My Secondary Infertility Story
Secondary infertility is real, painful and heartbreaking. It’s complicated by the guilt that you already have a child/children, so you don’t fit neatly into the “infertile” category, and you may look as if you are not struggling at all.
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Keshet Starr is a friend, mentor and colleague, and I am honored she has decided to share her story with all of you.
“Looking at me, you would never guess that infertility is party of my story. I have three beautiful children, pretty evenly spaced, I am knee deep in the world of mommy-hood, and I can talk baby gear with the best of them (don’t get me started on comparing double strollers). But look beneath the hood, so to speak, and it’s a different story.
You see, my first child was conceived after two and a half years of increasingly intensive fertility treatments, two and a half years during which everyone besides my close friends probably thought I was waiting to finish school, but really I was waiting for my body to respond to the drugs and finally do its job. The second-to-last month of that process was the lowest; I had had a really good feeling that this was ‘it,’ and I was counting down the days to take a blood test to confirm a pregnancy when a stop in the bathroom on my way out to the doctor’s office confirmed the opposite news. I had never felt so betrayed by my body and expectations before, and when the doctor called me almost exactly a month later, as I sat on a New Jersey Transit train on my way home from work, to tell me good news, it felt nothing short of a miracle.
When I was ready to try again, I repeated the protocol, and it worked on my second month with my second chiId. And then for my third child, it worked like a charm the first month.
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So when I decided I was ready to begin treatments for a fourth, I thought I knew exactly what to do. Sure, the treatments were expensive and time-consuming, and increasingly difficult to coordinate with my now-managerial job and growing family, but I had long since accepted that this was a challenge Gd had given me, and I was lucky He had made things relatively easy.
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But the first month, complete with IUI, failed. And then the second. And third. And fourth. I was now in uncharted territory--the magic bullet that had always worked in the past had failed, not once but several times. And I was now much older than I had been when I first started infertility treatments years ago, another strike against me.
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If you’ve experienced infertility, you are familiar with the particular torture of the two week wait. Even with all of science’s advances in reproductive technology, there is no way to speed up this part--you do everything you can, and then, for fourteen days, you wait to see if it worked. I generally try to distract myself from thinking about my fertility during this period.
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But at one point this year, the waiting time came before and during Rosh Hashanah. I went to shul, trying to gingerly avoid the many pregnant women there. I prayed like Hannah, whose story we read, asking for just one more life this year in our family--and if that didn’t happen, to be with me anyway. I cried, and prayed and hoped.
I used to think this timing was particularly cruel--to have to mourn and plan all at once. But now, I wonder, if it’s perfectly Jewish in its way; this juxtaposition of loss and pragmatism and grief and hope all at once, like the glass that we shatter under the wedding canopy. It echoes my experience of infertility and faith as well. I have never felt closer to G-d than I have when in the throes of infertility. I have never felt more acutely aware of how little control I have. I have never been more conscious of the fact that one of the most important questions of my life cannot be solved by hard work, research and optimism, even though infertility treatments require all these. I have never felt at once so held by G-d and so angry with Him. In a way, I have never felt so human.
I am still in the middle of my story, which is surprisingly painful to go through despite how blessed I have been. I don’t know how it ends, or if it will end, or if I will live the rest of my life with the question hanging, the sentence unfinished. All I know in this moment is the prayer I keep repeating--No matter what, just stay with me.”