This is a typical train of thought for IFers, but it's still troublesome. You know those blogs you have to stop reading for a while because you're uncomfortably green with envy? Maybe someone got a BFP doing exactly the same thing as you, when you got nuthin'. Maybe it's just the simple fact that they had more follicles at trigger or, in my case, that both of their twins made it past eight weeks.
I've realized that I don't really want twins. That I was terrified when we found out that we had them, afraid of having a truly shitty and medicalized pregnancy after a crappy medicalized conception.
Yet that seemed to have no effect on my sorrow and frustration--see, yet again you're broken, some little voice said--at losing poor little Runty. I felt oddly competitive. An unusual set of feelings.
Now, however, a gal who got knocked up around the same time as me is in the hospital, hoping to keep her little ones in for just a few weeks more and struggling with life on bedrest. And my heart is bursting with compassion and sorrow for her, whom I had envied a few weeks before.
That's the funny thing (for me) about IF: it wrings you dry and leaves you hollow. But that hollowness is a space that can accommodate new empathy, new desire to reach to someone and let them know you care and understand. That's the light plunging into the darkness.
12 comments:
What a beautiful and wise soul you are, Shinejil! I love the way you express this tension between the brittleness and the compassion of the IF experience - just perfect!
That's one of the best encapsulations of the IF experience I've ever read. My capacity to be happy for people (and, sometimes, to be happy at all) has shriveled, but my capacity to grieve with others is bottomless.
I 100% agree with you and understand too. My thoughts go to the girl you know in the hospital. Twins are a bigger risk than what people commonly understand.
I saw a newborn leaving the hospital the other day and it was easy for me to feel so much joy for the couple and congratulate them... who knows if they struggled with IF, too? even if they didn't, they still had reason to celebrate: pregnancy and birth in all their forms are an odyssey.
But I don't think I ever could have had that happy-empathy if I had never gotten pregnant myself. IF alone only made me jealous and bitter. and when misfortune struck another, I was cruelly smug and patronizing (on the inside, Miss Sympathy on the out).
I love this whole paragraph:
"That's the funny thing (for me) about IF: it wrings you dry and leaves you hollow. But that hollowness is a space that can accommodate new empathy, new desire to reach to someone and let them know you care and understand. That's the light plunging into the darkness."
I, too, have been surprised by the depths of my envy AND the depths of my empathy and/or sympathy. The IF blogosphere has taught me many things, especially that it's crucial to reach out to others in support AND celebration.
I know I'm the one you're referring to... but I don't know what to say. I feel the same way... I've been jealous over everyone from the beginning... people who got pregnant on their own, people who shared they were pregnant at five weeks because they weren't afraid of anything bad happening, and now, anyone I see carrying their baby(ies) without the help of pills, shots, and bed rest and worry. It's just a rough road that we're traveling.
I'm still so sorry that you lost your little Runty... but I am thrilled that your Bruiser is still thriving. (Speaking of which... while up way too late last night, I was watching Legally Blond of hospital TV and the character's dog is named Bruiser... so I though of you.)
I just hope that the two of us (and everyone else) can find their peace in their own way. Things can't be perfect (obviously) but we can do our best.
This post so resonates with me - although, my green envy point is a pregnancy that makes it past 9 weeks, since I haven't been able to do that. See? We each have our point and no two are likely alike.
But, in the end, infertility has taught me - well, actually hit me over the head with a bat - that the only grass I really need to be concerned about growing is my own.
I also think, though, that there is something so freeing when you reach that point that you can be simultaneously happy for someone's success in an area where you have not been able to succeed and respect the sadness that you have for yourself. I think you have achieved that nirvana.
So true. I've noticed feeling like this before too.
"I felt oddly competitive." That pretty much sums up the entirety of any desire I have for for twins.
Also though, more on point with the whole of your post... I've written about my friend Nat several times on my blog. I was soooo jealous when she got pg on IVF #2 after we had been TTC around 17 months. (I say "we" b/c her and I started in the same month of the same year.) Yeah, after she lost her first at 36 weeks I was no longer jealous. Then when she lost one of her tubes due to an ectopic from FET #2 after IVF #4. Now we'll be cycling together in August - me for IVF#2 and her for #5. Somehow I'm not so jealous anymore. Funny how that works!
This is a perfect post. I GET it, ya know?
well said. sorry to hear about your friend.
You put it so well, Shinejil. I connected with that last paragraph in particular. IF has been brutal but if I can take something positive from it, it's that it has taught me to be a more compassionate person... to understand how much it means to reach out to someone when they need it, in good and bad times.
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