Your pregnant infertile friend

In case you missed the big news (tucked into my most recent radio broadcast post), I am pregnant. This was a big surprise and has filled us with joy and total trepidation. We are blessed with five kids in our home right now (3 adopted, 1 bio, 1 foster), the oldest is 7 and the youngest is 5 months. Not exactly the timing we would have planned to get pregnant again, but God’s timing and ours have never seemed to match and our family is the better for it.

Photo by Rebecca Tredway Photography

Over the ten years since our infertility diagnosis (and the many treatments and tests over the years since then that confirmed how “impossible” it would be for us to get pregnant on our own) we have found that we are less infertile and more intermittently fertile. I’m so thankful for the gift of our biological son and the gift of this pregnancy (along with our two children we look forward to meeting in heaven), but the fact that our fertility has seemed so random and outside of our control has been a constant frustration over the last decade. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned through our struggle with infertility, ectopic pregnancies and even through our two (so far) successful pregnancies, it’s this:

Hope is costly.

I kind of hate hope. I shove it down and ignore it and fight it out of my life. I want low expectations so I’m never disappointed. I’m not saying this is right, just that this is how I’ve coped with our fertility issues, adoption struggles and foster uncertainties. And it’s worked fairly well. There are joys I have missed by not embracing hope, but when pain has come it hasn’t taken me under the way I fear it would have if I’d let myself hope.

This quirk of the pregnant infertile woman can make us kind of a weird friend to have. I know not everybody responds the way I do, but I think there is a segment of the intermittently fertile that struggle with hope. I want to give you a little window into the mind of your intermittently fertile friend so maybe you can help her cope or at least understand why she might be a little quirky about this whole pregnancy thing. Here are some weirdnesses you might notice in your friend:

I say “Lord willing” a lot. This was a phrase that entered my vocabulary when we lived in Tennessee for five years. I’m not sure if it’s a southernism or what, but it (and its redneck cousin “Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise”) have become part of my way of acknowledging that I am not in control of this process and that I’m not actually sure it’s going to work. I might use this phrase in response to the question “When is your due date?” “It’s in early October, Lord willing.” See how that works? Other people might use the word “if” a lot. Like “If all goes well. . . ” or “If everything is okay. . . ”

I minimize pregnancy symptoms. I don’t want my world to revolve around pregnancy. That feels so risky. So I want to fight through however I’m feeling to maintain as much normalcy as possible. I don’t really want to have a long talk about how I’m doing. Especially in the early weeks where the risk of loss is high and it’s hard to see any outward signs that things are progressing normally, I want desperately to get my mind off of this pregnancy instead of imagining all the things that could be going wrong.

I’m sensitive about pregnancy complaints. I have spent YEARS being irritated at women who whined about having to deal with the gift I was being denied. I want to be clear that it’s possible to talk about pregnancy struggles without seeming like you’re whining and complaining. And it’s not that women shouldn’t share their frustrations, it’s just that for the infertile woman it’s pretty tough to be sympathetic. I remember when we were in the home study process for our first adoption the social worker asked me if I felt peace about our infertility. I told her the biggest ongoing struggle for me was knowing how to respond to women who complained about pregnancy. I added that I’m sure if I was pregnant I’d be a whiner, too. I will always be grateful to that social worker for looking up from her paperwork and saying, “No. No you won’t. You will appreciate it in a different way from other women.” While I know there are moments where I have shared that pregnancy is difficult, my heart is always thankful that I get to experience those difficulties. I get awkward when I find myself in a conversation where women are swapping complaints.

Maternity clothes make me uncomfortable. Okay, not physically uncomfortable. They just make me feel weird. I don’t want to spend money on a whole wardrobe of clothes I worry I won’t actually need. I’ve spent many years making sure I never look pregnant for fear that somebody will ask me an awkward question and I’ll be forced to address my infertility. So actually dressing like a pregnant lady feels risky. I hold out as long as I can before putting them on (yes, I literally popped a button off my pants last pregnancy) and as soon as physically possible after the baby is born I quit wearing maternity clothes. I can’t say this is rational, it’s just this self-protective response to how scary the hope of pregnancy feels to me and how hard it is to fully commit to it.

I’m thankful for each day of pregnancy. Each day of pregnancy feels like it could be the last. Each moment with this baby needs to be treasured. There is not a day that I don’t worry I’m going to start bleeding and I’ll be back in that sterile hospital saying goodbye. So I try to combat that fear with thankfulness. Each day is a gift. I want to enjoy it and imagine that if this was the last day my baby spent on earth, that child would know they were loved and that they had a mama who loved to laugh, to dance, to sing, to indulge in a hamburger now and then. Pregnancy doesn’t seem like a 9 month process. It feels like a series of potential last days that I have to figure out how to positively deal with.

I won’t buy baby clothes until the last minute. I have had the moment of boxing up baby clothes you bought for a child that is not coming home to you. I have given away crib bedding that I just couldn’t use for another child after experiencing the loss of the child who was meant to sleep in that crib (this experience was via an adoption loss). I don’t want to go through that again. Buying any kind of baby supplies feels like a risk and it scares me. (Same thing for buying clothes for foster kids in sizes they won’t need for a couple months. Too risky) I would rather be running around Target at 38 weeks pregnant than see clothes in my house and imagine how I’ll feel if I don’t end up needing them. The party we had to celebrate the birth of our son happened when he was a couple weeks old for this very reason.

I don’t want to enjoy pregnancy too much. I’m afraid of enjoying pregnancy. What if I love it and I can’t make it happen again? What if it feels so special and magical that it changes how I feel about fostering and adoption? These were questions I wrestled with during our first pregnancy and my response was to just not focus too much of my life on pregnancy either positively or negatively. Now that I’ve given birth and know that it didn’t change my feelings about fostering or adoption one bit, I’m not as concerned about this. But it is still something that hangs back there in my mind— Don’t love this too much because you can’t have it again and then you’ll just miss it and be unsatisfied.

I hope this helps give a peek at the heart of the woman who finds hope and pregnancy a bit scary. Maybe with it all laid out this way it will help you be a friend and an encouragement to her heart and understand her quirks. Sometimes when we can’t have hope, we need a sister to come beside us who is willing to hope for us. A friend of mine recently told me she’s making a baby blanket for this child and praying with each stitch. While I can’t bring myself to do it, I love that she’s acting in faith for me that this will have a happy ending.

Intermittently fertile sisters, any thoughts to add?