I was looking back over my old writing and came across something I wrote for a "family poetry" class. At the time I was going through infertility treatments and my parents were going through a divorce. It was an interesting time to be taking a family poetry class. I am very very glad not to be an infertility patient. I never realized how difficult it was. I didn't absorb the weight of the issue when my doctor told me at age 9 that it might take me longer to get pregnant. What third grader is worried about the state of her ovaries? What does it mean to take longer to get pregnant? For me it meant five years of many different kinds of medication and profound loss and a sense of devastation every month. Fueled, of course, by the fluctuating hormones. My poor mother-in-law asked me one day, "Aren't you ever going to have children?" She meant it kindly. But I burst into tears. We hadn't told anyone we were trying. It didn't seem like their business. It was too hard to think about. Too hard to talk about. It sucked. Especially when all other women on the planet were pregnant. How to Conceive #1 Grateful Crap: that I am no longer an infertility patient, that I have three lovely children, one of whom was even conceived in the usual way instead of with the aid of a centrifuge, that there is technology available to assist people experiencing subfertility, that my house is full of chaos and bickering and toys on the floor and muddy clothes in the bathtub
Daily Convexions
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K. BuchananQuaker, teacher, parent, |