Your Chances” adver­tise­ment and TLC’s “A Con­cep­tion Story” Web series, I don’t imme­di­ately think about run­ning to the first Infer­til­ity Spe­cial­ist I know. And I don’t make a mad dash to the drug store to pick up more Home Preg­nancy Tests.

No. The first thing I think of is that it’s about d*mn time that Infer­til­ity is get­ting its time in the spot­light. Just like Can­cer, Dia­betes, Coro­nary Artery Dis­ease … and pretty much every other health con­di­tion (Erec­tile Dys­func­tion any­one?) has.

Don’t you think this 24 & 25 yo new­ly­wed cou­ple deserved to have kids? We started try­ing about a year after our hon­ey­moon and kept try­ing for more than 10 years.

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**How much do you love me, Kate? :-P

***EMD Serono, a Massachusetts-​​based maker of fer­til­ity drugs, spon­sors the Increase Your Chances campaign)

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Related Links:

TLC’s “A Con­cep­tion Story”

NYTimes Arti­cle

Increase Your Chances Website

The States­man Arti­cle (Austin Newspaper)

Salon e-​​News & Enter­tain­ment Article

Admin Shtuff

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