To the Woman Whose Friend Just Told Her She Got Pregnant on the First Try
Written by Dr. Colleen Reichmann, owner and clinical director of Wildflower Therapy (and IVF mom x2)
Maybe you were out to lunch and she hit you with it. The news. In the most earnest, genuinely pure way that someone who hasn’t experienced fertility heartbreak tends to:
“I’m pregnant! It’s so unexpected, we only tried one time!”
Maybe, for just a moment, you felt the blood rushing in your ears. It seemed like the next breath wouldn’t come. Then you registered her eager face, beaming at yours, so you quickly pulled your own into a smile.
“Oh my gosh, congratulations!” You said, while inwardly, you flinched. You hunched. Your chest tightened, and that now-all-too-familiar stomach drop happened.
A Tale of Two Totally Different Fertility Worlds
Your friend wasn’t trying to be hurtful in any way. You know that-you do. It’s not her fault, it’s just that she lives in an entirely different fertility world than you do. She lives in the world we learn about as children- the one we all tend to think will be ours one day. Her world consists of wanting a baby, then having sex, then getting pregnant with some semblance of ease. Then feeling excited.
You live in the alternate world- the upside down, if you will. Your fertility world consists of injections, retrievals, procedures, waiting rooms, bills, heartbreaking calls-“I’m so sorry,” and HCG drop monitoring appointments. In your world, bored-looking doctors peer across the table and ask “when would you like to try again? We can get you in for another round as soon as next month if we start the birth control now.” Your world consists of shelling out mind-numbing amounts for medications. You’ve learned all the tricks around icing before injections to minimize the searing, stinging feeling that some of them create. In your world, no one has the luxury of being phobic around needles anymore. You get it. You used to feel quesy around them too. But not anymore. Night after night, injection after injection-it was exposure therapy in it’s purest form. In your world, injection bruises bloom along your body in startling constellations. Yours is a world of calendars, two-week intervals, bloodwork, statistics, ultrasounds, more bloodwork, hope, being too scared to hope, losing hope, devastation-and the kind of grief that never fully leaves your body once it’s lived there.
“What Would That Feel Like?”
These worlds- yours and hers-are so different that they may as well be separate universes. It’s next to impossible to understand one when you reside in the other. That’s why you may have found yourself thinking, “Damn. What does that feel like?”
What does it feel like to want a baby and then just… have your body cooperate? To those of us who may have only ever known trying for a baby through the upside down, it often genuinely feels impossible to imagine.
And that way she beamed at you-pure exactment about that positive pregnancy test? What in the world does that feel like? It’s sometimes wildly hard for those who reside in the upside down to imagine entering pregnancy through ease instead of survival mode and fear.
Please hear me when I say this next part, friend. If you are fighting (or have ever had to fight) tooth and nail to become a mother, then it makes sense her announcement hit hard. It doesn’t make you a bad friend to cry in the comfort of your own home once you get there. It doesn’t even mean you aren’t genuinely happy for her. It just means that you are holding many layers of emotions at once. Happiness for her, grief for yourself. Bitterness at the unfair nature of this whole fertility game. Relief that she doesn’t have to go through this hell.
The Infertility Lens
Infertility truly changes the architecture of your inner world. People who haven’t been through it have trouble understanding this. But it introduces you to versions of fear and longing that many people get to bypass completely. And when others around you have that coveted, incredible fertility privilege that they aren’t even aware of-it is natural for part of you to drift into the wondering of it all. To feel the ache of realizing you may never know what that experience feels like firsthand.
There can be grief in not only what is happening to you, or what happened to you. But there can also be a really specific kind of grief in what didn’t happen.
The spontaneity. The innocence around announcing. Ease around conception that doesn’t involve huge amounts of financial strain and a battery of medications and surgeries. Even the ability to trust your body without hesitation can feel like something to grief, ambiguous as it may be.
The Grief that Persists
Sometimes people assume that once you finally have your IVF baby-your long-awaited miracle-after-loss baby-that the infertility grief disappears. But many who have resides in the upside down know that isn’t usually true. You can adore your child with every fiber of your being and still feel sadness when infertility resurfaces unexpectedly years later. People are complex. We can hold deep gratitude while experiences waves of grief, all at the same time. None of it discounts the other.
You can gaze at your sleeping child, filled with awe one night, and still feel your throat catch the next day when you scroll social media and see the pregnancy announcement “Thought we were done at two, but we were just having too much fun! Third baby, on the way!” You can feel complete and incomplete in the very same breath. You can feel healed in some places and permanently tender in others. Infertility has a long memory.
The Gutting Reality of Primary Infertility
And for those walking through primary infertility right now- those who feel like they are knocking with all of their might on the window into motherhood, trying to shatter glass that feels like cement-I especially want to say this: If announcements like your friend’s feel unbearable sometimes, you are not failing at being supportive. Please be so gentle with yourself. This is invisible heartbreak, and it’s a daily strain. You are essentially trying to walk around with a smile pasted on, in a world that feels like it is constantly reminding you of what you want most but can’t seem to have.
Of course it hurts. Of course hearing “first try” can feel like someone accidentally pressing on a bruise you spend every day trying to protect. As I type this out, I can’t help but think that. Of course, of course, of course. This is a profoundly painful journey.
All Feeling are Invited in the Upside Down
So if you are mainly feeling grief or anger after that conversation, know that all of that is allowed and ok. Or, if you find that alongside the grief you are able to access some happiness for her, and some relief that she won’t know the pain of the upside down, that is also ok. Sadness, envy, gutting despair, excitement for others, an ache that lingers longer than you expected-All of these feelings and thoughts are allowed. They all make sense. Many things can be true at once.
Maybe that is one of the hardest lessons infertility teaches us: that joy and grief are often roommates. And they often live side by side throughout each of our journeys through the upside down, and for a long, long time afterwards.
Looking for Therapy in Philadelphia or the Main Line?
At Wildflower Therapy, we work with people who are navigating infertility, IVF, pregnancy after infertility and/or loss, motherhood, body image, and the complicated emotional terrain that can exist alongside all of it. You do not have to minimize your feelings to prove that you are kind. And you do not have to erase your grief to celebrate someone else’s joy.
We also specialize in working with children, teens, adults struggling with body image and eating disorders, anxiety, depression, OCD, and other women’s mental health issues.
We provide therapy in-person in Philadelphia or Devon (and virtually for anyone in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Florida, South Carolina, Vermont, Virginia, Ohio, and Massechusetts.) We work with children, adolescents, and adults. We are neurodivergent-affirming, queer-celebratory, and feminist-relational in our work.
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