Redefining our Happy Ending

So here I am, spending what was supposed to be the year we took a break from all things fertility related, to travel and reconnect, to put our marriage and friendship first, to reevaluate and build something new together, stuck inside our house. Stuck inside the house we bought to raise children, with the extra bedrooms, down the street from the good school, a park around the corner to take the kids in summer, and the fun kids' bookstore down the street next to the gelato place we would stroll to on hot summer nights together as a family. I see so vividly the life we wanted to have here, buying this house more than 5 years ago thinking we would bring a baby home to it as soon as we could.

I have learned that you can't plan your future. You can't force something to happen, no matter how much you want it. We couldn't get pregnant, and it's not because we didn't want it enough, or try hard enough, or do enough. We couldn't, because of biology. We live in a time where there are things as miraculous as IVF and other ARTs, so people think that if you can't have one naturally, you can just pay someone enough and they can make one for you in a lab. If you just keep going, and keep paying, that eventually you can get what you want, what you planned for. IVF only works for less than half of the people that ever go through it, less than 40% of people who have the means and choose to go through IVF ever end up with a child through the process. To have the means and the option to spend upwards of $45,000 on a gamble comes from a place of such privilege that I never felt was acknowledged or recognized when I was in the fertility community. Having the opportunity to keep trying doesn't mean you want a child more than someone who can't take out a second mortgage on their house, or can't get a loan, or borrow from family. If I was handed $45,000 today and was told to go do three cycles of IVF, my doctors told me I personally have a 96% chance that it would still fail. People seem to forget that every single case is different. When someone tells you that you need to try because someone they know got pregnant on the first round so you just have to give it a try, that is toxic positivity. It is dismissive and belittling. You are telling someone they haven't done everything they can, when you don't know what it cost them to get to the point they are now. I'm not just talking about monetary investment either. I'm talking about the physical. The mental and emotional. It all takes a toll on you. When everyone around you talks about and analyzes your sex life, your marriage suffers. You stop feeling desired, and intimacy feels medical and obligatory. When most of your conversations are about the timing of shots in your stomach, or having to schedule your spouse’s time to go jerk it into a cup with a doctor standing outside the door, so no touching each other tonight, or conversely, you've got to have fresh sperm for your appointment in the morning so we have to do it right now whether you want to or not, it doesn't matter if you're exhausted and that your stomach is bloated and bruised from shots and excessive amounts of hormones that make you feel like a crazy person. You lose yourself in the process and get blinders that make it so you can only see the end goal, thinking that it doesn't matter how much you suffer now, it'll all be worth it in the end. 

After everything I put my body through, nearly a year after my endo surgery, I saw a fourth doctor- one who specialized more on my hormonal health to find out why after a year, I still hadn't been able to lose a single pound of the more than 40 I had gained from all the Clomid and Letrozole, and stress. Ten more vials of blood later and I found out- all that extra estrogen had damaged my liver. I was on the verge of PCOS and self-induced diabetes, as the estrogen had caused serious issues with insulin resistance, and my thyroid was all over the place from every doctor prescribing something different. My body can't regulate my hormones. I lost almost a third of my hair. My body is a different shape. My periods have returned to the unbearable pain I had before the surgery, spending almost a week every month barely able to get out of the tub, soaking in water so hot it makes my skin bright red because any colder and it doesn't provide relief. I was put on a strict diet and basically survived off of eggs, avocados, lettuce, and apples with almond butter for a couple months while we did more tests and found foods that didn't cause my liver to flare up. Now if I eat certain foods or drinks, my fingers swell, my eyes puff, and sometimes my body turns bright splotchy red and I have a headache for days. I've had to change my whole lifestyle to fix the damage from trying to become a mother, and I was not made a mother in the process.

In the end, I have come out the other side of this, more than half a decade later, reevaluating my life, and what it means to live childless when it's not by choice. I watch all my closest friends and loved ones become mothers and I am left behind. I struggle as I become an aunt again and again, watching the shadows of what my own children would have looked like growing up before my eyes. I watch as they don't have their value as women questioned by society, while I feel this constant pressure to prove my worth. These years have left me feeling unseen. I was constantly told that these years spent in misery would be worth it, worth the loss of self, worth the pain and grief, worth the lasting trauma, as long as I came out the other side with a child. The more that people told me that it would happen against all odds, and to just keep going, the more toxic and broken I felt. The positivity becomes too much, it becomes this weight that makes you feel like your empty womb equates to you as an empty vessel taking up otherwise useful space. I was living in such an unhealthy state of being, and my husband, like so many partners, had to just sit by and watch, disconnected from all the bodily pain and failure I experienced every month like clockwork. It could even be all the man's fault, and the woman will still bear the public blame and the burden of being less because she couldn't become a mother. My husband wasn't inundated with the same messaging that I get as a woman, never told that his worth in society is defined by his parenthood status, or called selfish for wanting a successful career, never told he is incomplete as a man without the title of "Father". As though women are only complete when a part of you grows within you and then detached itself from you, growing to become something else entirely with its own universe unconnected from yours. I refuse to believe my value comes from whether or not my biology has duplicated. I have always been the "mother" among my group, the one taking care of things, the one planning, and being prepared with the things you forget, the one people come to for advice or to talk through a problem. Yet, I cannot be a mother and so society has found me wanting, weighed me as half value. And this is false. I inherently have value, whether or not I am given it. I inherently matter, whether or not I have a child who thinks I matter the most to them. I inherently am worthy, of love and kindness and wholeness. I am complete. Because I am. That is not contingent on the imaginary threshold put upon women- that life experience only counts after sacrificing yours for someone else.

~Kait Hinckley