Dear Fertile Myrtle, Kindly Shut the F*** Up

As you get older there seems to be a series of expectations for your life set by society. It’s as if there is a task list with deadlines to be ticked off as you go. Maybe you are familiar with this list.

It reads:

Get into a long-term relationship
Get engaged
Get married
Have a kid
Have another kid
Have one more kid (but only if your first two are of the same sex. If you already have a boy and a girl stop after step 5)

Once you have embarked on task #1 the deadlines start. Don’t worry, society will let you know when the deadline a getting close. They do so with incessant questioning. As soon as you start dating someone even halfway seriously you get your first question…

“So, when are you getting engaged?” With which you reply with whatever variation of an answer you have come up with in an attempt to get people off your back and mind their own business. For me, since I am somewhat of a traditionalist when it comes to engagement and believe the masculine partner should ask the feminine partner in a moment of surprise, I would say, “I don’t know, whenever he pops the question!” [insert eye roll].

And then you get engaged…

“So, when are you getting married?” “When is the wedding?” Before you set a date these are frustrating questions because you probably just started to look into the costs of having the wedding of your dreams and are getting super over-whelmed and you try your hardest not to answer these questions by saying, “How about when you give me $50,000”.

Then you finally bust out the checkbook and set a date. The wedding is beautiful and before the reception is even over… “So, when are you guys having kids?”

GEEZ! You haven’t even been on your honeymoon yet! Can’t you just enjoy married life for a minute first??

However, secretly you were already planning on starting to try right away. You just didn’t want to tell anyone. You wanted it to be a big surprise when you announced a few months after the wedding that you were expecting your first bundle of joy and starting your perfect family. But then…

…nothing happens…

Month after month a pattern emerges: you do research on tips to get pregnant, you try them out, you are confident THIS is the month, you SWEAR you are late, you take a test, it’s negative…again. Soon you have stock piled ovulation kits and pregnancy tests, you only have sex on happy face days which drives your partner crazy, it becomes all you can think about or focus on and this is of course when yet another someone asks, “So, when are you going to have kids?” and rather than answer, you simply just want to punch them in the stupid face.

And then you start getting worried.

When are you going to have kids? Can you have kids? Should you see a specialist? Maybe you do. I did.

We started seeing fertility doctors about a year and half into trying to conceive. Of course we didn’t tell anyone we were doing this (especially not our families) because possible infertility is taboo to talk about. So instead we suffered alone, we worried alone, we cried alone. I remember, during this time, I was working at a restaurant as a bartender and that year nearly every 19-year-old server on staff got “knocked up”. The running joke of the place was, “Don’t drink the water or you’ll end up pregnant!”. Of course, as the only employee MARRIED yet childless it was suggested by every customer that I drink more of the water.

If it were only that easy…

And then one day, around Thanksgiving time, one of my friends came in. He is a jokester by nature and wanted to try to pull a fast one on me. He had a young daughter and told me that she sent him a picture and he didn’t know what it was. He wanted me to look at it for him. The picture on his phone was of an ultrasound but where the baby should be it was a turkey. He was hoping I would think it was a real ultrasound and that his daughter. who was way too young to be having kids, was pregnant and freak out but…[whomp whomp] I saw the turkey first. The crude joke didn’t land.

A little later my Mom came in and sat next to him. We were all talking for a while and then I turned around to assist some customers on the other side of the bar. When I turned back around my Mom was looking at his phone… Then she looked at me with tears in her eyes… damn it. He had told her I sent it to him and of course after being married for two years now she thought it might be true and believed it. I had to break my own mother’s heart right there while at work and tell her that no, she was unfortunately not getting a grandchild within the next 9 months from me. I could have killed him.

And then fertility treatment started.

In the course of three years we did testicular biopsies, exploratory laparoscopies, sperm banks, acupuncture, four rounds of IUI and one and half rounds of IVF. It was during these years I realized that we must have gone past deadline #4 of the to-do list.

I knew this because the questions stopped. Nobody was asking anymore about when we were having kids. That question had finally stopped! However, that doesn’t mean that it completely went away… It apparently just morphed into a new thing. It morphed into unsolicited advice.

People, I guess, just assume at this point that if you are trying you may be struggling and they start crawling out of the woodwork with the “how-to’s” of getting pregnant. Eat this. Drink this. Try this position. Coordinate sex with the lunar cycle. Wear this kind of underwear. Or my personal favorite: Just don’t think about it. It’ll happen when you least expect it to.

Yes, these tidbits of “wisdom” are a little annoying but you do occasionally run across one or two you somehow haven’t tried yet and you figure, “What the heck, it’s worth a shot… When’s the next lunar eclipse?”.

But then there is Fertile Myrtle…

A fertile Myrtle is the woman that plowed through the “steps” without skipping a beat. Getting pregnant for a fertile Myrtle is like leading a duck to water. In their minds they cannot even fathom the possibility of even a slight struggle to conceive. Their only struggle is how NOT to get pregnant AGAIN. A fertile Myrtle just doesn’t understand. They can’t relate, so instead they make a joke of it, offer irrational solutions, and tell stories of “hope”.

Fertile Myrtle will say things like:

If you want kids you should just take one of mine.

I should just have a kid for you. I can be like a surrogate or something.

You should just adopt a bunch of kids from [insert country here].

Will you be Little Frankie’s God-mother? That way you will at least get to be a parent if I die.

Why don’t you just try IUI or IVF? (And if you have and you tell them this…) Why don’t you just do it again? I know it will work this time! (Ok, do YOU have another $20K so I can TRY IVF again? No? I didn’t think so…)

I have a friend who was told she couldn’t have kids and then…WHAM! She was pregnant and she didn’t even know it! You just need to relax. It will happen when the time is right.

My cousin and his wife did 5 rounds of IVF and never conceived. Then they decided they just weren’t going to have kids and were going to travel instead. So they sold all their stuff and left and then….BAM! Three months later they announced they were pregnant! See, you don’t need doctors. All you need is a vacation!

It’s as if they simply don’t accept the fact you may not actually be able to have biological children and for some reason they feel you shouldn’t accept it either…

Acceptance is a process in which you come to terms with your condition and are no longer trying to change it. How is this possible with Fertile Myrtle constantly in your ear protesting it?

It is a STRUGGLE!

So please.

PLEASE.

PLEEAAASE, Fertile Myrtle, shut the f up.***

It’s okay if I can’t biologically have children. It’s okay if my husband can’t biologically have children. It’s okay if we choose to use donor sperm. It’s okay if we choose to use donor eggs. It’s okay if we use donor embryos. It’s okay if we choose to use a surrogate. It’s okay if we choose to foster. It’s okay if we choose to adopt. It’s OUR choice and it’s OKAY. We just want to have a family. It’s unfortunate, yes, that it was not as easy for me as it was for you. Trust me, I have fought my war of extreme envy of you over and over again already.

At this point, I am just exhausted. I’m tired of “trying”. I’m tired of doctors. I’m tired of medication. I’m tired of procedures. I’m tired of your questions. I’m tired of your “solutions”. I’m yearning for a baby! I’m yearning for a family. I’m yearning to be a parent. I’m desperate for an answer. I’m desperate for a solution. I’m desperate for you to SHUT THE F*** UP. Please, stop trying to “fix” me. The only thing “broken” is my heart and your incessant questions, jokes, and solutions are not helping! Oh, and you may want to go count your kids because I am just about on that level of bat sh*t crazy…

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