Mother's Day

Yesterday was Mother’s Day. It is normally a day of celebration for our mothers, as Michelle and I are very close to our parents. Since we began this infertility ride, holidays in general, but especially Mother’s Day and Father’s Day have become difficult to endure. It isn’t that we have any less respect or love for our own parents…it is simply the largest in your face reminder that we have not reached a resolution to our situation. Our family is still incomplete. And this particular Mother’s Day was even more emotional due to several extraordinary factors.

The desire to have a family of your own is all encompassing and takes over in every aspect of your life. You get good at masking the pain so that you can function in society and not turn into a walking basket case. But, in innumerable ways throughout the day, every day, you are reminded by something someone says or the passing of a parent with their child on the street or even accidently entering into a department store the wrong way and finding yourself in the children’s clothing section. Some days, it is easier to mask the emotion than others, and as I am slowly discovering, you can also learn to mask your emotions too well, enough to even fool yourself at times.

Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are always difficult for us, much in the same way that birthdays become because they act as markers of time that is ticking away. And, as the holidays pass, you tell yourself that this time next year will be different. Next year I will finally be able to rejoin society and celebrate this wonderful occasion. And when that next year comes around and you still have not become a parent, it is devastating all over again.

Yesterday was further complicated for Michelle and I for many reasons. The first reason is that Michelle’s parents moved seventeen hours away, to Texas, last year. With the price of gasoline, airline tickets, and the cost to travel in general so high, we are lucky to see her parents twice a year. The most we saw her parents last year was for a week at Christmas. Since that time, Michelle has flown out once, in March, to see her family for her birthday for four days. We have not seen them since. The distance is difficult for Michelle to reconcile because she loves her parents and it is hard not to see them more often. Yesterday, that distance was really difficult for her at a moment when she could really have used a hug from her mother.

To further complicate the emotional drain of the day; we recently found out that my younger sister is pregnant. This pregnancy was unplanned and my sister was really not in a position to be adequately prepared for this news. Let me preface all of this by saying I am severely torn by my desire to fully support my sister and to share in her gradual acceptance and excitement of her upcoming miracle and the desire to go and crawl into a hole somewhere and never come back out again. I love my sister and she has had her own fears about her ability to get pregnant and I know she has felt her biological clock ticking away as well. I am overjoyed that this dream will come true for her and I know she will be a wonderful mother. I am also excited to finally have my first niece or nephew, on my side of the family, enter the world. At the same time, it is going to be a constant reminder of our failure to have a child of our own, in the most proximal way possible. It will be hard to watch her go through the motions we have longed to go through for the last six years and have friends and family ooh and ahh over her progression while we suffer in silence. And one of the hardest things to reconcile is that it is no fault of her own, and I wish I could be more present in the celebration but the pain is so very sharp. I am sure that she doesn’t fully understand our distance but I hope in time she will know that it was never intentional.

These issues and several other related issues all combined to create a perfect storm for Michelle and me as we were getting ready to go to my aunt’s house for Mother’s Day festivities. I knew that the day would be extra difficult for us but was still unprepared when Michelle came to me and said we may need to take separate cars because she wasn’t sure she could make it through the day. I didn’t want to leave her alone on this day, and really, I didn’t want to face it alone myself. We both broke down into a sobbing mess in our bathroom and determined that the best we could do was to stop by and deliver my Mom’s gift, tell her we loved her, and beg everyone’s understanding that we had to leave.

Instead of either of us spending, what should normally be, a day of love and lifting up of our own Mothers, we ended up going to a local burger place for a quick lunch before starting a process of soul baring discussion about where we are with the fertility process, where we are with interpersonal relationships and where we are in our professional lives. It was an extremely emotional and painful process that involved more than four hours, mostly in the parked car, lots of tears and a new level of openness with one another. Instead of being a day of celebration, it became a day of knocking down walls and the painful process of re-engineering the way we rebuild them to ensure that they are stronger and more functional.

Yesterday became a day to reconnect with each other and to reinforce the fact that we entered into this marriage as a single unit and that we have every intention of maintaining that unit as a solitary force to be reckoned with. We still don’t know the clear path that will lead us to our ultimate goal to complete our family. However, I think we know each other a little better and are going to be stronger for the process. And, as I told Michelle yesterday, I realized that even if we are unsuccessful in adding children to this family by all means available to us, I will always see her as the mother of my children when I look into her eyes. I pray that we will be able to celebrate this holiday with our families again soon without the deep pain that steals the joy from the celebration. Ultimately, I know that we will weather whatever comes our way together and I pray that our mothers know that our hearts were with them in spirit.