How Infertility Transformed My Role as a Wife
My inability to support new life has allowed me to rid myself of the woman I “should” be
Before they can read, young girls learn their biological role: motherhood. But when I received my infertility diagnosis, I got the opportunity to redefine my worth.
Baby girls are clothed in onesies adorned with flowers, symbols of fertility. Pacifiers are replaced by dolls and plastic blocks by kitchen sets as young girls immerse themselves in the imaginary game “house.” These seemingly harmless swaps and clothing articles subtly reinforce the notion that when a young girl grows up, she is destined to be a mother.
As a child, I never fancied dolls and detested anything floral. I preferred playing street hockey with the boys and scavenging for worms as opposed to having teatime with the girls. Though my interests lied elsewhere, messages of my biological destiny bombarded all aspects of my life.
Television shows depicted women as loving housewives cooking, cleaning and taking care of the children. The scientists I aspired to be were portrayed by males like Bill Nye. Even my conversations with girls at school focused on the ages at which we wanted to be married and have our first, second and third kids.
When I graduated high school, I desired to find a male life partner, but I vowed that no man or baby would be more important than my career. At the time, my sole purpose in life was to become a highly acclaimed researcher. I wouldn’t let society’s expectations of motherhood get in my way.
Then I met my now-husband, Josh.
I was born an only child to parents that were also only children. Josh, on the other hand, had one brother, nine sets of aunts and uncles, and more than twenty cousins. During the early years of our relationship, my independent, childless goals slowly withered away as Josh taught me how the love and connection of a family could add to, not detract from, my life. He knew of my professional goals and not only encouraged me to pursue them, but he instilled in me that I could be a good mother and still make an impact in science if I so desired.
When we got engaged, I made the conscious decision to put our family before my career.
After much self-discovery, I realized that I desired to live a long life surrounded by my children and grandchildren as opposed to my degrees and professional accomplishments.
Josh and I wed during graduate school. Halfway through completing our doctorate degrees, we knew we wanted to have our first baby when I graduated two years later. After we married, the scientist in me began researching ways to prepare for a healthy pregnancy. On hormonal birth control since the age of 14, I was now 24 and hadn’t had a period in nearly four years. My gynecologist suggested I stop taking the pill about a year before I desired to get pregnant because my body would need time to eliminate the artificial hormones from its system and restart its natural menstrual cycle.
She assured me that my cycle would be back to normal in no time because this is what my body was made to do.
Josh and I were eager to get our family started with a “dissertation baby” — a baby that I would get pregnant with while finishing my doctorate and deliver shortly after I graduated the following year. That way, I could stay at home with the baby while Josh finished his final year of schooling, and we would have plenty of years in my biological clock to further expand our family.
With complete faith in my body’s biological destiny and with our dreams of a dissertation baby at the forefront of my mind, I stopped taking the pill a year and a half after we got married. This initial part of the baby-making process was all up to me — I needed to make my body the prime environment for two cells to create new life.
According to my comprehensive online research, I understood it would likely take one to three months to regain my period after stopping my nearly 10-year birth control regime. Despite knowing this, my heart fluttered each time I walked to the bathroom, eagerly hoping to see the bright red blood that would be a sign that my body was ready to regulate itself and support a pregnancy. I even started monitoring my basal body temperature, as I planned to manually track future menstrual cycles to have an idea of when I might be ovulating to get the timing right.
Days off the pill turned into weeks as I quickly hit the three-month mark without a trace of blood.
I was devastated.
I frantically called my gynecologist, desperate for guidance, but she simply told me to give it three more months. Because I had been on birth control for ten years and had not had a period for half that, it was likely my body needed a little more time to regulate itself.
“You’re young,” my doctor said. “You have years to get pregnant. There’s no need to worry.”
Telling me not to worry is like telling someone afraid of heights not to look down — it’s a lost cause.
As soon as I got off the call, I frantically began counting backwards from June, the month I hoped to give birth. To fulfill my plan and my “womanly duty” of childbearing, I would need to get pregnant around September, the same month my doctor predicted I would get my period back, exactly six months after I quit the pill. We would be cutting it close, but I didn’t have any other choice than to wait it out.
Three more months passed, and September arrived without a trace of blood, pinch of menstrual cramps or ache of tender breasts. I called my doctor once again, who seemed a little more concerned this time and asked me to come in for blood work.
