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On The Unfairness of Infertility
You have right to this world even if you don't bring a child into it.
You tell me, weeping, fighting with fate, that thirteen-year-old drug addicts get pregnant and have gorgeous, tragic, doomed children.
You're right, I say, stroking your hand, and that makes you cry even harder. I stop speaking, lose courage, and change the subject.
So, to my forty-year-old friend who feels that her life cannot go on if she doesn't have a baby, this is what I wished I'd said:
Yes, yes, everything you say is true. Yes, people who don't want children get pregnant and people who long for children, as you do, don't. That's not fair to them, or to you, but that's how the world spins in this life and it breaks your heart. Of course it does. Who would be a better mother than you? And no, no, it wouldn't have been better to have a child sooner when you didn't want one even if you can't get pregnant now when you do. I don't believe it. I don't think you do, either. Don't wrap that heavy, spiked cloak around your small shoulders. You don't deserve it.
You know life is not fair. You are smart and realistic; you are brave and resilient. But this inability to have a child has you baffled and sent you into a permanent state of hating the world, hating every woman who ever held a child that wasn't yours, envying even your mother and the fact that she carried you.
But the pregnancies of other women and their babies are not your enemy, and these other women are not stealing from you.
Getting pregnant and having children isn't like standing on line at the checkout counter where people can cut ahead of you.
That's not the process. That's not the way to think about it. It's more like standing in front of a row of machines at a casino when it looks like everybody else is winning. Their winning has no effect on your luck, has nothing to do with it, and doesn't decide whether your number comes up or not. But their winning makes you hate them and it makes you curse your own position.
You wonder why you're the only one not making the bells ring.
But you're not entitled to the jackpot. True, neither are those who win it-and some see the jackpot as a burden, what you see as gold they see as lead.
I watched a guy get lucky at a machine, winning first six, and then eight thousand dollars. It happens. And maybe it'll happen for you, and you'll have a baby, and that will be magnificent and wonderful.
But your life is your life no matter what happens, and you have right to this world even if you don't bring a child into it.
You're right, I say, stroking your hand, and that makes you cry even harder. I stop speaking, lose courage, and change the subject.
So, to my forty-year-old friend who feels that her life cannot go on if she doesn't have a baby, this is what I wished I'd said:
Yes, yes, everything you say is true. Yes, people who don't want children get pregnant and people who long for children, as you do, don't. That's not fair to them, or to you, but that's how the world spins in this life and it breaks your heart. Of course it does. Who would be a better mother than you? And no, no, it wouldn't have been better to have a child sooner when you didn't want one even if you can't get pregnant now when you do. I don't believe it. I don't think you do, either. Don't wrap that heavy, spiked cloak around your small shoulders. You don't deserve it.
You know life is not fair. You are smart and realistic; you are brave and resilient. But this inability to have a child has you baffled and sent you into a permanent state of hating the world, hating every woman who ever held a child that wasn't yours, envying even your mother and the fact that she carried you.
But the pregnancies of other women and their babies are not your enemy, and these other women are not stealing from you.
Getting pregnant and having children isn't like standing on line at the checkout counter where people can cut ahead of you.
That's not the process. That's not the way to think about it. It's more like standing in front of a row of machines at a casino when it looks like everybody else is winning. Their winning has no effect on your luck, has nothing to do with it, and doesn't decide whether your number comes up or not. But their winning makes you hate them and it makes you curse your own position.
You wonder why you're the only one not making the bells ring.
But you're not entitled to the jackpot. True, neither are those who win it-and some see the jackpot as a burden, what you see as gold they see as lead.
I watched a guy get lucky at a machine, winning first six, and then eight thousand dollars. It happens. And maybe it'll happen for you, and you'll have a baby, and that will be magnificent and wonderful.
But your life is your life no matter what happens, and you have right to this world even if you don't bring a child into it.
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