Monday, 2 November 2015

A little 'off topic' - Secondary Infertility

I recently came across this blog post –


It’s about secondary infertility but there are a lot of similarities to ‘general’ infertility and in some ways I guess it’s worse – you have a child yes, but that only proves you’ve conceived once so you assume you’ll be able to conceive again. And then you don’t.

It also proves what we as a group of infertiles already know – don’t ever, ever EVER judge a book by its cover. You have no idea what is going on behind closed doors. I have lost count of the number of times we have been asked over the years ‘so, when are you going to have children then?’.  This number increases tenfold with every year of marriage that goes by. Obviously we could be completely open and tell everyone the truth (pah!) or we have the various lines of defence we’ve always gone with (‘plenty of time for that’ ‘yeah, one day’) and I’m sure others can quite simply get away with saying they don’t want children if only to shut up the person asking the question.

But how much harder is that if you already have one child? How many times do you get asked when the next one is coming along? How many times does the child you already have innocently wish out loud for a sibling? Again, there are no doubt many that will claim they only wanted one child whilst secretly dying inside. You’ve managed to conceive once, who knew that that’s when infertility would kick in and you wouldn’t be able to conceive a second time?

I genuinely don’t know which is worse.

1 comment:

  1. Hi! Reading over your posts and feeling your pain. I also have a blog that no one knows about and it is so freeing. Only two posts so far but it really helps. Wanted to say how much I appreciate your perspective on secondary infertility. I suffer from it and feel like everybody hates me at my infertility support group. So grateful for haying one, but I can't imagine this being anymore painful. She does ask, all the time, about brothers and sisters and it hurts. Just today she asked if I had a baby in my tummy. NO! Dead on the inside, sweetie :) And for some damn reason a co worker emailed me today asking if I was pregnant. What is wrong with people? I hope everything works out for you. Every one of my "infertility buddies" has their rainbow baby, hopefully you're next. Good luck! mustsaveworld.com if you're interested.

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