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Showing posts from May, 2015

Falling Out of Love - Learning to Accept a Potentially Childless Future

I remember falling out of love. I was a young adult and had to face the reality that my long-term crush and I were not going to end up together. At first I would tell my friends I was over him and they would look at me and laugh and say, "Yeah, you're not over him."  The first stage was faking it.  Trying it on for size.  Practicing moving on.  It didn't last for long and soon I would be dreaming about there being someway that he and I would end up together.  Then I would once again act like I was over him, this time for a little longer than the previous time.  There came a point when either my friends started believing me when I said "I'm over him," or they just became tired of convincing me otherwise.  And then something switched and I really did start moving on.  I could imagine a future without him and started showing interest in other guys.  I went on an occasional date here and there and even went on several dates with the same guy.  Then somethin

Infertility is not psychological

Hope does not heal what is physically broken.  Changing one's thinking does not change a physical ailment.  We can't mind game our way into the physically impossible.  One of the troubling things about infertility is this underlying idea that infertility can be overcome with just a change in attitude. But the inability to have children is a disorder just like an amputated leg or cancer.  You can't think it away.  You can think about it differently and learn how to accept the condition and make adjustments to your life, but that doesn't make it go away.  It only changes how you respond to it. And the grief is legitimate.  It is saying good-bye to one future.  It is the death of what could have been.  I'm starting to think the realization of the loss or absence of fertility might be similar to the loss of a limb.  It is life-changing.  Your normal has to change and it won't ever be the same as what other's around you consider to be normal.  Just as strang