My Infertility Didn’t End With a Pregnancy

It was a hot July day like today when it happened. 

“I’m really sorry, but it is unlikely that you will ever have children.”

The doctor’s words cracked the stillness of the exam room. I couldn’t put meaning behind what she was saying to me as she wrote a specialist’s name on her prescription pad. “It’s not likely to help, given your tests,” she said, “but you could try.”

I really thought that the prescription pad would hold hope in the form of some kind of pill, fixing whatever was keeping us from getting pregnant. Instead, she handed me a referral that was “unlikely to help.” Maybe she knew it, maybe she didn’t, but in that moment, her words seemed to be robbing me of my future. I stumbled out of her office, blinded by tears. Once safely inside my car with the door closed, I screamed until my throat hurt. And then I put the car in reverse, backed out of the parking space, and drove home.

What was I supposed to tell my husband when I got home? For thirty minutes, I could protect him from the sadness that was sitting next to me in the car. If I drove around some more, I could shield him a little longer. I sobbed uncontrollably on the drive home, trapped by traffic, the stifling July heat, and the weight of new but profound grief. I sat at a red light and looked at all the people in their cars around me. Some sang along to the radio. Some stared into space. Some laughed or talked with passengers. How could the world be so normal when I’d just found out that fifteen months of trying to start a family had never even been a real possibility? Embarrassment and anger tangled themselves in my chest. How foolish I’d been to hope for something so ridiculously out of reach.

Frustrated by the world of normalcy in traffic, I cut across onto a backroad, a two-lane highway that usually took longer but put me out of traffic’s way. After just a couple of minutes on that road, I noticed flashing lights behind me. Not a cop, but my close friend Ranelle. She was one of the few people who knew where I’d been that day. I pulled over into a church parking lot, and we parked facing one another on the driver’s sides of our cars, windows rolled down. She took one look at my face, the tears that just wouldn’t seem to stop.

“Oh Glenna,” she whispered. She reached out her hand and clasped mine, our arms suspended across the space between our cars. To this day, I have no idea why she was on that road that day. There weren’t words I would have received, and she didn’t try to say anything other than “Go home to William.” I did.

I don’t even remember what I said to William, but I do remember gasping for air while I tried to say it. We curled up on our bed, two spoons in a drawer that felt too big. Wept. Grieved. Didn’t speak. I was twenty-four. He was twenty-seven.

________

For years, I tried to prove the doctor wrong. I researched, charted, planned, kept track of every little symptom or sign. I took supplements unapproved by science. I drank teas that smelled like a witch’s brew. I read books, medical studies, and online forums. I tried everything. I was Sisyphus, perpetually pushing a stone up a hill. We saw other doctors, ran more tests, tried procedures, saw a specialist. But in the end, that first doctor was right.

Last month, I stood in a pink gown in front of the mammography machine, waiting for the radiologist to finish the paperwork so I could get my yearly scan behind me. She ran down a list of questions.

“Age?”

“Forty-five,” I replied. I’d had a birthday the week before.

“How old were you when you had your first pregnancy?” she asked.

“I’ve never been pregnant.”

In response, she quietly drew a line through a bunch of questions on the paper. Not necessary.

After my scan, I sat down on the bench in the dressing room and took a deep breath. I’ve never been pregnant. The sound of that sentence holds more sadness than I can convey. It’s been twenty-two years since the doctor told me the truth about my body’s inabilities, but sometimes, the weight of it rolls over me with a surprising wave of pain. It hurts less than it did when I was twenty-four, but it still hurts. Less a cut that bleeds and more like a bruise when you press it.

There have been times when, as a writer and a Bible teacher, I’ve been asked to meet with this young woman or to email that young woman to give some advice and hope to them regarding their infertility. The truth is, no woman wants to hear from me on this. She doesn’t want my advice. I am her worst nightmare. I am the one the doctors warned her she was unlikely to be. I never conceived. Not once in more than two decades.

My infertility didn’t end in a pregnancy.

It never ended at all.

