MIA FREEDMAN: The specific mental anguish of infertility.

This post deals with miscarriage and could be triggering for some readers. 

Listen to this story being read by Mia Freedman here.

There is a very specific type of madness that comes with infertility. 

I was reminded of it this week when I watched the heartbreaking viral video by Melanie Swieconek about the ban on IVF services in Victoria (which was reversed as of this morning) during this garbage fire of an Omicron outbreak.

I could hear it in her voice. The madness. The anguish. The desperation. I have heard it in my own voice when I screamed at my husband that we had to have sex because I might be ovulating while waving an ovulation chart in his face.

When you’re desperately trying to conceive, that screaming is called ‘foreplay’.

It’s brutal.

Listen: Mia Freedman discusses Melanie Swieconek's video on Mamamia Out Loud. Post continues below.

And my heart goes out to every woman who is living it right now or who has ever lived it. There are a lot of us. 

It can be hard to explain to a civilian what infertility feels like because a lot of it doesn’t make sense. You feel like a failure. As a woman. As a partner. As a human. You feel furious at the universe and at your body and at every woman who gets pregnant by accident. If only.

Every pregnant woman you see on the street makes you die a little bit inside. And every friend or relative or celebrity who announces their pregnancy pours a little bit of acid into your heart.

Even your partner cannot comprehend the depths of your despair and desperation. And your grief. And it’s the strangest form of grief because you are grieving someone who doesn’t yet exist. Who has never existed. Who only exists in your imagined future and you’re willing to crawl over broken glass to get to them but even that isn’t enough. Your willingness to endure pain and suffering and to make yourself physically and emotionally vulnerable in the most raw and primitive way is not enough. Because there are gatekeepers.

Image: supplied.

Money is a gatekeeper. Science is a gatekeeper. The availability of fertility services are gatekeepers. And the biggest gatekeeper of all is something that doesn't even have a name. Is it God? The Universe? Luck? Is it the soul of your future baby, deciding whether now is the right time or not to come into the world?

It’s maddening.

And alongside all this is often also grief for a baby who did exist. Once. For a time. Maybe a miscarriage. Maybe a fertilised egg in a petri dish. Maybe an embryo injected into your desperate, hopeful womb.

And still the madness grips you along with the hormones but dear God don’t let anyone try to pass it off as just the hormones. It’s deeper than that. More existential. It’s the cold fear that it will never happen and that you will be trapped in this agonising liminal state of longing so desperately for a baby.

It broke me, the madness. For a time. It broke my marriage that was only a few months old. The baby I lost halfway through my second pregnancy was like a wall I crashed into.

I’d been pregnant three times before that. The first two times, I was young and my boyfriends were idiots. Even then I knew they were not men I would want to be tethered to my whole life, not men who would make good fathers. I ended those pregnancies with sadness but not regret.

Several years later, when I met Jason and fell pregnant after just a few months, it was a happy accident and I knew with complete certainty it was our baby. And it was. He was. He is.

Two years later, it happened again and I was excited to grow our family even if it was on slightly shaky ground. Jason had just recovered from two years of a debilitating chronic illness that struck soon after our son was born. So when that pregnancy ended abruptly at five months, our reactions were very different and the chasm between us widened into a gulf into which we both fell. We separated seven months after losing our daughter.

Those seven months were excruciating because of the madness. The grief and the desperation to fill my empty arms with a baby. It broke us. Our marriage collapsed.

Years later, when we reconciled and took the time to make sure our foundations were solid, we tried again. I had fallen pregnant four times by accident. How hard could it be?

So hard. So painfully hard. It took a long time and months of ovulation drugs and I went to some very dark places. I was almost swallowed by the madness of infertility so I understand its depths. To those who are in the darkness, I can only say that I can see you. We see you. The countless women who have been where you are now and all the women who are in the darkness alongside you, we see you. You are loved and understood.

Feature image: supplied by Mia Freedman.