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  • Writer's picturecrazybighope

Feeling Distant From Friends And Family

I always hoped that whatever happened in my life or theirs, my friends and I would have the empathy and imagination to walk with each other, whatever our path. And actually I’ve been pretty lucky in my friends as well as my family. When I read about the insensitivity some individuals and couples have to bear, I feel genuinely shocked.

But I still spend a lot of time feeling completely cut off from the world. For me, I always knew I wanted a child, but it was a thought as much as a feeling. It was only when the impossibility of it became clear that the full gaping absence opened up in front of me. It felt to me like having my membership of the human race revoked. (And it turns out that being a feminist committed to the idea that women have many and complex roles to play beyond motherhood didn’t make the slightest bit of difference).

So how can it not affect relationships with family and friends, when you are raw and the world is full of everyday situations that are like a knife in the heart. For me what worries me at least as much as the pain are the strategies I’ve developed to manage it. Not consciously, rather it’s something I think my brain does trying to be helpful, so I can survive these moments. But after a while it’s hard not to notice the numbness.

Take an example. I’m at a party, and there are various small children tottering about among the adults. Lots of grown-up chatter but some bedtime stories too, and babies being cuddled in the middle of it all. I chat, I have a drink, I read a story to a child. But I know I am a peripheral, shadowy figure that’s stumbled into the wrong room. I have never felt so far from the people around me. I can look but not touch. I feel like I’m coated in glass.

Because what is the alternative? It feels like the alternative is to stop spending any time with the people who care about me, to stop doing the things that add up to my day-to-day life. Because then I won’t have to risk feeling the desolation that those situations make me feel. And it’s tempting. So the numbness is the price of keeping going.

I want to overcome this deep sense of exclusion but I’m not sure how to feel like part of something again. In the short term I know I’m one of the lucky ones because I have friends with kids, friends without kids, coupled-up friends, single friends. I truly treasure my friends who don’t have kids, because with them I don’t need to be so on my guard for feeling pain at any moment. And the more I learn about my situation, the more I understand that I don’t need to feel guilty for protecting myself sometimes from a world that isn’t making much effort to understand me. But I feel like there must be a way back to human connection that transcends this infertility thing. One day I hope to be able to connect again with my lovely old friends with children – and new ones – without feeling the protective glass coating creep over me.

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