.... to be fed-up when people moan about not being about to conceive DC 2/3/4/5/6/whatever

[AuntieDoris]

... when I can't even manage to get pregnant with number 1?

I know it doesn't make any difference to me but it still unreasonably winds me up :(

as a childless women who as a result of a violent sex attack had 6 weeks of pain i hope i die before going through again, 2 years of problems standing & walking, remaining damage to the bones in my pelvis & has been completely asexual for the last 4-5 years (and i am nearing 40):

i am thankful most days i now life without intense physical pain. i am thankful that i am not some starving orphan in Somalia. that thought kept me going. i am grateful i am not Joanna Yeates because it could have been worse than living a period of my life in intense pain.

i am sorry if you have children & cannot have all the kids you want but you need to appreciate the things you do have. all of them.

See I se this differntly

In the Sn world you get a tiny proportion of people who look at oyur child say oh but their SN is less than minie so you should not feel bad / need support / etc

My child ahs ASD but their has ASD and LD so hard cheese

it's cruel, unkind and the ability to feel for oters even when youa re not in their circs is called empathy and is a key life skill

my friend left over this thread: a friend who has had several miscarriages and an ectopic. who has still offered me amazing support with my problems despite the fact that deep down she could technically think 'Ok yes your kids are Sn but at least you ahve them'.

Support my fucking arse.

Oh and the person who said don't read AIBU if you don't want to know the opinions? how do you know you don't until you have read? I think it is safe to assume that someone wpould assume support on Mumsnet, nothing about AIBU is intended to over ride that: read the frigging opening blurb!

I can post support for people with wildly different experiences to mine- whose child is being diagnosed with dyslexia, someone struggling on twice my income, whose child has G&T- and that's what MN is for. So on that basis next time a campaign arises to ditch AIBU I am in. It won't happen, gets MN too much publicity and they are a commercial enterprise, but AIBU is the worst of all MN and this thread proved it.

8OP* I am sorry you have no children, I hope one day something changes that enables tyou to fulfil your dream of becoming a parent.

I am so, so sorry that you have had such an awful experience Always. But there are days for being thankful and days for being sad for all of us in life, and even though some people never have to go through what others do, they will still have sadness.

A friend once had a miscarriage, early enough in pregnancy. It was her first. She had had an unpromising scan and was told to wait and began to bleed heavily at work. In shock, she went in to tell her colleagues and burst into tears. Her colleague took this moment to tell her, at great length, about how it wasn't that bad because she had had several and lost a baby at 10 days old and really it was just a clump of cells etc etc and she knew she could get pregnant. She meant well for my friend, of course. There was truth in what she said. It was not the right time though.

Did the colleague have it worse? Yes, undoubtedly... and at a different time, could that perspective have maybe even helped? Perhaps. But we can all only draw strength from the tales of others' pain when we are ready and there are moments in life which are acutely painful no matter how many people have suffered worse and how much worse their pain might be. My dear friend, who went to her 20 week scan to see her twins to find that they had literally both just died that morning wouldn't have felt comfort in hearing another person had multiple twin losses at that moment. There is always someone who has it worse and often there are times that our most acute pain just isn't anything comparable to that of another. I can't imagine what it must be like when you see pictures of people keening over the graves of their entire families in war zones, the sheer horror of it. What you have been through Always is something no woman should ever, ever have to experience and it is extraordinary that you can feel thankful. But there are times for everyone when that is just not possible for some people.

I feel hugely thankful for everything in my life, pretty much most of the time. But there are days I cry for things that might have been and experiences that I wish hadn't been, mostly related to my father's slow descent into devastating alcoholism and clinical depression. My experiences are not comparable to yours or to the pain of many of the women on this thread but they are real to me and some days, even now, there are flashes where they obscure the good in life. I suppose this can only be the same for everyone. I am again, so so sorry to hear of what you have been through Always.

