All your life you’ve planned to go to Paris. You talked about with everyone how your dream was to go to Paris. You saved for it, thought about it, planned where you visit, talked to people about Paris and finally it happened. You bought the ticket to Paris and you were on your way to finally make that dream happen, except when you land the pilot says, “Welcome to Holland”. What? Hold on, wasn’t this plane going to Paris? You run to the hostess and say that there must be some mistake, but no, there is not mistake. The plane was detoured to Holland and now your this is where you will be.
“But wait, I don’t know anything about Holland and I don’t want to stay here!”, but stay you do and hope that at some point there will be another plane back to Paris.
This is how it is with infertility, because its a detour from your plan. Its a detour from what is normal and what is supposed to be free and a natural process all of sudden has a lot more people involved and a lot more moving parts.
But stay you do. You go out and buy some new guidebooks, you learn some new phrases, and you meet people you never knew existed. The important thing is that you are not in a bad place filled with despair.You’re simply in a different place than you had planned. It’s slower paced than Paris, less flashy than Paris but after you’ve been there a little while and you have a chance to catch your breath, you begin to discover that Holland has windmills. Holland has tulips. Holland has Rembrandts.
But everyone else you know is busy coming and going from Paris. They’re all bragging about what a great time they had there, and for the rest of your life, you’ll say, “YES, THAT’S WHAT I HAD PLANNED” except that now you need to learn this new language and hope that someday you’ll be able to go back to your dream and it hurts every time you get a reminder that you have not been able to fulfil the dream.
The pain of that will never go away. You have to accept that pain, because the loss of that dream, the loss of that plan, is a very, very significant loss. That longing will never go away. You’ve stepped on the train of infertility and hope to God that at some point you’ll be able to off, but perhaps you never will. For now, you need to enjoy the very lovely things about Holland. (Adapted Poem by Emily Kingsley)
This is how your journey of grief starts because you need to mourn the idea of how you thought your journey of creating a family and being pregnant would look like. In 16 weeks of personal therapy I learned about grief and how it may occur. Grief may come in different forms and doesn’t always have to do with a person’s death. It can be a death of a dream, expectation, idea, job or relationship. Grief comes in many forms. For me, it’s like this small ball that was bigger and is now smaller but sometimes it gets triggered. It means that sometimes my trigger gets hit in the most innocent situations. I like this description of grief. It fits.

The close I get to 39 the more this trigger is being hit. The grief ball is smaller but its like a ping pong rolling around in that box. I get reminders and updates about this pain and the most hurtful thing is that I don’t think my partner gets that same kind of reminders of this as much as I do.
The pain button gets hit. And hit again, and again, and again and again. At first the pain button and the ball is big and unrelating and you can’t control it.


I used to be good with learning about news of a pregnancy and I’m not as great anymore.
The panic that has risen around not being able to have had a family with my husband turning 46 and me 38 is not a situation I wanted to be in. It feels like the candle is burning thin and my options are running out.
Trying to talk to him about other options end in the conversation of Money, but what I started a Go Fund me page? Something. Anything. Why does it seem not so urgent to him? There is no more time to waste! I could just let 6 months go when I was 33 now at 38 there is no jerking around. Just because I look young doesn’t mean my biology is young.
Your fertility drops down 50% at the age of 35 and if after 7 years of never ever being pregnant. Not even once then my alarm bells are ringing really loudly.
I’m desperately trying to figure out the route to take. Right now deep diving into Surrogacy (its not free people its $60k plus even if its altruistic).
I’ve reach out to the adoption lady who does home studies. I’ve been circling around her business card thats been sitting next to my bedside table since January of this year.
It feels like I’m grasping at anything in sight and all the while I’m trying to figure out why can’t I just go back to Paris and why is it that I need to buy all the new guidebooks and hope that hubby will actually want to read these new books. Hopefully he can finally get on board and make a decision about choosing a direction.