What Your Best Friend Wants You To Know About Infertility

What your best friend wants you to know about infertility:

Friendships are the fabric that make and shape us throughout our lives. We all have a mix of groups of friendships, the friends we’ve known for a lifetime (we know it all and so do they) and the friends who we met later on at uni, work or the gym. All of them know different parts of us, love us for who we are and the memories we have together. 

Our friends are with us through all the tricky parts of life and even more so when we find ourselves navigating being an adult; the relationships, the break ups, the fuck ups, the good times and the awful times.

But there is one part of life, where you can feel on the outside of your closest friendships and it’s no one’s fault. There are no fall outs, you can't pinpoint the moment it happens but in the struggle to have a baby, we become distance and disconnected in friendships and relationships.

Struggling to conceive and loneliness:

When you find yourself navigating a bumpy ride to motherhood and your friends are at different stages, maybe they are currently expecting or they have been through pregnancy and have their babies or maybe children are not part of their plan. It can suddenly feel like you are an outsider, that everyone has become a member of a club that you need to “qualify” for, as it's not just an automatic entry. Even though you are doing everything you can to join, you're still not in.

Feeling on the outside means it can be difficult to speak about how you feel, so let me tell you what your best friend wants you to know about infertility!

What I wish you knew about infertility:

There is nothing that could have prepared me for how hard it is to navigate this journey, it’s relentless. The emotions I feel are so intense and completely unfamiliar, the anger, the rage, the jealousy, the fear, the sadness and the uncertainty are so overwhelming and they are there all the fucking time.

Even though I promised myself it wouldn’t be, it’s become all consuming, infertility is woven into everything I do. This journey makes it feel impossible to say yes to plans for the future as my life is only as big as each cycle at the moment. It’s exhausting, I’m exhausted.

You can ask me about what’s happening, I’ve been on the steepest learning curve, not one I ever wanted to understand but I had no choice. As none of us are prepared for what this journey might look like. If it’s not what we were previously led to believe. All of those years I worried about falling pregnant, the belief that I was playing Russian roulette with my fertility having sex, well it turns out that wasn’t the case for 1 in 6 of us. So please ask but also know that some days I can talk about it easily and share everything that’s happening and other days it’s too painful. Please hang in there with me and don’t stop asking. When I’m ready to talk it really does help.

Right now I feel like there’s a club that I’ve longed to be a member of for years and yet regardless of what I do. I’m still not able to join. I feel stuck on the outside and I question whether I’m good enough to join “mum club” and I’m terrified I might never be. We’ve done everything else together and I always assumed we would do this too.

Even though I'm good at putting a face on, I am grieving everyday. For how I thought this would be, for every cycle that my dreams are raised only to be shattered with the arrival of my period. I grieve for the losses I may or may not have spoken about, I don’t want to be the friend who is always sad or the one that everyone feels sorry for. I feel so lost and alone. I had no idea I could feel so lonely. When you simply check in, I remember I’m not alone.

I feel very lucky to have you as a friend and I’m sorry I am absent at times but I hope that one day I will get to join the “mum club” but until that time, keep me a seat and give me highlights of what happens there.

How can you support your friend?

If you know your friend is navigating a journey through infertility or you think they could be, please let them know you are always there.

Always know their absence is self protection and a means of coping. But to know you are a text away, well it means the world. They don’t need you to do anything other than acknowledge how difficult it is, you fix it by just being there and you are welcome to bring the wine and chocolate on the really shitty days. 

If you are currently struggling to conceive and feel all of this, I am here to help and I have a range of packages that can support you, check them out here.