The other side

I worked on my "Common Ground" post for two or three days before I posted it. I tweaked it for fear that it would sound too harsh. I reworked it a couple of times. I kicked it up "Freshman English 101-style" with a rough draft.

But it still wasn't right.

After all that re-reading I read it one more time after I published it and thought to myself, "I'll be damned." I thought I bent over backwards to make it even-steven for both sides, but it's not. As if I weren't already "out" about my relative newness to pregnancy loss, I realized that I forgot one major side of the coin.

I already know how tough it is to be a mommy, but infertile? Not so much. What about the issues that infertiles struggle with on a daily basis? Speaking as one who doesn't know about that (yet) I can tell you that if you're not infertile, you really can't get it. I think you have to live it and breathe it to get it.

I will say that when I was pregnant, I had a close family member dealing with infertility, and I bent over backwards to NOT talk about my pregnancy in front of her. However, 95% of the time, pregnant people don't know when they're around infertiles. They probably never mean to hurt feelings, but they inevitably will. This has been made very clear to me just in the short time since my miscarriage. I've had several people (who don't know about the miscarriage) make comments about "when you have another one" and about so-and-so being pregnant. I've even had a couple people innocently ask if we're planning to have more, and I vaguely answer "probably, sometime."

Just to clarify, I'm not writing this post "in response to" anyone's comments. I don't take them personally because I know they're just opinions, but I did want to acknowledge and validate those feelings that I don't understand. It must be absolutely awful to want something so badly and not be able to make it happen. It has to be an all-consuming, terrible burden to live with every day.

I don't know what it's like to long to get pregnant month after month. I don't know what it's like to chart temperatures and time cycles. I don't what it's like to see specialists and make game plans. I only know what it's like to be pregnant, and then have it taken away.

We're all sisters, and I'm sorry I forgot to include one side of the family.