________

Two weeks ago, I sat in the ER with my ten-year-old. He’d stepped on a piece of glass, and I couldn’t get it out with tweezers. The sliver had driven itself deep into his heel, and I figured the doctor would have to numb Ian’s foot before using something sharp to cut through the skin and pull out the glass.

The doctor walked in with an array of instruments and some numbing cream. “Are you Mom?” she asked, before pulling her stool up to the end of the bed to examine Ian’s foot.

“I am,” I replied.

My son grabbed my hand while the doctor pressed on his heel. Sweat beaded up on his face while the doctor probed and tried to pry the glass from his heel. I whispered words of comfort and stroked his face over the next half hour while the doctor worked with a nurse to get what turned out to be two pieces of glass from deep in his foot. He was so brave, and when the glass was finally pulled out, his relief poured out in tears he’d dammed up with courage. I held him tightly, his body soaked in sweat.

But all I could think about was what a sentence spoken in an exam room can mean.

I’m really sorry, but it is unlikely that you will ever have children.  

How old were you when you had your first pregnancy?

I’ve never been pregnant.

 Are you Mom?

I am.

I’ve been a mother for eighteen years. My sons came to me via paperwork, social worker interviews, home inspections, fundraisers, grief, broken starts, and a lot of waiting. I am really thankful I get to be Mom to them. Something about their little newborn bodies placed in my arms healed the deeper wounds infertility caused. I’m content with the motherhood God graciously gave me, even if it came to me in an envelope I didn’t recognize. My family is more to me than I could have ever wanted. I don’t think about infertility most days.

But some days I do think about it.

It’s like an old injury—a knee you hurt on a run twenty years ago that now aches when the weather changes. I have to work up a lot of nerve to go to baby showers. I only order children’s Bibles as shower gifts. I instinctively avoid baby and maternity sections in the store. I don’t go to the women’s clinic for checkups as often as I ought to because there are too many pregnant women there.

I wonder sometimes if the bruise goes away when you’re old. In mid-life it’s still there, hard to detect most of the time but painful if someone presses it too hard. It’s not that I wanted different children. I want the children I have, I just wanted more of their existence. I wish I could have carried them myself, weird as it might be to say. Not to erase their beginnings or to change our story. It’s an impossibility that doesn’t even make sense.

________

Twenty-two years of infertility has made my life interesting in some ways. I can feel so unbelievably out of place in certain settings, much like (I imagine) my single friends when their married friends talk of husbands and families. I can talk about being a mother without ever knowing what it feels like to have a baby in your womb. I can parent without knowing what labor feels like. There were many months where I walked around living my life without the knowledge that my sons existed or that they would one day be mine. It’s an odd thing, the existence of a perpetually infertile mother.

What would I say to the young woman with infertility who doesn’t really want to hear from me? I am her greatest fear realized, but if she really wanted to hear what I had to say, here’s what I’d tell her.

It’s hard. Infertility will always ache somewhere in your heart—sometimes faintly and quietly, sometimes loudly and painfully. Sometimes you’ll forget about it. Sometimes you can’t forget about it.

But, you can bear it.

I wouldn’t have believed that when I was twenty-four. Accepting that that doctor would be right for my whole life felt like swallowing glass. I refused to believe that I could bear up under such a sentence. But I did. I have. Not because I am strong. Oh, I have been so weak, so fragile, so breakable in moments when I needed to be strong. I still cry on the way home from every baby shower.

But, I could bear what God ordained because He is the one who ordained it. And I love Him.

Whatever has happened—or hasn’t happened—to me has been filtered through the kind fingers of the Lord’s sovereign hand. I don’t know all the reasons why God wrote the story of my life with this one long chapter, but I have learned that in His no, sometimes there’s a really different yes. My infertility didn’t end in a pregnancy like most people’s do. It didn’t end at all. But the Lord did make me a mother, and He did fill the sad places in my heart with joy.

Are you Mom?

I am.

That’s enough for me. I know a miracle when I see one.