National Infertility Awareness Week
November 8th, 2007 by Liss
For those who are currently fighting with infertility, the thought of a single week to be “aware” of it is laughable. It consumes every single waking moment of your life - the hours spent in doctors’ offices, the time spent taking inventory of your medications, the endless worry about insurance and how little it covers and trying to figure out how you’ll ever be able to pay for the treatments you need just to try to become a parent. The futile Google searches that you hope will just tell you what you want to know: when will you…WILL you…ever get what seems to come so easily to so many others. The hours you spend crying because the money you’d so carefully saved up for retirement and your unborn childrens’ college funds is all but gone, and nothing to show for it but bruises on your body and on your heart.
Even when you’ve gone through this journey and come out the other side, the reality is that the strain is still there. The knowledge that we are compromising our daughter’s college fund in an attempt to give her a brother or sister is not easy to sit with. We believe that it’s the right thing to do, but the need to make these choices hurts. Watching our daughter hug her cousin, or a friend’s baby, and hearing her ask for a baby of her own hurts.
It’s definitely different the second time around. Some of the questions are different. Some of the feelings are different. I’m a mother now, and no one can take that away from me. If all I ever have is Abby, then I have gotten my miracle and am so grateful for that.
But especially now that I really know what it’s like to have a child, I know that what I want the most is more of what I finally have.