How are you?

[MrsDarcy4092]

I find this question so difficult to answer.

I feel like normally the person asking couldn't handle the real answer so what's the point in being honest?

I also feel like if I am honest with that response and I tell the person exactly how I am they then have information which is really sensitive and private and most people don't deserve to know it. and most people won't have anything useful to say so why am I opening myself up to them? It's just giving them material to gossip with.

i don't want to talk about it all the time for this reason, I want to get on and try and pretend that normality exists. But ultimately I don't want to have to say, "how are you" because I really don't care that your job is stressful or your credit card bill is high or that the baby's poo is no longer yellow . I literally don't care.

Hmmm. Maybe I'm not coping with our recent ivf fail as well as I thought!

This is exactly me. I'm not very good socially at the best of times and have to try really hard with small talk generally, but right now? With all the sorrow and worry of this? I literally can not be arsed with dealing with more awkwardness as I skirt around the truth of how I really am. They don't really care to know the truth. I don't care to tell them, so I just don't bother. I know it's making me seem rude but I literally don't care.

I'm probably being a bit of a shit friend to my actual friends at the mo too. I'm isolating myself in the real world and struggling to participate in the Facebook world - recently i simply can not 'like' pics of their babies.

My thinking is that any friends worth having will understand and forgive me eventually, and any that are told about the situation and still feel snotty can bugger off.

Small talk 'how are you's' - I just don't have the energy right now.

This is such a sorry state of being, isn't it. Fucking infertility

It's hard to say fine or okay thanks, when you're going through the worst situation you've ever faced. But like you say, it's not always the right time or place or person to launch into it all. More and more I realise how little people can understand it unless they've been through it.

Bridgetjones I feel like I'm being a terrible friend to some of my oldest and preciously closest friends too. The only way I can explain it to them is to say I'm living in a little bubble of pain right now and it's all I can do to keep my head up and keep going. I have almost no capacity for anything else right now.

It was like when my good friend (who had no trouble conceiving her two little ones) told me I should seek counselling because I'm still sad over my two chemical pregnancies, last one happened around the same time our mutual friend fell, so it's a constant reminder to me of what if.... and I really don't see the point. There's nothing anyone can say to make me less sad or to be ok with not falling pregnant. She was trying to be sympathetic but it just made me feel very alone...

Such a good topic for a thread. This question is one of the things I find the hardest. Especially when asked by people who have been either insensitive in the past or haven't given a shit about our circumstances or both. I have a family 'do' soon (not my family, they've been amazing) which will involve triviality and breezy "how are you? Anything new your end? How was your holiday?" Questions. I can hardly scream "holiday was fine in parts but largely shit because I am still fucking infertile 3 years later and there are kids EVERYWHERE"..

Recently i got asked that question by someone whom I know id not care on face-book, after i gave him my answer he blocked me and told our mutual friend that he only asked a simply question. Some people are very insensitive, they do not think before they ask questions like 'when is the baby coming'. I am left with no option than to answer them back 'why not ask the man upstairs(God) as I have asked him the same question for the past 4 years. Its hard for them to understand the pains and the disappointment for they have not worked in my shoe. Next time they ask how you are or they are blunt to ask when is the baby coming? looking them in the eyes and tell them a few home truth.

I agree. This question annoys me at times. The person asking the question really just wants to hear "fine" and they're usually not really actually interested in how you are. When I've been depressed in the past, this question has made me irrationally really angry because I know that most of the time the person asking doesn't actually really care how I am and so I it often used to make me feel even worse about myself.

I think the shutting yourself away and avoiding babies/baby photos is a very normal self protective response although it does make you feel like a shit person at times.

I actually find it ridiculously easy sometimes to avoid this question by just immediately asking how the other person is, then they get distracted by themselves. It's shit but easier than either saying fine and dying a bit inside or actually getting into a discussion about how miserable you are when they don't really care and you don't have the energy for it anyway. This is obviously a very negative view...!

I really do want an "I am not OK" t-shirt sometimes though.

Lemon I do that too. I hope it'll make me more sensitive to others if I notice other people do that in future, to ask them at a later point or in private if they are really okay.

lemon jamon that's a good idea. I might try that in future.

I went for my second counselling session last night (totally new to counselling but need to try and learn some coping strategies as I find it takes me so much longer to bounce back from those 'on my knees' moments which happen too regularly now). I raised this very point. Her advice was: "why wouldn't you say that you're not ok?" I said that I often feel that people don't really want to know, it's just a polite greeting. She said; "you don't necessarily need to go into great detail and some social circumstances mean that you can't but I suggest you say: "still in limbo as you can imagine with ongoing treatment but doing as best we can". I actually really liked that. Or words to that effect. This may be more relevant to me though as one of the things that causes me a lot of anger is DH's family knowing about it but NEVER acknowledging it. Counsellor suggested that I just act as though it IS on people's mind and, well, why should they expect me to lie?

One of my husband's uncles wrote a pretty nasty comment about 'childless' people on Facebook not having a vested interest in politics because it won't affect their kids. It's people like this that enrage me and when I see him next month and he asks how we are, I will say the above. He didn't mean to be nasty to us per se but it's the lack of sensitivity and thought for what he is saying when he must be able to appreciate that there after nearly 4 years of infertility, we might not get our baby? Clearly not on his radar and I REALLY need to change this mindset because I am at a point where I need people to be sensitive and protect us a bit.

Also, counsellor made a good point:

If someone you knew had a life threatening illness or even an illness/disability which impacted on their everyday life, would you breezily assume everything was ok with them and not offer extra thought to what you say? She said that I need to "not be so hard on myself" and downplay what a difficult situation this is for us. Ultimately there is a lot of truth in this - my downplaying and disguising the situation I am making it harder for myself when people aren't careful with my feelings. I am very emotionally low maintenance and I think I need to change and be more vocal.

Sorry for looong posts but makes a lot of sense to me.

We need people to understand that what we are going through is a never ending cycle of grief and disappointment, panic and quite often a totally inability to live beyond the 'present' moment. Everyone likes to trot out sayings like "live in the moment" but you NEED to be able to look to the future as a human being without being in fear of what it might bring.

You've recently registered to spam the boards bruuner. Do you think we were born yesterday?

Yeah, you have really thoroughly trashed the reputation of all clinics in Kiev, Ukraine, particularly BioTexCom. It's almost as if that's what you want to do. Is that what you want to do? I'm really curious.

Or are they just so bad that they can only attract patients by posting scam stories all over the internet? It's really strange.