{giggles} "It Happened Sooner Than We Thought!"
The dance of infertility, pregnancy, announcements, womanhood, and virility in your 20s, 30s, and 40s.
I’ve been riding the whole infertility train for about three years now. It broadly sucks and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, but I’ve largely come to Jesus about it. My life is very weird currently — I just spent 20 years in mostly BS white-collar jobs staring at screens and wondering why the screens were relevant, and now I’m a bartender at a corporate sports bar chain, headed to Seattle later tonight for an Alaskan cruise (seven years ago I swore I’d never ever go on a cruise) — but I do try to temper the resentment associated with infertility as I move towards foster/adoption down the road.
As you ride the ol’ infertility train, you realize there are certain triggers along the way, provided by both genders. Maybe a couple that seems hideously unhealthy cranks out four kids in five years, and you wonder: “How or why is that happening?” Maybe you find a YouTube of a mother who shackles her kids to the refrigerator door handle, and you think: “Hmmm, why not me?” A lot of dudes are very passive, flippant fathers — they might be better at the house, but how they discuss fatherhood in group settings is weak — and that can be a trigger too. It’s a hard road to walk, but you need to reduce your triggers along the way.
Now, all that said, twice this week I had a woman in conversation rub her belly and indicate she was somewhere between 10 and 15 weeks pregnant, giggling and adding: “It happened sooner than we thought.” Look, in the grand scheme of shit, I cannot begrudge the happiness of other people, or begrudge the motility of said Chad’s sperm or the bountiful nature of said Lindsay’s eggs (those are fake names, just so you know). But I do think sometimes people present this stuff in a way that’s a little bit offensive to those going through the other side of it, be that infertility or repeated miscarriages.
At the same time, you don’t want to force conversations in a certain direction, or have people walk on eggshells around you — that’s not organic and won’t lead to a long, fruitful friendship.
It’s a hard little dance to navigate.
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