Kicked Out of the Infertility Club
They say dealing with infertility is like being part of the kindest, most welcoming club in the world. At least that’s what a friend told me as we bonded over a shared, years-long struggle to get pregnant.
And it proved true. I found myself connecting with friends from across my life, college friends I hadn’t stayed in touch with, new friendships in which we both instantly exhaled when one of us revealed the silent struggle we endured. I found things to read and support groups to join (with limited success), but I had a clear narrative and identity, planted firmly in the middle of this involuntary club of those yearning to have a baby. As a result, I shared details about ovulation, acupuncture, blood tests, and diet changes with anyone who cared to listen. Getting pregnant became my north star, and talking about the struggle became a source of power, maybe control even, as I waited and wondered whether mine was a body even capable of having a baby.
Infertility is defined as “a disease of the male or female reproductive system measured by failure to achieve a pregnancy after 12 months or more of regular, unprotected sexual intercourse,” according to the World Health Organization.
And as we wait longer to start families, more and more of us seem to struggle to get pregnant. In the U.S., one in five (19%) of women ages 15 to 49 struggle to get pregnant with their first child for more than a year, according to the CDC, and fertility rates (defined as the total number of children born to a woman in her lifetime) reached their record low in 2020 according to a study by the National Center for Health Statistics.
Meanwhile, I watched with guilty jealousy as countless friends and vague Instagram connections seemed to conceive just weeks after their weddings, theirs a story of baby showers and awed excitement, many oblivious to the impact each of their posts had on me and others. But I had my club. We could poke fun at the awkward pregnancy announcements (“we baked more than bread this quarantine”), toast (over wine and poke bowls) the extended “free time” and life events we were able to enjoy unencumbered by a screaming child. My husband Charlie and I certainly filled up that free time. In the 18 months it took to conceive, we moved twice, adopted a puppy, bought our first house, achieved big career goals, and skied until I literally dropped and landed in surgery.
But the thread that bound my ever-growing club of ladies had a shadow side I hadn’t considered. We were connected by a shared sense of uncertainty, a collective struggle and goal: “Let’s all get pregnant. At exactly the same time. And tell each other…when?”
Conventional wisdom seems to say that no one shares pregnancy news until week 12. That’s when the risk of loss shrinks enough to call things more certain. But is the rule different if you’re already sharing so many other details?
In December 2021, after a few rounds of letrozole, a medication that is often used to stimulate ovulation, I ovulated. In my journey, that alone was cause for celebration. A personal bodily function I readily shared with anyone interested. And then the unimaginable happened. We got pregnant. To say it felt like magic after 18 months of trying says something about the power of positive thinking. We were thrilled. And shocked. And constantly fearful that it was all too good to be true. Suddenly life became about thinking ahead, nourishing this living being inside of me, and sleeping. Constantly.
In the early weeks we didn’t share our news with a single person, it felt good just to hold onto it. After all, we had waited a while for this kind of hope.
But there’s no precedent for secrets in the infertility club. Ours is a shared understanding and openness. A safe place to share fears, doubts, and test results without fear of judgment. So when conversations arose with friends about their upcoming appointment or plans for IVF, I froze.
Meanwhile, close friends shared their exciting pregnancy news (at the usual 12 weeks), sometimes a welcome surprise just weeks after they started trying. Their buoyant energy and lightness felt foreign to us. Their awe in the simplicity of the process was an affront to my appointments, experimental treatments, searches for new doctors, and tears. I didn’t relate to them. I just couldn’t.
If I couldn’t celebrate with my fellow pregnant people, and I couldn’t connect with those who had supported me through this time, where could I turn? Who was I now that I had overcome my identity as someone with a challenge to face? With every week this question burned in my gut. The guilt of a secret that others keep without thinking made me question the “right thing to do,” but I kept quiet. We hadn’t even been to the doctor yet.
The drive to that first appointment was filled with dread. Surely those 10+ pregnancy tests were faulty. It all felt too good to be true. I asked my husband whether he would be more nervous headed to this appointment or as a lawyer preparing to cross examine a murderer on trial. He chose the courtroom.
15 minutes later we were listening to the heartbeat of what would allegedly become a child in eight months. At the time he was the size of a blueberry. My husband felt excited, I mostly just felt nauseous.
Fast forward one year and I spend every minute with a 6-week-old little guy named Wesley. Now I’m part of a new kind of club, the new mom club. We text each other at three in the morning to compare notes on sleep schedules (the word schedule is a joke!), send links to the must-have gear that will surely soothe the baby better than the other 25 things we’ve tried. We plan meetups around naps and feedings, often arriving 30 minutes late despite best intentions. Once again we’re connected by shared experiences, this one another all-consuming life change that we’re desperate to normalize through connections to each other.
Shared experience seems an ideal way to form a bond. But how fragile must those bonds be when our experiences change, or we leave a certain life stage behind? I guess parenting means diving into an entire lifetime of new stages and experiences, and I’m sure there will be more “clubs” to join at every step of the journey.
