Sucks.

Need I say more? I tried for a minute to use another blog to write about it. Then I more or less “came out” with most of my friends about my/ our infertility. So I figured I may as well just “come out” here with it:

Khalil and I are struggling with infertility. Real, live, bonafide infertility.

And in the way that my weight loss posts don’t typically talk about calories and pounds (although I know some do) but the emotional and mental aspects of weight loss, my infertility posts are not going to talk about MD visits, medicines, diagnoses, or other such details. I find them boring (to myself, I’m not at all talking down about others who want to keep that kind of record, it’s just not me) and so I don’t want to share them with you guys.

I will tell you this, though: infertility sucks.

It’s weird thinking that you can’t just have sex and BAM! there’s a baby. It’s kind of sad and very frustrating knowing that it’s going to take more than just the two of us and a magical moment and all of a sudden there will be a new addition to our family. It’s hard knowing that it will take us, lots of not-so-magical moments, and a team of doctors to get us pregnant.

The first thing that I have to grieve about? Is the way we get to tell people we’re pregnant. I didn’t tell many people that we were even trying or considering pregnancy. When people asked, I was very vague. “Sometime!” or “We’ll see” or I’d go so far as to make things up “We’re waiting until Khalil gets through grad school”, “My career’s going so well right now, we want to wait”, “We’re waiting for a house”, “We’re trying to get our debt paid down”- all of those have come out of my mouth. I really, really wanted it to be a surprise. There was a place in my heart every month while I waited that planned out when I’d be seeing family next and how we’d tell them. The month before Thanksgiving I wondered if Thanksgiving would be too soon to tell everyone. Ditto Christmas, Memorial Day, Easter, etc. (Not Valentines Day. I was in Pittsburgh for Valentines day, dealing with my dying father. I wasn’t planning pregnancy news.)

When I told my mom, she asked why I waited so long to tell her. And I told her the truth- because I had wanted it to be a surprise.

It still breaks my heart that when we get pregnant, it will likely be planned. There are still some steps in the meantime, but right now the all-knowing doctors are saying that IVF will probably be our best bet (for those of you not familiar with infertility vernacular/ acronyms, IVF stands for In-vitro fertilization, and it’s when they take my egg(s) and his sperm, fertilize my eggs in a petri dish, and a few days later (hopefully) transplant embryos back into me. Fun, no?). This is just about the most intrusive and expensive way of getting pregnant. Again, fun, no?

Infertility, much like death and dying, is a grieving process. The difference is that there are sparkles of hope along the way, that keep getting run over. You have a test, or a doctor’s appointment, or something. And you have a hope that this one will be fine, this one will show something different. And then it doesn’t. You have each month of hoping that you’ve happened upon a miraculous surprise- naturally-achieved pregnancy- and then you don’t.

The idea is to keep up the hope. But this infertility? Not only does it suck, it’s also a hope sucker. You have to work to keep it from sucking all the hope right on out of you.