Why do fellow strugglers matter and how to find them?
“Courage is as contagious as fear” , Susan Sontag — At the Same Time: Essays & Speeches
There is a silver lining to infertility. It’s a unique way to meet fantastic women, and to grow closer to preexisting friends who have similar struggles. A unique bond forms in knowing that one is going through the same array of pain and disappointment as you, living in a world with no guarantee. An intimacy that many others will never understand.
Personally, my closest “infertility buddies” were the first people I called — pretty much the day after I took the positive pregnancy test- to share the good news. They had participated in my journey and would best be able to understand my emotions, of over-the-moon joy mixed with high anxiety that something might still go wrong.
Being able to identify these “fellow strugglers” usually requires being ready to share your own situation — but it’s not rocket science (with some false positives). Look for couples who got married or bought a flat with a second bedroom a few years ago, and who still don’t have kids.
In my case, I had a close friend who had got married the year before me, and had decided to be open about their journey. I remember for instance she told me she had shared her and her husband’s medical issues with her in-laws quite early on, so they would stop asking about when they would be having kids. She was very brave, and in general seems to have lived through the whole experience more stoically than I did. Thinking of her exemplary behaviour helped me tremendously in processing bad news.
Like in any battle (bloody or metaphorical), feeling that you are not alone matters. Two of my former colleagues confided their own baby-related struggles to me, which although different from mine (each infertility journey is unique), bound us closer as we talked about this deeply intimate topic. As they were also part of the small club of vaginal ultrasound junkies and spermogram-survivors, we laughed about the least sexy aspects of it . I see them much more regularly than before. In Nairobi, I also became close friends with a lovely American woman who had suffered five miscarriages, and yet kept her relentless energy and her faith in God. We actually had lunch every Tuesday for over a year, sharing in our stories and worries.
Many of these women achieved a healthy pregnancy in the years before I did. When they announced it to me, my reaction was always bittersweet. One the one hand, their pregnancy meant that I lost a day-to-day fellow struggler and was a little bit more alone in my enduring infertility situation. But on the other, it gave me hope of a similarly successful outcome.
Now that I am myself newly pregnant, I intend to continue to help those I know who are still hoping for light at the end of the tunnel. Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to his friend Benjamin Webb back in 1784, “lending” him ten louis d’or (gold coins) at a time when he was in need. His request to Webb was not to be paid back. Instead he asked that in the future, when Webb would meet a man in similar distress, he would entrust this Sum to him under similar modalities. This is now called “paying forward”, and it’s very similar to how I envisage “paying back” all the precious support I received during my infertility journey.
Given I work in Global Health, one way I am trying to do this is by pitching to my organization the creation of a programme focused on infertility prevention, diagnosis and treatment in Africa (where countries in the “infertility belt” have the highest rates of infertility in the world); here’s the exec summary of the proposal. Fingers crossed!