I'm getting more and more reminded of the time there was a thread on conception (yes, conception, not chat, not AIBU) where a few of us in the same position struggling to conceive their first were having a good moan about how shit that was and someone came and told us we should be glad we didn't have children as she had childbirth injuries. This thread is turning the same way. I'm truly sorry for anyone who has very difficult issues in their life, who has pain however it is caused. But things are turning really unpleasant now.

What I see on this thread is huge amounts of pain, and I am worried that some people who are suffering huge pain have left mumsnet for good, and have thus lost a valuable source of support and help.

I suffer from depression, and know several other people who do too - we meet and talk regularly. Some of their stories are awful, so much worse than mine, but no-one has ever told me my depression is less bad or less worthy of help/support than theirs. I believe that this is the kind of empathy and acceptance that everyone on this thread needs

Doodlealley - I really like your post

working9while5 i agree with your comment about the days for being sad. but those are the days when i think it is important to remember the luck you have had in life the most. even if you dont feel at all lucky.

i wonder if some people find objectivity a positive way of coping and other people find the same objectivity offensive.

Peachy but isnt the other side of coin to you saying "their SN is less than minie so you should not feel bad / need support / etc" does anyone with a child with less SN say it is as bad for them as a parent of a child with profound SN?

by my reading, the comparision in this thread goes in 2 directions. one group saying: it is not as bad. the other going it is.

i personally dont find other womens experiences or beliefs offensive.

Always - that sounds like a truly terrible experience for you and I am so sorry that it happened to you.

The problem here though, isn't that people are not thankful to have one child or that they don't appreciate them. I'm sure they are and they do.

I agree very much with NorthernLurker this thread should never have been about taking sides or portioning the amount of pain one person is allowed to feel against another and it should never have been about rating pregnancy losses either.

People keep pointing out that this thread was started in AIBU and so nobody should expect support, they should expect debate and a difference of opinions. TheRealTillyMinto just a few posts ago you were saying it was all about sensitivity, now you are saying "if you don't like it don't read it." It would have been very unreasonable of anyone to say to the OP that if she feels fed up about someone saying they are struggling with secondary infertility she should just not read the threads. That seems to be going against the sensitivity you were asking for on her behalf and instead saying that people can be as insensitive as they like because it's her problem and responsibility to make sure she doesn't read about it any more.

It's one thing to hear different views, it's another to see SheCutOffTheirTails giving ratings to pregnancy losses and quantifying the amount of pain someone is allowed to feel if they have one child or none, lost a child to a MMC or a stillbirth, deciding who they can talk to about that pain, deciding that by talking about their pain to the wrong person they are stating it is exactly the same and are therefore dickheads while at the same time insisting that people need to have empathy and the OP is allowed to have a bad day and that people are trying to stop her saying how she feels.

There is a massive difference between starting a thread which mentions being upset about secondary infertility, which might be read by someone who has primary infertility, and deliberately telling a woman who doesn't have a child that your pain is the same as hers.

We did not need to go down the road of discussing who feels worse or for what.

We don't have to decide who feels better or worse to be able to empathise with someone who is unhappy and reaching out for support.

It's unfair to suggest that the people who can see that both the OP and the people she is taking about are all in pain are not empathising with her and can't understand how the pain might be different. What they are saying is that both sets of people are in pain and deserve to be allowed to ask for support. That's empathy at it's best, when you can put yourself in both situations and try your best to be sensitive to both, without totting up the pain points to decide who is more deserving.

I think it is. She was.

Secondary infertility is hard too, surely???

DandyLioness - I haven't said any differently about the number of people who do or don't empathise with her, or what their situations might be.

I've spoken about one person who has gone from saying people must be sensitive to saying "if you don't like it don't read it" and another who has said that she would be a bit if someone who experienced a MMC and then had another child compared her loss to a stillbirth.

As I said before, in my first post on this thread, I have had a MMC at between 20 - 22 weeks, then a premature baby who died, and then a living child.

I refer to my son's birth as a stillbirth even though medically it is classed as a Late MMC and it was no less painful to lose him and give birth to him at that point than it was to hold my daughter and watch her die.

