Why start a blog now?

Our journey through fertility treatments and finally through IVF was kept very private for a variety of reasons.  I was young and maybe a little sad that someone in my age group had to go through this.  After all, I was only 27 when I did my first IVF cycle, and even younger when I started the process.   And perhaps I felt ashamed; there can be a stigma attached to fertility treatments – real or perceived.

The big reason?  We just didn’t want to answer a lot of questions.  Fertility treatments are painful enough as it is without everyone asking a ton of questions.  We were struggling with many of those questions ourselves and quite frankly didn’t have a lot of the answers.  Plus I didn’t want to deal with all those well-meaning people who would say things like:

“What if it’s twins, triplets, etc?”  (I was just trying to get pregnant with one; not worry about anything else.)

“Well Octomom just had 8!  Could that happen to you?”  (Thanks Octomom for giving fertility treatments a dirty name.)

“Why not adopt?”  (I have no problem with adoption at all; it is a very loving and generous thing to do, but it takes a very special kind of person to open their hearts and lives in that process and I knew I wasn’t that person.)

“If you just relax it’ll happen!” and many other varieties of “If you just….” followed by some other well-meaning advice.

“Are you pregnant yet?”

“Well so and so did ____ and they were able to get pregnant.  Why don’t you do that?”

And so on.  I just couldn’t deal with that.  I was dealing with my own stages of grief.  Really that’s what fertility treatments come down to for a lot of people.  I was angry, very angry.  Why me?  Why is it the teen mom and not me?  Why is it the crack head parent with three other children to support and not me?  So many why’s.  So many prayers for a baby.  Then it shifted to praying not for a baby, but praying for understanding.  I had to make peace with the fact that for some reason God needed me to go through this.

It was much easier to open up for our second cycle, but I still wasn’t comfortable with everyone in my life knowing I was doing this.  I just wanted to complete my family and move on with my life.

Now I get it.  This is why God needed me to go through this and why I needed to start a blog.  To help other people; to share my experiences in the hopes that it will make it easier for someone else that’s struggling; to provide understanding to those that never have or will never have to go through this.  And hopefully to help me find that missing piece...

Note to my readers: After my next blog post I will be answering common IVF questions!  Please post in the comments or send me a message of your questions and I will do my best to answer them.