A bonus post about why after a year or two you can never really be cured of infertility, even if you eventually manage to have healthy babies.
The money
The money that could have been a family vacation (or three), allowed the house you buy to be just a bit less of a fixer upper, given you a little breathing room to job search a little longer, or hell, to help out others whose need is so much more than yours.
Even if you had the cash on hand, even if you saved up just for this, you can’t help knowing what it could have bought instead of false hope.
The time
Some people choose to be childfree while they’re young; we wanted to be empty nesters while we were still young. And it’s not as though we can enjoy this time together now the same as if we were choosing to and completely innocently thinking we could get pregnant as soon as we wanted to.
Time just keeps turning while we spin our wheels. We get older. Our friends’ kids get older. Our parents get older. That time can’t be got back again. My grandparents were all dead before I turned 20.
The innocence
Of happiness for seeing two lines on a home test, being excited for scans, not worrying if things are might be slightly out of the norm… and of accepting medicine as a practiced thing.
Twice I’ve had home pregnancy tests that didn’t pan out. Meanwhile I hear most walk-ins and family doctors just do a repeat urine test and then tell you when to come back for a doppler. No worrying, no waiting on bidaily blood tests hoping the levels double. If you have never had a loss, you just get happy at two lines and call an OB or midwife.
Not only will I not feel pregnant until the first ultrasound, I’ll never feel like I’m out of the woods. Ever.
And I’ve had one of those experiences that pulls back the curtain on medical “science”. It’s science alright — fiddle with things based on hypotheses and then make conclusions. A medical “practice” is the part I have real trouble with. They have what they think will work, but if it doesn’t, it’s possible for them to be completely stumped. You have to trust that there is no way for them to know, and not just that it’s too expensive for them to find out, or that no one has cared enough to do research to learn about it.
Being pregnant with your friends
Doing appropriate exercises together, co-baby showers, commiserating when you know the other person is in the same boat — all gone. Sure, you might get their stuff as hand-me-downs instead, but at the cost of…
Your friends’ kids and your kids being the same age
It starts bad enough. Your friends are at it before you can be. Maybe they were married later than you, too. But that’s ok, it’s not like you needed to have the oldest. Besides, aforementioned hand-me-downs!
But unless you’re right behind them, that age difference will really start to matter. What kid wants to hang out with kids 3 years younger than them? 5 years younger? 8?
And what about the kids conceived after you started trying? There’s the one who was conceived 5 months after we started. The one that has the exact birthday of the due date of our second chemical pregnancy, the one that really tricked me into thinking it was for real.
The further your kids drift from your friends’ kids in ages, the further you know you’ll end up being from their parents.
The idea that the universe even notices who you are, let alone rewards you for it
Doesn’t need much explanation. If the universe doled out pregnancies as lessons, it would catch the hint when women hid their pregnancies the first or maybe second time, and wouldn’t send them three more after two cases of infanticide. (A link in case you somehow don’t know what I’m talking about, even though these cases pop up at least every 5 years.)
No illusions remain here.
Bonus
All the perfect houses that went on and came off the market while you weren’t sure if you needed 4 bedrooms or not. We found the perfect fixer-upper we could have bought no problem in the summer of 2015 but hesitated and missed our shot.