After my husband and I began our journey through the fertility process, I took on a new task at work.  I am a pregnancy and adoption counselor (ironically) and I then became the “expert” speaker for our sessions on moving from fertility treatments to adoption in our home study groups.  I didn’t want to concentrate on the negativity of the treatments.  I feel that whatever you go through, no matter how hard or horrible it is, there is always at least one positive thing that you can find about the situation.

I took this idea and rolled it into the beginning of my part of the session by talking about losses and gains in various situations in our lives, such as graduating from college, marriage and moving.  I end the losses and gains part by having couples talk about the losses and gains they experienced while going through the fertility process.  While the answers to the question about what losses couples have experienced comes easily, they are surprised when they can come up with just about the same amount of gains by the time we are done.  Doing this session actually helped me get through the process because I was able to step back and look at what gains I was experiencing both within myself and with my husband.

For anyone going through the fertility process, the losses are obvious.  There is the loss of spontaneity in your love life because everything is on a schedule.  We have the loss of money for all the treatments we have to pay for because most of our insurances won’t pay for everything.  The loss of freedom and the loss of control go hand in hand.  Everything is in someone else’s hands, in someone else’s timing, in someone else’s opinions, in someone else’s options, in someone else’s expertise.  We don’t have control over anything except for whether or not we want to proceed forward or when we want to stop and look at an alternative method of parenting such as adoption or surrogacy.  We have the loss of time as month after month we wait and experience disappointment, only to lose another 30 days before we go through the same thing again.  The loss of privacy happens because we have to tell doctors and nurses about every detail of our personal life and they are present in the room when we are (hopefully) conceiving through IUI or IVF procedures.

We experience the loss of friendships.  This can occur either when others make uncaring or judgmental remarks that cause us to step back from the relationship.  Sometimes we choose to step back from the relationship because we just can’t bear to go to one more baby shower or one more 1st Birthday Party.  We can also experience loss of closeness with our families for the same reasons.

There are also other losses that we experience personally.  The fertility process affects each of us differently and we react to it differently.  Facing the loss of our dream child and the possibility of never being pregnant was hard for me and it was hard for many of the women in my support group.  My husband and I faced the loss of honesty as we did not tell a lot of family members about our problems and month after month I had to tell my Mother-in-law that we were going to wait another 3-5 years to have children because we just weren’t ready yet.  In my job my loss was often thrown in my face as I counseled women facing unplanned pregnancies.

With all those losses, where are the gains?  I found that you have to look deeper, deep within yourself, deep within your relationships to find the gains.  I gained even more closeness in my relationship with my husband.  We went through everything together.  There was no finger pointing at me because, essentially, I was the reason we were going through this.  I loved him deeply before, but because of the process I love him even more.

I gained an inner strength that I didn’t know I had.  The fertility process was hard, harder than I could even imagine, yet I was surviving it.  I gained a sense of humor about the process as well, which is what helped me through.  It was such a heavy thing to go through.  I had to find irony and humor in the process and it helped lighten the load.  I also began to gain a sense of peace, knowing that if it didn’t work I would be able to be a parent through adoption.  I knew I would grieve, but I knew I could heal if that IVF hadn’t worked.

I gained friendships through my fertility support group.  These friendships were what got me through the tough times and they are still going strong as we have all entered new phases in our lives.  I gained confidence through these friends and through starting the fertility support group.

I gained a closeness to God that I had not experienced before.  My faith was strengthened.  Instead of being mad and asking “why me?” I asked for strength to get through everything and to be able to accept whatever outcome we had with the procedures.  This helped me through the hard times along with my husband and my friends.

My husband and I began to gain some control in our lives as well.  At one point we were able to say “we need a break” and we didn’t do any fertility stuff for 8 months before doing our IVF.  We saved some money during that time, but we didn’t keep a time table in our relationship.

Just as we all experience our own personal losses during this process, we all experience our own personal gains.  When you are in the middle of the process it is often hard to see some of these gains.  Take the time to make a list of all the gains that you have experienced so far, even if you have to reach deep, deep down inside just to come up with one.  By doing this, it helped to ease the stress in my own journey as I would pull out that list and read it or add to it when I was having a hard day.  I hope that by doing this it will help you get through the process as well.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 25th, 2006 at 3:56 am and is filed under Fertility. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.