Fertility Woes

Another mother in my mom’s group just announced her pregnancy. She’s the third one out of the 10 of us so far. Ours is a group of first-time moms whose babies, now toddlers, are all the same age (16 months), and now three of us are on the road to our second.

I know what will happen next: one by one each of the moms’ bellies will balloon and then pop, and then there will be me, standing there in my non-maternity jeans while the others talk about food cravings and fatigue and sleep deprivation. I will be coming to our weekly playgroups armed with my one beautiful child to find the topics have shifted from napping and pre-schools to the exponentially increased workload of caring for two. Well-meaning, the moms will reassure me that having only one is a blessing, and then they’ll go back to cooing at their newborns.

It won’t matter what they say, though. As deeply in love as I am with my child, and as much as I appreciate his blessed existence, in my head “family” includes more than one child, and anything less is just not complete.

I assumed that because I was able to bear my first child, that there would be no problem bearing a second, even though I was told I had only a 2% chance of getting pregnant the first time around. I subscribed to my own natural healing efforts, and four months later I was pregnant — naturally, the old-fashioned way.

Now, once again, I’m panicking over the negative statistics about aging and fertility, I’m feeling jabs of envy each time I hear of another friend getting pregnant, and I’m getting impatient, stressed. All over again, I have to remind myself that I am not a statistic, that I can make a difference in my own fertility, that I need to be patient and mostly, that I have to surrender to whatever life brings me. Just like when I conceived my son, I have to be in that place where I can see that my family — my life — is complete, just like it is.

And once I can see that again, anything is possible.

By Cindy Bailey