Community

When I first started this infertility journey, I (like most people) just thought it would be a trying to conceive journey.  I thought it might take a few months, maybe even a whole year (heaven forbid!) but if I lent myself to the research and to the diligent schedule I had created…we’d be pregnant.  The first few months were already a bucket of cold water in the face.  How have I had a cycle all my life with only a dim idea of how the whole thing works?  I became…well…obsessed.  It was my every waking thought, all events, all ideas, buzzed around trying to conceive like little insect nuisances to a large elephant.  Around 6 months, I found an online community (it no longer exists but I still have a tight friendship with most of the original group through FB) that I could pour my obsession into instead of letting it drown my life.  At that time (it seems like a billion years ago now), I spilled all of everything to my group.  I was so completely naive about these women, some of them had already been trying for a year or two before I joined and I remember when I got pregnant…having the thought that I was “finally” pregnant…that it was such a long and arduous journey, that I could never go through a whole ELEVEN cycles of trying again (even though we had only really been paying attention about half that time) and how glad I was that it was OVER. 

Then I miscarried. It was a devastating time for payday and I but I got through it and a lot of it had to do with my infertility group at the time.  They were there and I needed them and I loved them.  We have drifted, most of them have had second (and some third) children while my journey still continues on and at some points over the last four years since the miscarriage, it’s been hard to be around the original community that helped me so much in those days.  I still love all the women there and over the last year I have come back to the group almost to full daily participation as I did in the “old” days.  I am glad for that, really glad about that growth.  I have found over the last two years that it is important to keep in contact with ladies who are still trying or who talk of how tough trying to conceive was when they were, often and without shame.  I don’t ever want to lose the community because I won’t ever forget the struggle no matter how it ends.  I appreciate the people letting their emotions out in their blogs with rawness and humor (secondvoice) as well as those who would never shy away from the topic of infertility (lollipop Goldstein), and those who have so much faith it inspires you to have more (induetime).  There are so many that I read diligently and I can’t name them all but if you write about IF…I hope you know you are a part of a community that (baby or not) I will always be at home in.

Stay thirsty my friends,