@TheVeryThing @redphonebox thank you so very much. Your empathy and sensitivity is very, very touching and so very much appreciated
Thank you also @stopfuckingshoutingatme - I'm really militant about being open about our experience of infertility and miscarriage, because I believe that unless we talk about it, how on earth are people expected to know how to support us?
These words by Jody Day, the founder of Gateway Women, massively spoke to me this week :
^As a culture, we’re pretty uncomfortable with unfix-able things. We like to believe that if we have enough data, make smart decisions, throw enough money and a really positive attitude at anything, it can be solved. There is also an unspoken but pervasive fantasy that if we’re ‘a good person’ things will work out for us in the end; a fantasy that persists in spite of the fact that not only do bad things happen to good people, but really great things happen to horrible ones!
So this perhaps leaves a lingering unspoken idea in people’s minds that childless women either ‘did something wrong’ or, even worse, that they ‘are something wrong’.
Internalising this guilt and shame can be profoundly corrosive to a woman’s identity just at the time in her life when she may feel acutely adrift from her ‘womanhood’, and struggling to get her head and heart around what it means for her to be a woman if she can’t be a mother. Often, at the very moment when she’s most in need of empathy, compassion and understanding from friends, family, acquaintances and colleagues, instead she’s met with silence, banter or judgement. Her grief becomes an unspeakable thing, both for her and for others.
For many of us, childlessness turns out to be one of life’s unfixable things. And no, adoption doesn’t ‘fix’ childlessness. It’s an entirely different way of bringing children into your life, and not one that every woman or couple has the mental, emotional, familial and financial resources to even consider, let alone accomplish right now. It involves taking on the grief and trauma of a vulnerable child just at the point when you’re quite possibly in the worst shape of your life to do so. To every parent who says to a childless woman or couple, “Why don’t you just adopt?” (I love that ‘just’!), perhaps the answer needs to become, “I’m a physical, financial, spiritual and emotional basket-case right now, so I think I’ll pass, but if it’s so easy and such a fab idea, why don’t you adopt?!”^
www.tommys.org/stillbirth-and-neonatal-death-stories/childlessness-after-miscarriage-untold-story