The Lens of Infertility
Every once in a while, you read something and think, “If I wasn’t infertile, my mind would have never gone here.” But you are infertile, so your mind does go there. You see the world through infertile-tinted glasses.
Sometimes that’s a good thing. Maybe it makes you more sensitive to others because you know how you feel on the other end of a poorly-worded question. Maybe you know how to give good comfort. Or maybe it makes you more patient, more understanding, more grateful.
And sometimes that’s a bad thing. You see dangers where there are no dangers. You wonder how another person isn’t worried about their pregnancy because fretting is your second job. You see meaning in innocent comments, lose friendships from jealousy, or avoid sections of the store as if your life depended on it.
The lens giveth and the lens taketh.
The article in question was about puzzles. I was reading it because a friend passed it along. I like puzzles — interactive fiction puzzles but also logic puzzles and escape rooms and jigsaw puzzles. He sent it along because he knew I liked that moment when I saw how a puzzle came together.
But all I could think as I read it was about unexplained infertility and the inexplicable within diagnosable infertility. How we think we can know the cause even without knowing everything about the body. How many things we believe come with an explanation that we’ll look back on decades from now and marvel at how little we understood.
That’s what happens when you read puzzle articles with infertile-tinted glasses.
4 comments
Does it help that this is where my brain went too?
Networks and intertwining is something I think about almost daily. We see correlations, collect data about aspects being “sufficient”, but when looking for the underlying cause of find redundancies and learn that often “sufficient” doesn’t equal “necessary.” Often the flip happens too.
We still don’t know what the underlying cause of my infertility diagnosis is. I know I’m prone to anemia, have low progesterone and bruise easily. That’s it. In the eyes of most physicians I’m completely healthy (and need to spend the rest of my life on iron supplements). The puzzle is too complex for them.
After 6 1/2 years of being a parent, and with my family complete, I find that there aren’t too many things anymore that trigger the “infertile” part of my brain. The one thing that does is when people — esp. women over 35 — blithely assume that they will be able to have a child whenever they plan to, and the number of children they desire. Obviously it works out that way for some folks, but for me and for so many other people I know, it did not.
This is still me, all the time. Not necessarily in a painful or sad way, but it’s an awareness that some don’t have. I get really uncomfortable when people announce very early pregnancies. I note when there is only one child in the family and wonder, is that by choice? I see child-free couples my age and wonder endlessly if that is by choice or circumstance. And I never, never, ever ask. But it’s always there, in the background, lurking.
I can see how the puzzles, the final clicking, would bring up thoughts of infertility. I’ve felt like my particular infertility journey was like a puzzle where nothing ever quite matched up. I also think that the lens that you see things through is forever changed after infertility, and there will always be those moments where something triggers you — maybe it’s just a “huh, my mind went there” and maybe it’s more pervasive. I wonder about only children, too, cringe at early pregnancy announcements, wonder if couples without children chose their family size or had it chosen for them, and get triggered by books, movies, and TV shows all the time. It can be exhausting, and I hope one day it’s less frequent.