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Bunch Of People You Let Down Via Infertility
A Contextual Caveat
I fully understand no one cares about the infertility or miscarriages of others, unless maybe it involves your best friend or sister or something similar. It’s also a tricky issue because you can’t really “help” per se, as offering to donate sperm/eggs to your friend at work is probably a generalized social overreach, and you end up pretty much saying “I’m praying for you!” and then going back to doing whatever you were doing before, which typically involves some version of telling everyone else how busy you are with your kids, thus further making the infertility/miscarriage person/people feel bad, as if the only thing anyone is supposed to do in adulthood is shepherd their kids around. I dunno. It’s an interesting little arc. However, my specific triggers are not your problem, and I understand that. I write stuff about infertility because other people find it and message me that some of it was helpful. That’s all.
Here’s the list
- Yourself: Makes you feel kinda worthless as a dude, especially since any number of dudes exist for whom this wasn’t a problem, but those dudes think their daughter is in kindergarten when she’s in third grade.
- Your spouse/partner: In what I would call “the baseline problem of infertility,” many arguments that seem to be about something else are actually about your inability to hit a baseline of what a woman might expect from a man.
- Her parents: They are not grandparents.
- Your parents: Ditto.
- Potential friendships: For better or worse, a lot of adult friendships center around “similar life stage,” which is shorthand for “how many kids and their ages.” These…
