How to deal with life goals when dealing with infertility?
“The burden of unavoidable unhappiness is increased by unhappiness about being unhappy” — Viktor Frankl
When living through infertility, the passage of time is traumatizing. Before Infertility (how odd that that Infertility feels like a time marker, a little bit like “Before Christ” and “After Christ”), I was always happy to have my birthday celebrated. That changed radically as I plunged into the world of infertility. Then I felt powerfully Flaubert’s words about time as a destroying force: “No sooner do we come into this world than bits of us start to fall off”.
Time moves by awkwardly when faced with infertility. The two-week wait between ovulation and pregnancy test takes seemingly forever, but the months of negative results fly by, and your birthday comes again way too soon. Time is associated with disappointment — each month and your time “trying to conceive” gets longer, and the odds of pregnancy plunge. For women, there is the constant societal reminder that your biological clock is ticking.
But worst of all, there is the pressure we put on ourselves. When we started trying to conceive in 2014, I remember I had put together an Excel (habits of a former consultant die hard) with my goals for the year. I had even included a status column, to allow for frequent tracking, i.e. better accountability. Top of the Excel, goal #1, was “Have a baby”. But month after month, I was unable to “deliver” on this goal. As months went by, I lost the courage to open that excel to see how I was doing on my ~15 other goals, because I knew I hadn’t achieved the top one.
Because of my past habit of setting “life goals” at the turn of the year, Christmas and New Year have become the toughest moments of the year. As soon as I see the first Christmas trees being placed in malls (which often, unfortunately, happens in November), I get a slightly sick feeling in my stomach, as I remember I have failed this year once again on my #1 goal.
So what can be done? Should one stop planning life goals all together when struggling with infertility? That would leave us at odds with the world, which urges to plan, plan, plan. To quote but one famous writer: “And indeed, that IS the question: whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal. It is a choice we must all make consciously or unconsciously” — Hunter S. Thompson.
· I would say no, continue planning, but plan differently and flexibly. Infertility is a major life crisis. At this time more than ever, it’s worth asking oneself , in Donna Tartt’s words, “what’s worth living for? what’s worth dying for? what’s completely foolish to pursue?”
· Recognize that you can’t control everything. We live blindly, oblivious to that reality. We live “as if happiness were something that everyone should and could attain, and that any sort of compromise in its pursuit was somehow your fault” (Hanya Yanagihara). Going through infertility treatments will never be fun, and it sets up many restrictions on what you can do in your free time (periods when no sports are authorized, resting encouraged, travel may feel borderline, etc.)
· But still, there is so much you CAN do. William Kamkwamba, a poor boy from Malawi who had to quit school to support his starving family, learned to built a windmill for his village with science books from the public library. He quotes Martin Luther King: “If you can’t fly, run; if you can’t run, walk; if you can’t walk, crawl.”
· In particular having infertility doesn’t mean that you can’t step out of your comfort zone in other ways. Mark Twain commands us to do so: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did so throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” Benefits of living a life outside your comfort zone far outweigh the risks.
· So, how do you step out of your comfort zone when you have infertility? Have what Kofi Annan, the former UN Secretary general, called “a sense of opportunity”. Sure, when you are struggling with infertility and need proximity to good hospitals, moving half way around the globe is unlikely to be possible. But there are other ways to do so. Meet new people, speak to strangers, find new projects which you can invest yourself in and new skills you can learn. Volunteer in your neighborhood. Take a different path on your walk back home and write down what you notice.
· Be grateful for what you are achieving, and don’t dismiss it. Partly to contradict that feeling of mine that we hadn’t achieved much during one of our infertility years, I decided to create a special birthday present for Richard. It was titled “31 things before 32” and listed all the things he had achieved or all the fun things we had done together during that year. It didn’t include conceiving a baby. But I was actually quite surprised, writing it, how many things there were: playing football on a Somalian team, being best man, teaching geometry to underprivileged children, camping in the wild, learning some good tunes on the guitar, etc.
It wasn’t a wasted year after all. It gave me courage for the next.
