Think about the last time you asked how someone was doing and they mentioned a challenge, an illness, or said they were just feeling a little down.
Did you hear what they were really saying? How they were feeling?
More importantly, did you follow up to see how things were going?
Awhile back, I wrote about the challenges and uncertainty of blogging. The blogging world was new to me, and I wasn’t sure how to navigate it. Blogging gurus always advise focusing on a specific “topic” to keep readers engaged. The topic I chose was infertility. After all, this is what I experienced, and what I […]
People with infertility feel pressure by family, friends, and well intentioned people every day.
Pressure to have a baby within a “reasonable” amount of time after they get married.
Pressure to bless parents with their first grandchild.
Pressure to provide a sibling for their first child.
It doesn’t help.
It hurts.
Yes, I am grateful for having been diagnosed with infertility.
Why would anyone be grateful for THAT?
Let me count the number of ways.
I firmly believe that we need to educate our young men and women about the symptoms and causes of infertility earlier rather than later. We need to do basic fertility testing sooner rather than later.
So we can be prepared.
So we can have realistic expectations.
For every time I thought about my friend over the years, I assume his mother thought about him a trillion times more.
What would that be like? To lose a grown child?
It is unbearable to fathom losing a baby or child at any stage. People are in pain, whether we recognize it or not.
Countless people and businesses who start off blogging with a bang end up abandoning the practice for a myriad of reasons. I can’t count the number of times I have clicked on a website’s blog and discovered that the current post is 6 months to 2 years old. Blogging is a great idea in theory, but if we don’t know what to say or how to say it, it goes to the wayside.
Smack. That was the sound of my foot hitting my mouth. I knew better. Or so I thought. After all that we had been through regarding infertility, I had been so hyper-aware of assumption comments.
I didn’t know that the seven words I would hear next would rock my world for weeks, months, and years to come.
“I’m sorry, there’s no heartbeat.”
I visualize Mark Zuckerberg clicking post on his Facebook page, announcing to the WORLD that he and his wife endured three miscarriages, and were pregnant again. Some might be curious why he waited until they were far enough along this time. Why he didn’t reach out during the challenging times. My guess is that he was too vulnerable.