Little Cone Flower

March 26.

I’d say this is where my mind begins to get fuzzy. Where I began to live two lives. One full of devastation and one where I’d numb my thoughts to exist in the world that was moving forward around us.

It was the day my sister-in-law, Jamie, told us she was pregnant. All of the siblings were at Mom and Dad Cone’s house for our weekly pizza night. She brought her pregnancy test out to Mom who was sitting by the fireplace. This exciting, life-changing moment for her, was unfortunately the moment that broke me. I remember my mind went blank, and it was as if all my systems had frozen. It was like one of those movie moments where all background chatter slowly goes blurry and turns to white noise. I shook myself out of my head long enough to force a smile, give a hug and say congrats. Our eyes caught for a second and I knew I hadn’t responded right.

I made eye contact with Brian and realized he wasn’t responding with excitement either. Although I noticed our lack of expected emotion was apparent, I couldn’t get my body to do anything but stay numb. I don’t remember what lame excuse was used to leave, but we headed home shortly after the announcement. As we walked to the car, I lost it.

When I say I lost it, I mean a complete loss of control over my emotions. The emotion that took over was anger. I was angry at our situation, at the struggle, stress and sadness I felt. Angry that I didn’t know how I was going to be happy for them. Angry that this happy moment was also ruined by infertility.

Most of all, I was angry that while I struggled to wait for the one thing I wanted most, I would have to watch Jamie get that exact thing. I would watch her fulfill the milestones I was beginning to worry I’d never be able to experience with these people I loved so much.

It was this moment of anger that made me realize infertility doesn’t stay attached to the singular event of Brian and me struggling to get pregnant. Instead, it unravels its ugly arms of jealousy, shame, anger and loneliness and attaches itself to other parts of life. Infertility creates this conundrum where you want to be so angry at your situation, but there’s nothing to physically be angry at. It’s this word that is used to describe hundreds of reasons why two people aren’t able to produce a child, but within its definition is a tangled, messy web of situations no one fully understands.

So I ran.

On our treadmill that is. If you know me, I hate running. Like, loathe it. However, I figured the treadmill was better than actually running away. So I blared ‘The Greatest Showman’ and sobbed and ran until my mind had to move its attention from my grief to keeping air moving through my lungs.

The next day we headed down to our friend’s house to hang out. I was in a terrible mood as we drove the two and a half hours. I don’t remember many specifics of our conversation besides Brian trying to understand why I was still upset. After all, we were on a path with the doctor to optimize our chances each month, and there wasn’t much else to do in the meantime but wait. Although, in theory, we had so many options ahead of us, I had this sickening feeling. One piece of conversation I remember having is that I couldn’t shake this feeling that having kids wasn’t going to work for us.

Brian tried to reassure me that we would have kids, but I remember saying, “Yes, but I just feel like you and I won’t be able to have them together.”

Being on the other side of our results, it feels like I’m writing this conversation to add depth to our story. However, it really is what I said and how I felt. Whether it was a nudge to start preparing me for our journey or the pessimist in me, the potential reality of our situation was setting in.

Outside of Brian and my conversation, Jamie texted me on the ride down. She confirmed our lack of emotion and said Mom had told her to talk to us. I remember feeling gratitude towards Mom for keeping our journey to herself. My instinct was to make up some excuse and not tell Jamie why we reacted the way we did. The thought of her feeling sorry for me while she had everything I wanted felt like a jab to my pride. However, I wanted to lessen the possibility of future disappointment and told her the path we were on. With another person in on our venture, I began to realize that with each new confidant, the burden I felt became a little less.

After enduring the two and half hour car ride that felt like a day’s worth of drama, we made it to our friend’s house. This is where I stepped into the first true moment of numbing my thoughts to carry on as normal. This was the moment I began my unhealthy dance of smiles in the day and tears as I laid my head down at night.