How to make infertility lemons into lemonade?
“We are never more alive to life than when it hurts — never more aware both of our powerlessness to save ourselves and of at least the possibility of a power beyond ourselves to save us and heal us if we can only open ourselves to it . . .We are never more in touch with life than when life is painful, never more in touch with hope than we are then”. Frederick Buechner, The Clown in the Belfry
Unless you are masochist, you go through life trying to avoid suffering. But suffering can’t be avoided in the infertility journey. Some moments are almost unbearable. When my best friend Anne called to tell me that she was pregnant , I cried hot tears. It was particularly difficult to say goodbye to having kids at the same time as her. I pretended to be going through a tunnel so I could hang up and collect myself before talking to her again in a more composed way and congratulate her.
But moments of intense suffering can be sublimated, transcended.
In the case of Anne, I thought it’d be better for me to concentrate my energy not on my sadness, but instead on organizing something beautiful for her. A totem of friendship even in these different circumstances: her pregnant, me infertile. Anne had never wanted to get married, but she had joked during my hen do that the only thing that she would really miss about getting married was never having a hen do with her best friends. So, from the time that she announced her pregnancy, I concentrated my efforts on organizing for her a surprise hen week-end with her best friends. It occupied my thoughts for months, and I couldn’t help smiling thinking of the joy that she would feel. And indeed, it was one of the most memorable, friendship-heavy sleepovers of my life. A couple months later, I asked her to update me as soon as she’d be admitted to the hospital to give birth. She did, and I was truly excited for her. I’m now the goddaughter of her daughter, who has now become the toddler I feel closest too.
There are some milestones that are especially difficult to cope with when going through infertility. For me, the two worse ones are: (1) my wedding anniversary and (2) the Christmas season. Even there, with a bit of creativity, I’ve been somewhat able to transform the dreaded dates into something I was actually looking forward to.
(1) On our first year of our wedding anniversary, when infertility was not yet there as a big gray cloud darkening the day, Richard and I had spent an amazing day in Capri, Italy. We talked for hours, reflecting on what we had achieved the previous year, the best moments, and dreaming about the following year (which we imagined would include a baby or at least a baby bump).
But already for our second wedding anniversary, this had been less fun, as the “Best Moments List” was complemented with a “List of the worse moments of the year” (we tried to laugh about them).
Our third anniversary fell less than a month after our failed IVF, in which inexplicably, 15 follicles had been retrieved from my body but no embryos created (for more details, see Empty follicle syndrome). I was dreading our usual routine of nice-romantic-dinner-and-reflection-time. At lunch with one of my Nairobi besties, I shared that anguish, and she asked:
“What would make it something that you’d be excited about? You don’t have to maintain the tradition!”
She was right. I’ve always liked surprising others so I decided to put on a surprise party for Richard on our wedding anniversary. I invited all our Nairobi friends to our place. Before the party, I organized a little scavenger hunt for Richard. He’d proposed to me through a scavenger hunt so I thought it would be a nice touch to do the same for him, four years later. I picked him up at work and gave him the first clue. The last clue brought him home to the surprise party. All my attention before the milestone was focused on the surprise. I didn’t even have time to be sad.
(2) Christmas was another story. As we planned to go back to the UK, I knew we’d be spending a lot of time with Richard’s friends, whom I love, but who almost all have kids (some even have several). I decided to sign up to volunteer for two days with a charity that provides shelter and activities for homeless people. It was fantastic.
“The burden of unavoidable unhappiness is increased by unhappiness about being unhappy” wrote Viktor Frankl, the author of Man’s search for Meaning. Very much like the Victorian poet William Ernest Henley who called each man “the captain of [his/her] soul”, he reminds us that “man is ultimately self-determining. Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be”.
Frankl sees three ways through which humans can create meaning in their life. The first is by creating a work or by doing a deed. The second is by experiencing something or encountering someone; in other words, meaning can be found not only in work but also in love. Most important, however, is the third avenue to meaning in life: even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he/she cannot change, may rise above himself and his/her pain, and by so doing change himself.
Albert Camus, the French existentialist, hands us a similar duty: “We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more”. When one is suffering with health issues such as infertility, this may seem like a big task to achieve. But it does not require lifting mountains. After all, Simone Weil, the French philosopher, asserted that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
Building on our heightened sensitivity due to our own suffering in order to pay greater attention to those around us - our friends, our partner, the homeless person on our street, etc.- can allow us to heal quicker. And even enjoy some “lemonade” moments in the process.