When we examined my blood work, we found that my female reproductive hormones were essentially non-existent…even lower than the levels in a post-menopausal woman.
Yet again, I was devastated.
As a biological female in a heterosexual relationship, society deemed motherhood as my destiny. Though I pushed it away as a young girl, it was instilled in me that my job — my responsibility — was to create a space where a life could be formed and carried into this world. My worth was seemingly defined by my fertility and width of my childbearing hips. If I couldn’t produce children, I would be the reason my husband and I lived our lives without driving to weekend soccer games, kissing bruised knees, attending high school graduations, and watching our children start families of our own.
Debilitating guilt ensued. I started blaming myself for getting on birth control at 14, positive that it forever shut down my reproductive system. I blamed myself for the eating disorder I had developed and recovered from just two years earlier, certain that my body would never trust me with another life if I couldn’t take care of my own. I blamed myself for starting a Ph.D. program, confident the associated mental stress and 14+ hour days in the lab with hazardous chemicals contributed to a physically stressed body that refused to support reproduction.
I not only blamed myself for making decisions which affected my reproductive system, but I also shamed myself for being a wife that my husband didn’t deserve. When he married me, he didn’t expect to marry a woman who didn’t have the ability to get pregnant. He didn’t manipulate his body and health with birth control, high stress or an eating disorder. He didn’t deserve to endure the emotional burden that my mistakes inadvertently placed on him.
He deserved a better wife.
After seeking the help of a reproductive endocrinologist, I was diagnosed with hypothalamic amenorrhea and told that because of my “type-A” personality, I might not ever regain a natural menstrual cycle. My husband and I might need to explore infertility treatments, which may or may not work after years and thousands of dollars spent trying every option under the sun.
I thought infertility would be the end of our marriage and the start of a deep depression. I had a history of mental illness, and I was sure that my husband would leave me for not living up to societal expectations, instigating a deep, dark depression I would never return from.
But as soon as we received this news, and I opened my mouth to both blame myself and apologize for not being the wife he deserved, Josh stopped me.
“This is not your fault. I don’t blame you, so please don’t blame yourself,” he gently said.
Hearing those words from my husband, the person who never once believed I was a problem or had created this bump in the road, gave me the permission I needed to relieve myself of all the blame, guilt and shame that was suffocating me.
For a year I had chastised myself for not living up to the role I was meant to serve based on my reproductive system. I went a step further and projected those feelings on my husband, despite the fact that he never once blamed me for losing the ability to ovulate and potentially create a child. In the depths of self-degradation, I not only lost sight of the strong, resilient woman I was, but I also lost sight of the unconditional love and understanding my husband had for me.
In therapy, I unpacked countless images, remarks and messages that made me believe my worth as a woman was defined by my reproductive abilities. I processed the guilt I felt, carefully examining why I blamed myself for my infertility, and in turn, why I projected those same feelings onto my loving, supportive husband. Most importantly, I redefined what it meant to me to be a strong woman and equally contributing partner in my marriage — and it was so freeing to accept neither had to do with my fertility.
I’ve been off birth control for nearly a year and a half, and I still don’t have a period or ovulate. It’s incredibly upsetting to not be able to start trying for the family we both so desire, but this battle with infertility has been a gift for my relationship with my husband — and my relationship with myself.
Our relationship was built on respect, patience and understanding. This infertility season is just that — a season. It does not define our relationship. And it certainly does not, and will not, tear us apart. It has allowed us to open a dialogue about the roles we want to play as husband and wife, not the roles society defines for us.
For me, my battle with infertility has made me redefine what it means to be a woman and a good wife.
Yes, I was born as a biological female with the organs needed to support a pregnancy, but just because I have those organs doesn’t mean they instruct my purpose or define my worth. And just because someone is born with ovaries doesn’t mean they identify as a woman, nor it mean someone born without them cannot identify as one.
We are not defined by the bodies we are born into.
Yes, I am a wife in a heterosexual relationship, but that does not mean my purpose in this relationship is to bear children and take care of the home. I am still that strong, independent young woman that I aimed to be when I was a child, and now I bring that same compassion, spunk, and intelligence to this relationship. We do not have to feel guilty for being unable or consciously unwilling to fulfill an antiquated expectation of the “proper wife.”
When it gets healthy, my body might be able to support a beautiful pregnancy and bring a child into this world — but it might not, and because of my season of infertility, that’s something I can accept without shame or guilt.
