Infertility

Infertility is an incredibly isolating experience that can be difficult to understand if you haven’t been through it. Like other stressful life events, infertility tends to draw out underlying relationship tensions and disparate feelings and along with it, many well-intentioned people struggle to say the right thing. Even with good intentions, things can come out wrong, become hurtful, and sound invalidating or minimizing. Although everyone is drastically different, I wanted to share my experience and the things that helped me feel supported through our infertility journey (and also the things that hurt me most).

My husband Kevin and I have always known we’ve wanted kids. Perhaps we were premature and way ahead of ourselves, but from the first months we were together, we had already talked about our future dreams and set a “plan” and timeline for how our life together would unfold. But we were in for a treat when we were faced with something we couldn’t necessarily “control” — infertility. For the longest time, I hated that word. Yes it’s just semantics and yes it’s a real thing to be diagnosed “infertile”, but to me, I refused to think I was incapable of anything, so I always dropped the prefix and called it our fertility journey.