Things their mother should’ve told them

Posted by admin in Stories on 03 10th, 2010 | no responses

We all know the feeling of desperately wanting to get pregnant, and being forced to witness the pregnancies of those around us, friends, colleagues, 12-year olds, homeless people, pretty much everybody else who wants to, and even those who don’t! Ugh!!!!! Is there a better word for this- It’s just maddening.

One of our fertility friends wrote in and asked me, what do you say to those comments like, “when do you plan on having a baby?” or my favorite, ”I can’t wait for you to get pregnant so our kids can play together!”.  Here’s the thing, I know from my own experience that those kinds of questions should just never be asked. Someone with class simply knows that you don’t ask a woman about her plans for having a baby unless it’s obvious that she wants to share that with you. But I should add that my experience has given me a sort of sensitivity to this subject that most people don’t automatically have–why should they? Because they haven’t experiened infertility, there  is a whole world of things that just would not occur to them, so my point, we should give them the benefit of the doubt, don’t you think? It’s like expecting a blind person to describe the color of the sky, they just can’t do it.

It’s funny that this comes up today because I was recently asked by someone I work with when or if I was going to have kids. But, we have worked together for 2 years and it wasn’t completely absurd for her to ask, we work at a school and most of the people we work with, have kids. In this case, I sort of told her a short version of the truth, and I’m sure she regretted asking, not that I was aiming for that, but it does teach them a lesson. I personally like the answer, “we’re gonna stick with dogs for the time being,”  that really oughta do it. But I think it’s okay to say, “we’re working on it,” or you can even say something kind of light like, “we’re not quite there but I promise you’ll be the first to know.” I don’t think there is an easy answer to this and each case is different but we can always (we meaning, fertility challenged) and should always walk away with our dignity in tact-we don’t have to join the others in the land of the tactfully challenged, we have enough problems.