Loss of Finding Out | Guest Post
When you experience loss in your journey to parenthood, ranging from difficulty conceiving to infertility to fertility treatments to miscarriage to prematurity and infant loss, it wears on you. But, what most people fail to understand in this process is that loss is not just a one and done, the loss continues to happen to you over and over again, and even worse, it starts a spiral that feels never ending, the spiral of secondary losses. Those secondary losses that come as a result of your primary loss and can range from friends who you cannot rely on anymore to a personal instinct and intuition you no longer can believe in to the picture of what you had expected your family to look like changing and evolving.
For me, the changes in the picture were the worst.
Remember Back to the Future when Marty McFly kept pulling out that family photo and seeing himself and his siblings disappearing as he mucked around, upheaving his parents’ history? For those of us who have lost, especially when the losses stack up, it can often feel like the picture literally erases and changes in front of us.
Way back when Mark and I were starting our parenting journey, I had this fantasy in my mind of how I would find out I was pregnant and then how I would tell Mark. I imagined him coming home and me saying hold on, here’s a gift for you and then him revealing a t-shirt that said Best Dad or #1 Dad, or a onesie that said I Love My Daddy. I thought about waking him up, holding the positive pregnancy test and getting to see as my non-morning person husband acclimated to what was happening and then got excited. The fantasies I had in my head were a bit cheesy, sure, but I also dreamed of a fun time, a time that sounded at least somewhat similar to all the experiences my friends and family had.
As the months went on and still no baby, we turned to infertility treatment.
Taking all romance and fun out of the situation, the reality became very clinical and the fantasy seemed out of reach. Want to know how you find out you’re pregnant via IVF? You have a date that you have to go to the doctor’s office where (as if you hadn’t been poked and prodded enough to this point) they draw blood for a pregnancy test. I, like a lot of others, would then go to work or back to my daily life, trying not to think about it, trying to distract myself, while simultaneously staring at my phone and hoping for THE call, the one where a nurse would tell you congratulations or I’m sorry. Then, I would immediately call Mark, except for the one time where my test was on a Sunday and we were together for the call. Those fantasies of how I would tell Mark slipped further and further away, replaced by clinical procedures involving shots, invasive ultrasounds, blood tests, hormones, fear, hope, worry, joy, and everything in between, all hopefully leading to that call.
And so that’s how it went. Our first round, I was pregnant, but the nurse who called me spoke so clinically that it took me a minute to realize she was telling me I was pregnant. I’m sorry, but when you’re calling anyone to tell them they’re pregnant, let alone someone who has gone through the very intense process of IVF, show some joy, be direct and say congratulations, not your test came back positive. But, I digress.
Then, we had one cycle where the news was a no and at my in-law’s lake house, I got the call, walked outside with Mark close at my heels and then heard the dreaded I’m sorry, followed by the let’s schedule a consult with the doctor. I remember feeling overwhelmed and so incredibly sad and all the emotions because well it was devastating and also, I was hopped up on so many hormones, and thinking wow, it’s like you won’t even let me grieve this loss before moving onto the next step, the next round of stick Michelle with a ton of needles and dump a whole bunch of hormones into her that cause her to alternate between crying for no reason, feeling like she’s jumping out of her skin, to be exhausted, to be nauseous, to feel like she’s pregnant even if she isn’t.
Our third round resulted in another pregnancy and this time, the nurse was much more direct and congratulatory, but again, we knew when the call was coming, there was no chance of surprise, and especially after our quick breakfast post blood test found me completely nauseous over the chocolate I love, we knew what the news was going to be.
Having been through infertility, miscarriage, and infant loss, I can tell you that each one of those stages was a loss.
But, the loss that we talk the least about is when you have to go through fertility treatments. The loss of conceiving naturally, the way you’re “supposed to,” the way it seems like every single other person is able to, is a difficult loss. For females, this often feels like a hit and even a loss to the very essence of you because we are told throughout time that we are good at getting pregnant and having babies. It also means that any timelines or any thoughts of when you would like to have your kids and how far apart you would like them to be, etc. gets changed for us. I have a living, active 11-month-old as I write this, but I look at things and think I should have had more living children by now or that my kids would have been older by now.
But, I also think about the whole process of being pregnant and having a baby.
I missed out on the chance to surprise my husband with pregnancy announcements, but I also lost the chance to assume that I could get pregnant, to assume that I could stay pregnant, and to assume that pregnancy equaled bringing a baby home.
I lost innocence and naivete and I often wish I could have those back.
For now though, I will love my two children, one in heaven and one here with us, and I will create memories that will sustain me even more than a surprise pregnancy announcement. But, it does not mean that I am not remorseful and hurt over the picture I had in my mind of what our family would look like, what it should look like, and that is something I will just have to let go of eventually.