And neither loss has been made better for me by the subsequent birth of my son.

Which IS what SCOTT has said in her post on page 15. My son's birth is not the same as a stillbirth. Well it is. And she has no right to put a label on it.

I don't know Lissie. I opened this thread because a friend with secondary infertility has had her fourth attempt at IVF this week with an embryo implantation taking place two days ago. She is terrified this will end in a fourth miscarriage. A family member with primary infertility is coming to visit next week and will meet my son for the first time. I feel at a loss to know how to support either one of them and hoped this thread might help. It hasn't.

And that's because of one or two posters, SCOTT included, shouting about being sympathetic and empathising while stamping all over everyone else.

I swore to myself that I wouldn't come back to this but here I am.

I've found myself really angry and upset by this thread.

I am very lucky to have children but I will never forgot the ones I lost.

5 years ago I fell pregnant. From the beginning I knew something wasn't right and I kept having this pain. The doctors didn't listen to me or take me seriously. I kept going to hospital and they kept sending me home.

After 2 weeks of this I woke early one morning and the pain was horrendous. We managed to get back to the hospital before I collapsed.

I don't remember the rest. I know i was rushed straight into theatre. There was no time for key hole. They cut me open, I have a nice 7 inch scar to show for it.

My pregnancy had been ectopic. They said I was about 9 weeks. My tiny precious baby was growing in the wrong place. As he grew my Fallopian tube rupture and at the same time my baby died. There was nothing wrong with him. He was just in the wrong place. Later, when I asked what had happened to my baby I was told he would have been disposed of with the clinical waste. They threw my baby in the bin.

They had to removed my Fallopian tube and ovary, my remaining ovary was damaged too. I wast told it wouldn't be easy to conceive again.

I cried every day. Every single day. But time does heal a little and it started to get easier. But today reading this thread I'm right back there, filled with sorrow.

Who is going to tell me my pain is less because I'm lucky enough to have other children.

Does my dead baby not matter because I have children

And what about all my miscarriages? I've been lucky enough to have had children in between them. But all those babies that were growing inside me. Do they not matter? Nobody, and I mean nobody has the right to tell me my pain has been less than others.

Yes I have the family I wanted but I have been to hell to get them. I nearly died.

i dont find what anyone is saying is offensive. i might not agree with them but thats it.

i wonder if alot of this problems on this thread are that people have different ways of coping and different abilities to cope. for me counting, rationalising, forcing myself to look at the glass as half full is how i cope. how someone else copes is not right for me & vice versa.

i dnot think this thread is about infertility. it is about coping with it & we are all different.

Always, I know what you are saying.. and my grandmother has a very similar outlook, she is an amazing woman. My grandfather once drove her into a wall when she was 7 months pregnant because she hadn't cooked the potatoes the right way. They both nearly died, and she lost her baby. She endured years of agony and being thrashed to within an inch of her life, over and over, watching her kids go through the same.. knowing he was sexually abusing them. I assume that she was also raped by him. Yet she is unrelentingly positive at the age of 89. She says that at 35 she thought she would be dead by 50 but she left her situation at 61 and built a whole new life. She started a career (childminding!) and worked til 70, she travelled to America and to India, she sought out an excellent placement in on old people's community housing initiative run by the Lion's club and became a mother hen to everyone there, running Bingo and trips away.. and her positivity is just unbelievable. Where she found the strength for it I will never know.. it is an amazing talent to be able to cultivate in yourself. There are a lot of books about this positive psychology stuff that suggest it has a major impact on how your life proceeds, physically and emotionally..

But I wonder if sometimes when you have actually been to the brink of hell and you reach that rock bottom is it a case that you have so much pain in you that you have to make that decision to sink or to swim, and that when you have reached that point, you could go either way. Just immerse yourself in it or decide that you have to do something different.. but that is so hard, and I absolutely admire people who have that immense courage to just go on when they are in agony but absolutely am in awe of people who can remain positive while doing so. I don't know that I could make that choice and I also hope I never have to find out...

