Baby talk

This will be a very personal post with a topic I only have shared with my closest.

The reason I write about it is that my experience is that it's not a topic you talk about so much because it involves a lot of pain and grief. But I also think that if you talk about it, it can be helpful in a way too. 

I will try not to get too serious, just convey a brief summary of my own personal experience.

So here we go....

Even if it hurts, I occasionally want to go back in time and think about what life could have been like if I hadn't had to move away from home at the age of 16 for various reasons. The consequence of the fact that I felt so insecure and lonely was that I didn't really had the strength to take on everyday life or take care of my health. I'm thinking in particular of my gynecological problems which later caused my infertility.

I don't know if I have written about that topic before as it is quite hard to just think about, and even harder to share. The older you get, the harder it is, in younger years you at least had the chance to resort to other methods, but at a certain age, these possibilities are also exhausted.

Involuntary infertility is, in addition to heartache, an obstacle in a relationship or at least has a great chance of becoming one. The difficult but necessary questions become almost overwhelmingly stressful. When to bring up the subject? How will your partner react?

I found out about my condition when I was only seventeen, so I had to go through this several times, because you always think that the guy at the moment is mr Right and you are going to live happily ever after. There was some of them that didn't care, or in fact thought it was great. Obviously because they were too young to even think of fatherhood, they just wanted to have "fun".

As I got older, and the guys too, they either said it was okay even if I had the feeling they lied since the relationship pretty soon faded out, or they ended the relationship right away which I thought was more honest of them to do.

But the hardest part of this condition is to wrap your mind around the fact that you never going to be a mother, not in a natural way at least. My genes will not pass on but die with me.

I have also never had the opportunity for any other alternative such as artificial insemination or adoption. Adoption was ruled out, because the unstability of my relationships did not allow this. In addition, my gynecological problems have meant that the chance of succeeding with artificial insemination would have been very small according to the tests I underwent.

Another though thing I had to cope with over the years is having to listen to baby talk all the time, and with baby talk I mean parents talking about their offspring. This happened especially during the age of 18- 35 when all my friends and colleagues in the same age had children more or less regularly.

They could not stop talking about their babies. I often tried to get away discretely, but did not want to be rude so I often had to hear just about everything from the birth to the first burp and all the other incredible things that had occured until this conversation. I felt heartbroken and jealous but I just smiled and nodded with tears in my eyes, which the new mum of course took as shared happiness.

These moments was torture, but that was of course not their intention, they had no idea about my problem and were just happy and wanted to share their new life, and I always listened politely while I broke down a little inside each time...

The knowledge that it's now too late for me is kinda liberating but every now and then I collapse in this pile of self-pity  and then the thoughts come .... what if ...

What if I had been a bit smarter and taking care of myself at 16? But who knows, maybe I'd still gotten these problems anyways. 

Well, there's no reason to speculate, it is what it is, and I've accepted it now.

But I still take detours when I see someone with a stroller ..

XOXO