Friday, November 05, 2010
In or out?
Until making the decision to move forward with this blog, I had been very private about my fertility struggles. From the outside looking in, we are just your average family of five. Especially now, since our journey is over. Back in the days when I was still in the trenches, though, I felt a strong need to conceal the truth. I just couldn't deal with a daily barrage of questions regarding the state of our fertility. Maybe I was ashamed, fueled by my desire to appear normal to the fertile world around me; maybe it was my fear of being pitied (or any number of other factors), but I was very selective about who had knowledge of my infertility issues. I still feel this way to an extent. However, I am happy to discuss my experiences if I feel it will help someone and they show a genuine interest in my story. So I'm curious blogging world, in a real world scenario, are you open with your infertility struggles or do you hide it? Are you in, or are you out?
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Mostly in, for many of the same reasons you've cited. I was having a hard enough time handling the stress of ttc & infertility treatments, nevermind having a dozen other people waiting with baited breath along with me for the results of each cycle. Even pre-IF, I just never felt that our family building plans should be anyone else's business except mine & dh's.
ReplyDeleteI have a few close friends I have confided in over the years, some made through our pregnancy loss support group. I'm sure our extended families have guessed some of the story, since we I was pregnant once but we don't have children -- but we have never really come out of the closet with them re: fertility treatments. Two of my husband's cousins have children via IVF, but we only know about it through family gossip -- they have never talked about it either. Seems weird, but I respect their privacy & I guess they respect mine.
At work, turnover has been such that only a few people are still around who would remember my pregnancy, so I'm sure most of my coworkers have no idea about my story.
I'm out ... all the way out. Most everyone knows about our struggles and I find it hard to refrain from telling people that my daughter is an IVF baby. I don't know why I feel compelled to continually share my story. I have no idea what I hope to gain from telling people, but I can't stop myself.
ReplyDeleteI look forward to following your blog. There aren't many parenting after IF blogs anymore!
LFCA
All the way out baby! Always have been. One of the last of the relatives and friends to have a baby so it was inevitable that people would start gossiping and assuming why i wasn't PG etc. So i let it rip one day, when an old lady approached me at a b'day party, rubbed in the tummy and in broken English asked "no beby"? My IF journey took 6 years. For most i got the pity looks but i didn't care. i knew that one day i would have my miracle. i held on to hope for dear life. I shouted to the world what i was going through, not necessarily for support but for people to leave me alone and stop asking. And most importantly to educate people that not all women fall PG at a drop of a hat!
ReplyDeleteI'm only new to the blogging world. I look forward to following yours and hope that we can share experiences. Please check mine out - i've only got one post at the moment :)
LFCA
I'm here and I'll be reading. I do much more reading than writing these days. Searching for Serenity was my santuary. A place to connect and divulge our struggles..because we were not out. We're out more now that our little Nugget is here, but we still don't shout it from the mountain tops. Rather we sit quietly and patiently with the others in our life still struggling with IF. I look forward to sharing this part of the journey with you.
ReplyDeleteI'm out now. I wasn't while we were going through IF treatments. I had just decided to be more open about it because I wanted more support when we finally conceived. Now I often wonder if people wish we'd just shut up about it already. But I have had so many friends and acquaintances open up to me about their own struggles. I figure if I can help people feel less alone, then that's a good thing. Looking forward to following your blog.
ReplyDeletewelcome to the blogging community! I was in about my two losses and secondary infertility until just recently. Now, pregnant again, I've "come out," because I want to make people understand that it's NOT necessarily a guarantee that pregnancy ends in a live baby, and that having a child isn't necessarily easy for everyone. I'm glad you're here!
ReplyDeleteI try to be open about it when I feel it's appropriate. I want to help educate others and help them grow in their sensitivity towards infertiles, but I don't want it to be about me and trying to gain their sympathy for myself. Sometimes I want to bring it up and don't because I don't think it would honestly be beneficial to anyone, and sometimes I don't want to bring it up but do in an effort to be more open and vulnerable.
ReplyDeleteBlogging has really helped me open up about our struggles. Until recently the experience was so intensely emotional and painful that I just didn't have words to talk about it with people. Reading so many stories of others and testing out my own words in my posts has helped me find my own voice. I write about things that I am worried about, thinking about, experiencing, and then it is easier to talk about them.
ReplyDeleteI have actually shared my blog with the few IRL people who know the details of our struggle. There are others who know that we are having trouble, but nothing more than that.
It took me a long time before I started writing and reaching out for support, I think that I was in shock for a long time following our diagnosis, and then getting so much bad news at every future appt.
So, in my case, I'm not in, but I'm also not out. Its like an iterative process where blogging helps build my confidence to share which helps build my confidence to explore new thoughts in my blog and so on.
Welcome to the blogging world. I hope to join you soon on the other side of this journey. It is wonderful to have you here!
We were mostly out. I guess it depended on who I was talking to, but I was pretty open that we were dealing with some IF issues...just not everyone knew that it was MFI.
ReplyDeleteI wanted people to know for two reasons...1) in case they were dealing with something similar. 2) so that people who were pregnant or immensely fertile would know (maybe?) to use some commonsense when talking about pregnancy/babies around me. Didn't always work, but sometimes.
Oh, and 3...I don't keep things bottled up inside very well. It just festers...and IF would have been the ultimate festering!