Infertility PTSD

This post is a very long time coming.

I wrote it in pieces while I was pregnant. Different reflections in various trimesters, feelings and fears and hormones and happiness all ebbing and flowing. I felt nervous about sharing these thoughts, but always intended to before Rory was born. Then he arrived five weeks early (we can talk about the PTSD from that experience another time), and to say my life changed would be a huge understatement. Once he was here it felt strange to come back to this. I didn’t want to. But the truth is that it’s still part of me, part of my story. And, if you have stuck with me this long, you know that I often write to help process my own experiences and my reason for sharing is so someone else might feel less alone. So, here we go again…

I have walked side by side with many women on our respective infertility journeys who became pregnant and then shared their doubts and fears with me. Each of these times I can vividly remember feeling slightly confused…why aren’t they just excited? This is what we’ve been hoping for! I would attempt to buoy them, to encourage that excitement we “should” be feeling.

I didn’t get it. I couldn’t see what they were seeing because I wasn’t where they were.

Pregnancy after infertility is wild, and Infertility PTSD is real. It is constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. It is anticipating bad news before there is any because your experience has conditioned you to expect it, plan for it, brace yourself for it. It could lead to feeling slightly detached out of self preservation or being straight up afraid. Your heart doesn’t know what to do with good news. It doesn’t know how to believe it.

Wash all of that down with a slimy helping of guilt for feeling anything other than perfect happiness because you finally got what you wanted and others are still waiting.

It’s the joy of a positive pregnancy test swiftly followed by the expectation that you will find out it isn’t viable. It’s feeling normal pregnancy twinges and wondering if any of those pangs mean you will lose this baby. It’s the anxiety that comes from knowing too much, too many stories, too many variables. It’s the excitement of sharing this good news with your loved ones and the worry that you might have to share bad news later. It’s the fear that taking a bump photo will somehow jinx it. It’s the panic that you won’t get to meet this beloved baby that’s been many years in the making. And the enemy whispering that you probably won’t have another chance. It’s your brain trying to prepare your heart for more disappointment because that’s all you’ve known.

That’s what worry and fear really are, right? Rehearsing for the bad stuff. Imagining how you will respond, how you will feel.

And now, I get it. I can finally see what my friends were seeing. I am guilty of rehearsing my pain, of letting fear creep into my heart. And even knowing that fear is not from God… I can’t blame us for feeling it. We have faced some scary and sad things walking through infertility. Those familiar doubts and anxieties can so easily come crawling back, and I am a human susceptible to believing them to be truths instead of just thoughts. Especially when my own experience has trained me to weather disappointment. What my experience did not equip me with was the easy ability to walk into this pregnancy with the complete belief that we’d end up with a child in our arms at the end of it.

I don’t mean to say that my entire pregnancy has been filled with only fear. (Or that only people who have experienced infertility or loss face pregnancy related fears.) My pregnancy has been joyful and miraculous and incredibly meaningful. But it has also been complicated, scary, and nerve wracking. The first several months it felt like I was living on a pendulum - the high of receiving good news and the free fall of anticipating something bad until I got the upward swing of good news again. The elation of two pink lines swinging to the anxiety of waiting almost a month for a doctor to confirm there was actually a baby in my uterus. The thrill of knowing the baby was real followed by worrying that genetic testing would reveal that this child wouldn’t have enough chromosomes to survive like our single IVF embryo. The relief of knowing our child was healthy slipping into the fear that I would miscarry and lose this baby we already loved so much. On and on and on… feelings of such joy and anticipation being haunted by whispers of what if and doubt. You work to rewire your brain into believing the best, to focusing on the excitement. But that worry knows just what to say to get your attention. And then again comes the guilt reprimanding you for your struggle.

I imagine that many who experience a delay on their journey to a baby understand this sort of cycle I’m describing. And none of us really want to talk about it or admit to it because we don’t want to seem anything other than grateful for our pregnancy, our baby. We spent so long being jealous about morning sickness, we don’t want to complain about ours. We were so desperate for those third trimester aches and pains, we don’t want to wish them away. We fought so hard to hold onto hope for these tiny miracles, we can’t stand the thought of anyone to doubting how much we still want this. We imagined what it would feel like when it was our turn, but the fears that something will go wrong, the guilt that it’s us and not someone else, and the confusion about what club we belong to now weren’t really part of those day dreams. Some days are so hard and some days it’s still just plain hard to believe it’s real.

I’d also imagine that many artists formerly known as infertile (seriously… I don’t even know what you’d call us.) would agree with me that there is a turning point. A moment or a milestone you reach that changes your heart, makes you open your arms to the reality of this little life. It’s probably different for everyone. Maybe it’s that first scan, hearing the heartbeat, or making it out of the first trimester. My guess is that for a lot of us it’s hitting viability at 24 weeks. The peace of knowing that your child stands a good chance of surviving even if they came early, even if they came now is indescribable.

I think my moment hit somewhere between 24 weeks and moving into my third trimester. The relief and reality of this baby became so tangible. I could breathe a little easier. I let myself be expectant and excited as we put together our son’s room, registered at the hospital where I’ll deliver, and started taking classes to be as prepared as we can be. I allowed myself to actually start planning for the future instead of feeling like I needed to package the present in bubble wrap and just wait it out. One day I said something to my husband about suddenly realizing we were having a baby. At almost seven months pregnant. Of course, he replied with, “yeah, you didn’t get that?” And I said, “no! I was having a pregnancy!” 😂 That’s kind of how it’s felt. Waiting all this time and just feeling so dang grateful to get to experience pregnancy. Something I had wanted so badly. It took me a longer than I’d like to admit to let myself believe there would be more than just a pregnancy. That in the end, we will have our long awaited child. And we will get to keep him.

And so we do! He’s been here for almost an entire year, and every day I’m delighted that we get to keep him. Reading the feelings I wrote out more than a year ago was cathartic. I wish I could hug that version of me, validate her feelings - being too uncomfortable to sleep and literally being congested since your second trimester and wanting to whine a little doesn’t make you ungrateful!, and maybe tell her that early prep work should start even earlier. ;) So much has changed between then and now, but if anything that has reenforced for me how important it is to talk about these things. Fertility, Family Building, Motherhood… they’re just too big to do alone. We need each other to share our burdens and our biggest joys. So, hey, if you ever need a listening ear, come sit by me.