June 10, 2008 was a day unlike any other. There I was, Pamela Mahoney Tsigdinos, pictured on the home page of The New York Times with a link to a health feature about my husband and me — Exhibit A: one of the many millions of “involuntarily childless” couples making our way in a child-centric society.
When I first started to blog and then write a book (Silent Sorority) about our infertility experience I don’t know which of us needed the Tums antacid more — me or my husband. Me for disclosing to the world our secret -- our unsuccessful, decade-long battle with trying to conceive, or him for knowing that, by association, our unusual last name would be forever tied to the word “infertility.”
The doctors, after multiple surgeries and junior varisity and varsity treatments, had put us firmly in the unexplained category. There was no amount of “trying” that was going to cure us. Alpha pregnancies never it made it to beta. Infertility became ever-present in our lives -- the elephant in the room. In trying to make sense of it during one of our many conversations, my husband pointed out the difference between “temporal” and “structural” changes in life.
Temporal change can be difficult and painful. Lose a job ... find another. Have to move ... set up house elsewhere. You adjust accordingly and move on.
Structural change is quite different. You lose a loved one. You experience a life-changing disease (e.g. infertility) and it creates a loss in your life, one that can sometimes feel like a black hole. A structural change causes a fundamental shift in your life. You don’t simply “get over” the associated losses — instead you “come to terms” with them. For me that meant writing about and researching the experience. In one study on grieving losses I learned that:
“...reliving memories are normal reactions...Little by little, you should begin to feel better. Eventually, you should begin to focus on resuming relationships and activities. It's not uncommon to initially feel ‘disloyal’ to someone as you start to move on.”
The sense of disloyalty was something I knew all too well. It had actually manifested itself in guilt. In one blog post, A New Chapter (Guilt Not Included), I acknowledged that one of my biggest inhibitors in coming to terms with infertility was a fear:
“that by allowing myself to accept a life without children that it would mean that I didn't work hard enough for my embryos, that I didn’t want or love my children-to-be enough, that I had somehow failed them. That my children didn’t matter as much as someone else’s children.”
While I’ve found peace in my life, I still wrestle with grief. It catches me when I least expect it, which is why I’ve come to accept that the losses infertility inflicted will visit from time to time for the rest of my life. That’s what happens with structural change. A blogging friend summed it up best with these words about her own dance with grief:
“...grief is f*^king sneaky! It gets you when you are watching mourning doves build a nest outside your window and you burst into tears; when you see a child whose face snatches you back in time as surely as any mechanical time machine and your heart aches to the point you can feel the pieces falling off...”
April 24- 30, 2011 is National Infertility Awareness Week, a time to reflect on the many millions, each in their own way, coming to terms.
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Pamela M. Tsigdinos, author, Silent Sorority - 2010 RESOLVE Best Book
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