Battling the grief :(

To grieve or to mourn is always something that I have associated with death and the loss of a loved one. This is absolutely what it is.

But I didn’t realise you can grieve and mourn in with other ‘losses’.

After our recent disappointing appointment, I struggled quietly a lot inside and I expressed some of this when I met with my counsellor.

She helped me to realise that actually I am grieving. When my mind is so full of work stuff and stress that I feel like I physically have to switch off my mind from thinking about me and my hurt, it is because my instinct is to find space for me to grieve.

I wasn’t sure whether it was appropriate to use that term with me but then as we chatted about it and what it meant for me, I realised really quickly…

I am grieving.

I am grieving the loss of a lot of things. It is natural for anyone in our position to feel loss and need time to wrestle with and deal with that loss.

So, what have I lost?

1. I have lost time. By now I’d have thought we would have one and maybe two children, or at least be expecting a second child. But we have zero and not even an embryo or a hope that we might be pregnant soon.
2. I have lost hope. Every month that comes and goes, every miserable appointment, every painful thought, every moment of realisation of the journey we are on is another moment of hope lost.
3. I have lost a chance every month. I find it difficult to say and I mean this is the most sensitive of ways that I can, but every month it feels like I am loosing another baby. Every. Single. Month. I feel myself ovulating and I dream about what this baby will be. I work out when he/she will be due, about when and how we will tell our family and friends. But then my period arrives and I feel like I have lost another baby that never was.
4. I have lost joy. So much joy. It is a struggle to see joy very much when your whole world is marred by a painful darkness that seems to be in everything.
5. I have lost my dream. My dream was to conceive quickly, to have children naturally and to have children by the time I was 30. Slowly, but oh so very surely, every single ounce of my dream has been ripped apart, chucked on the floor, stamped on, spat at, screwed up and chucked in the fire. I had one final part of that dream intact until the other day. The only part of my dream that so far I had managed to cling on to was the hope to have children (or at least a child) by 30. So when we went to our first appointment, thinking it was a proper IVF appointment, from looking at others’ timelines, we genuinely thought we might have a shot at having a baby by the time I was 30. But now even that has been stolen from us. It’s not important really, but it was part of my dream. And now I have nothing left.

Infertility causes a lot of loss. More than I have mentioned. But I do need time to grieve and process all of this loss.

To most people, it doesn’t make sense. These ‘losses’ surely aren’t really losses? They don’t understand if they haven’t had to deal with it. Several people have tried to tell me that it doesn’t matter that I won’t have a child by 30. But that’s fine if that was not your dream or your goal. But to me it was. It was the very last piece of a dream I had had since childhood. And now it is gone. Imagine dreaming your whole life for something which pretty much most people get so easily, and having it taken away from you no matter how hard you try.

Infertility means I need time to grieve. And it is important that I do that. So please, if you know someone going through this, please don’t invalidate their feelings by telling them that their ‘losses’ aren’t important, because really they truly are for them, but just be with them as they are coming to terms with many losses and needing time to grieve.