Question:
My husband and I have one child and will never have another, due to a medical condition I have. Had we known about my medical problem I’d have been advised never to have any children. We’re glad we don’t know and we absolutely treasure the child we have. That being said, I had always wanted to have several children. I’m having a hard time seeing friends get pregnant and feeling happy for them without feeling jealous. We really are thankful for the child we have and are tired of people, when they hear why we have only one, telling us we should be thankful for our one. WE ARE THANKFUL!!! and we make that clear to everyone. Yet somehow that’s supposed to be enough and I can’t seem to get over this. Just when I think I’m done being jealous of pregnant women another friend has a baby. And while we do see some benefits of having just one that doesn’t make up for the sadness I feel over it all. I see so many things about women who can’t have a child at all or can’t have another, not any like me who just shouldn’t as it’s dangerous for the mother’s health. My daughter is 5 and I’m so sick of people asking me when we’ll have another child or making comments about it being odd we had just one.
I suffer from depression due to abuse suffered as a child and this whole issue just seems as one more way for life to get me down and be unfair. A friend just had her fourth child and I’m having a hard time being happy for her. When I do tell people I wanted more than one they always tell me how thankful I should be.
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Answer:
Infertility is a life-changing, semi-traumatic process for many affected people who desire to be parents. It is one of those things that people cannot really comprehend who have not been through it. At least, that is what I’ve gathered from dealing with people who are coping with infertility.
Friends and family probably cannot relate to your sense of loss, expecially because you have a child. They will impose their own values and expectations onto your situation and your pain will be, in many cases, incomprehensible to them, or seem childish or ungrateful. That doesn’t make your pain and loss any less real or valid, however. I think the appropriate stance to take with regard to insensitive comments is to assume that people who make them usually don’t mean to be idiots, but just end up being that way because they are blind to the actual situation. They are blind in this area, and don’t realize it. They see themselves reflected when they look at you and mistake that reflection for you. You can forgive their insensitivity a little more easily when you recognize that this is often the case. “Forgive them father, they know not what they do”.
You state that you can have a child but that it is dangerous for you to do so. Are you aware of advances in reproductive technology that may allow another woman to carry your child for you? The process is called Surrogacy, and it is quite stressful and expensive, but it can result in the birth of a healthy child, provided your genetic material is sound and not itself the source of your infertility issue. The process works like this. You would contract with a surrogate woman who would agree to be pregnant for you. You would undergo ovarian stimulation and your eggs would be surgically extracted from your body and then impregnanted with your husband’s sperm to create embryos. Those embros would then be implated into the surrogate’s womb (after she had herself been chemically stimulated to be optimally ready to have an embryo attach to her womb. The baby would grow in the surrogate’s womb, be born normally, and then transferred to you.
If surrogacy is not for you, there are other ways to have an additional child, including adoption. Just because you are unable to proceed in the conventional manner doesn’t mean that you need not have another child, is my point. Good luck!
