Candace: The time piece of life never stops for anyone. It doesn’t matter what life event maybe happening at the current time whether good, bad, or something that has just brought you to your knees, everyone around you keeps moving. Just because we are infertile doesn’t mean others are not. People are popping out kids like rabbits as Chris and I stare at our broken biological clocks.
We have nieces and a nephew. A full out brood of them. Our siblings have very much succeeded where we have failed. Spending time with them is a gift and we cherish any chance we can get to see them, those near and especially far. My sister and her husband went out of town this weekend for a much deserved vacation. We happened to acquire “The Doodles” (my nickname for my nieces). To say we had a blast with them is an understatement. It gives us that temporary buzz of what it would be like to be a parent. The good and the bad. With all of the feelings of euphoria, it does eventually wear off. Ours was when we had to take them home and go back to our empty nest. At the end of the day, my sister is there mom and I am the aunt. It is a borrowed child in a sense and we are searching, waiting for ours. The scene from Dumbo always comes to mind when I think of this. The one where all of the zoo animals have stork deliveries parachuting down to their expecting parents and you see Mrs. Dumbo reaching out for each baby only to realize that package belongs to someone else. The happy ending though is that Mrs. Dumbo’s stork was late. Very late. It came, not with everyone else’s but on God’s time. So, I inhale and take a big sigh and keep waiting for our lost stork.
Being around parents and their children and getting to have baby time, i.e., holding one for a while, is not without its perils. Well-meaning parents can sometimes deliver commentary which acts as a swift ninja kick to the infertile box, oh those Tasty Sneakers. For the sake of not exposing identities, we will call new ‘oops’ parents by the acronym: NOP. So, I am holding this precious baby and NOP says to me, “It’s not that easy Candace, try only having 1 hand to do everything.” Then proceeds to dump a cleaning product in my free hand to help clean off the dinner table. WTF? So, what did I do? I ate crow and held that little cutie while I made that table sparkle. NOP wanted to try to get the point across that it is not that easy and that perhaps we were wishing ourselves into something inconveniencing to our normal lives. I guess that is the difference between those who were not ready to be parents versus couples who have been for years upon years. Here is an analogy, how can you have a full plate of food and complain about what you have to a person who is starving? It doesn’t seem to be as readily forgivable in that light as an ill-informed comment about the difficulty of having a child.
Chris: Want something fun to do with the “Doodles” in your life? Get a bunch of that leftover Styrofoam that seems to magically accumulate in your garage. Then, take said Doodles out to the garage and have a sword fight with all of the Styrofoam and packing materials and make it snow by rubbing two broken pieces of Styrofoam together. Tons of fun for everyone involved! Just don’t let the Doodles’ aunt see the huge mess in the garage or else you will be spending some lonely nights on the couch. Trust me, I’m a doctor.
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I am so tired of the comments from fertile people, I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to be polite about it. The “just relax.. it’ll happen” REALLY bothers me, but I HATE the “you’re still so young” comment. I’m 27, not 19 – and I have eggs that are older than me according to my RE, and with having PCOS I only ovulate about three times a year – and it’s a crappy egg at that. We live in a state that DOES NOT include IVF at all, and that’s the point we’re at. I don’t think we will ever be able to afford IVF in one shot, and I’m not sure that jealous feeling will ever leave when I see a pregnant woman. Fingers crossed for you and us that miracles DO exist.
Hello Anonymous, We know for a fact that you can afford IVF in one shot. It just may be that you have to reach your hand out, further than you ever thought, to ask for support from your family, friends, church, community, and strangers. Check out our fundraising page for a few ideas and shoot us an e-mail for more. Good luck, keep your fingers crossed, and don’t let financial infertility stop you.
whoa! well have you considered adoption?
So I am thinking you may be new to Our Misconception blog. If you scroll back a few months you will read our adoption journey. The cliff notes are that we did and still do consider adoption. I write about it often and we were very far down that entensive, invasive, and very expensive road. The surrogate was surprised we did not expect or seek out. Really in all truthfulness it was the one option we did not even consider! So to answer your question. Yep, we sure DO consider adoption, we just hit the pause button on it.
God people are so stupid. Sorry.
Amen…Aren’t Candace and Chris cool? I don’t know if I would have handled that question so nicely…
Candace :I love that scene from Dumbo, it makes me cry almost every time… That’s right… one can only assume the best is yet to come… xo
Chris: Doodles, some dissolve in water some in vinegar, it’s yet another funny, useless piece of information that I am happy to pass on to you… have fun
Ali W., First thank you for the Styrofoam advice. The next time we mix doodles and Styrofoam, we will have to ‘experiment’ with what they dissolve in. The amazing thing about Dumbo, is hat prior to going through infertility, this blatant fact about Dumbo’s mom never crossed our mind. Hopefully, we can bring the awareness we have now to a broader community and get more tissues used when watching this movie.
That Dumbo scene pulls at my heart strings every time! You two are amazing for dealing with the insensitivity of the NOPs… it never ceases to amaze me how people don’t see how destructive their comments are. Chris, you crack me up every time I read your blog!
RunCC37,
Thank you for your insight into these comments from the NOPs. It is amazing that they don’t see their impact and, although we want to believe they are always well intended, it is hard to do so sometimes.
Add to the starving person, “I mean, when you eat all this food, you get indigestion, gas, bloating, heartburn etc. You also gain all this weight! Totally not worth the calories. Just look what food has done to me…”
Maybe what you chose came with it’s difficulties. And, maybe you didn’t realize what those difficulties would be when you chose to have a child. BUT, at least you were able to choose the baby. You take the good with the bad.
And you keep your mouth shut.
Anonymous,
Thank you for your comment. It is tough to hear all of these comments about how hard this part of having a baby is or how tired they are from the night before. When it is all said and done, we don’t think we have ever wanted to have something to complain about more than wanting to have a child. Here’s to sleepless nights, dirty diapers, and complaining about how our love for our child blurs our vision of anything else!