I don't know why some people do, why you can Always, why others just find things harder. And I suppose that in terms of what has caused the hurt on this thread, this "hierarchies of pain" thing, really the hierarchies are all mediated by what your own experience is. I asked this before, what was the worst experience my grandmother had? Is it relevant, I wonder?

I can see in a totally objective sense that there is nothing in my experience that can match yours Always, or Lissie's, or my friend who lost twins at 20 weeks. I don't think that these experiences make my own pain in life less relevant.. but I do see that there is a central issue with this thread related to who is doing the comparing. It is okay for one person to say to another: "You have had it so hard, what you have gone through is much harder than anything I have ever experienced". But to say to someone in pain: "I have had it so hard, what you have gone through is so much less painful thank anything I have ever experienced" just breaks a deeply entrenched social norm, even where, yes, well, obviously it is true (e.g. if someone whose child has died tragically said it to someone whose great aunt Mildred had passed away in her sleep there is absolute factual value, but to say it at auntie Mildred's funeral just because her relatives shed a tear goes against social convention).

memoo

I know.

I have lost 4 babies and was very ill for a long time after the 1st. I was told I had mc but unfortunately it was incomplete and after weeks of pain and illness I lost the remains of my baby one afternoon. I was alone and terrified. My mum got me an emergency appt at the GPs and I took the remains in some kitche towel (my mum, bless her, scooped it out of the loo for me) and the GP looked, and said "yes, there is foetal tissue there" and them threw the remains of my baby in the pedal bin under the sink.

I am not sure I will ever forget that metallic twang as the bin lid closed.

They were all early mc so I guess I should be grateful for that, but it still hurts. Even now. My 1st was in 2002 and I still wonder...was it a boy or girl? He/she would be nearly 10 now.

I am very lucky in that I have my 2 lovely ds2's, but PLEASE OP, do not look at a woman with dc and automatically assume that its all been a bed of roses.

Please.

w9w5 - who is doing the comparing yes. to compare yourself can be empowering, whereever you come out. if someone else, does the same, how you react depends on your personality. for myself, i dont mind people being tough in me. it can be useful.

Becaroo, I'm sorry you went through that. It's true you never forget. You dream about how old they would have been now and what they might be doing. I long to be able to hold each of my lost babies. Just for a short while. Just to be able to look at their little faces.

Always, do you think that approach is something fundamental to your personality or something positive that has evolved out of your terrible experiences? Do you think it relates at all to where you are at in accepting those experiences? I have no idea what it's like to be anyone on this thread, I can imagine reacting both ways.. if it were a situation where I could see that the person's experiences were just way, way out of line with mine I would accept them telling me to get a grip. But I have reacted angrily in the past to friends telling me e.g. that I should/shouldn't talk any more to my father, should/shouldnt have compassion for him in a "what the hell do you know?" kind of way. It feels like an intrusion. If I suffered a serious bereavement or my precious child died or something else terrible happened to me as it has to you, I would not react kindly to being told that I was blowing it up out of proportion though. I would be angry. And hurt.

memoo Thank you. I sometimes look at ds1 and ds2 and wonder...would they look similar? Would they have blue or brown eyes? My nose? Dh's hair?

Silly, really.

I am deeply graetful for what I have. But I mourn what I lost.

It's not silly, not at all xx

w9w5 the book 'the lovely bones' says you are shaped by your bad experiences but you are not defined by them. they affect you & for a short time maybe take over but there is still a lot of you left.

your grandmother sounds amazing. she was not defined by the bad things in her life. i had one bad experience, not a lifetimes worth.

i think your friends might be trying to remind you about all of you that your father did not take away.

The OP did not automatically assume it was a bed of roses for women with children, just that she thought they were lucky to have children at all, which we are.

I have a child who died, it is the worst hell, but I am never sorry I had him or not grateful for having two healthy living children.

I would suffer the pain and ten times worse for the sake of having my children. To have no children would be far far worse.