My Adult Book Report on the Struggles of Infertility.

"'Oh, Libby, what happened to you?'

I told you, it defines me."

It was at that moment in the novel What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty that I stopped caring about the main character, Alice, and her memory loss and focused solely on her older sister Elisabeth as the driving force behind the novel. This was supposed to be a swift beach-chair kinda read for our book club this month, easy and silly without many cares, but it turned into a novel for me that has been on my mind for weeks now, one that lingers and has left me questioning a lot of things.

What defines Libby (Elisabeth)?

Her infertility.

It's there, etched into her face, her body language, her behaviours. It's a "deep, slumping sort of sadness about her." I know what that looks like.

It looks like me.

I see it in myself every time I look in the mirror or in the remembered play-by-play of how I act around people. The physical manifestations are shockingly apparent when I look at pictures from years past and all I can see is how tired I am now, deep inside my soul, in recent pictures when held up in comparison. The dark circles, the wan skin, the way that my body just doesn't hold itself up anymore and curls in on itself naturally. Even when I was tired and depressed with a one-year-old, I still looked like a person who people would be willing to talk to. Life hadn't really knocked me down yet. Now I can see why people may avoid me unless I have my fake mask plastered on, but even that has huge cracks that no amount of adhesive can fix.

My losses have taken a toll on more than just my looks. They really affected my mental health. In a mental berating to herself (of which, I'm not a stranger), Elisabeth told herself that "[y]ou're not a proper woman with these half-hearted, faintly ridiculous attempts to have a baby." Bingo. Nailed it. How often I questioned my own body and why it just couldn't do what it biologically was designed to do. We already had a daughter who was so easy to conceive. Of course, when we finally got pregnant the second time, we were ecstatic because we didn't know what was coming. Just like Elisabeth had said that she wanted to yell at her younger husband and herself that "'[j]ust because you're pregnant doesn't mean you get a baby, you idiots,'" I wish we could have done the same.

Elisabeth and her husband's behaviours throughout her infertility mirror our own, which makes me wonder if all infertile or struggling couples do the same. Whenever a positive test happened after the first loss, my husband's first response was "well, I'm not getting my hopes up," but you could hear that tiny quiver of it lurking in the back of his voice. We often lowered our voices to an excited whisper when talking about the baby, as Elisabeth and her husband did, "as if we could trick the gods into not noticing us sneakily trying to have a baby." Then the pain and bleeding would start a few days later and slowly that small amount of hope died away and I stopped telling him about the positives all together, only telling him afterwards when I was losing it. To go through that alone was better than having to hear the hardened pain in his voice where that last bit of hope used to live. Elisabeth never told her husband about the sixth loss as he was extremely happy at the moment about other things in his life and she couldn't bear to crush him again.

The burdens we carry. It's no wonder we sink.

This babe I'm growing now came at the perfect time. Physically, miscarrying is hard. Emotionally, it is indescribably draining. And mentally, it was destroying me. We had been discussing how much longer we could go on trying. To be fair, our timeline for trying really wasn't as long as many couple's. Elisabeth had seven years of failure, and we only had a year and a half. Everyone's fertility stories are different. But there does come a point when it is questioned, "when is enough just enough?" We were reaching that point rapidly. Six miscarriages. How many more miscarriages could we endure? Elisabeth had also reached that point in her journey. She was just "so tired of trying and trying and trying." And that's where we were at before this one who is now rolling in my tummy at this moment decided to stick. Trying for her that month was really getting down to one of the last times we were going to attempt it.

There's a passage in the novel that sums up my feelings about the whole ordeal and I have read and re-read it many times.

"I remember thinking about how mothers were prepared to run into burning buildings to save their children's lives. I thought I should be able to go through a bit more suffering, a bit more inconvenience to give my children life. It made me feel noble. But now I realize I'm a crazy woman running into a burning house for children who don't exist. My children were never going to exist. They were always on my mind. That's what's so embarrassing about all this. Each time I sobbed for a lost baby, it was like sobbing over the end of a relationship when I'd never even gone out with the guy. My babies weren't babies. They were just microscopic clusters of cells that weren't ever going to be anything else. They were just my own desperate hopes. Dream babies.
And people have to give up on dreams. Aspiring ballet dancers have to accept that their bodies aren't right for ballet. Nobody even feels that sorry for them. Oh, well, think of another job. My body isn't right for babies. Bad luck."

It still shocking to me how a simple paperback could so totally encompass my thoughts of the last almost-two years. It makes me wonder if the author suffered through losses herself or if the behaviours and thoughts of infertile women are just so stereotypical that it's easy to imagine what it would be like. However she got her information, it is spot on. This book has left me reeling for weeks now.

At one point in the novel, Elisabeth wonders what it would be like to be in her sister's shoes and to lose her memory of the last ten years. She imagines a fake speech her husband would tell her to the question of how many children they have:

"Over the last seven years, you've had three IVF pregnancies and two natural pregnancies. None of these theoretical babies became real babies. The furthest you ever got was sixteen weeks and that one broke our hearts so badly we thought we'd never recover. You've also been through eight failed IVF cycles. Yes, this has changed you. Yes, it has changed our marriage, your relationships with your family and your friends. You are angry, bitter, and frankly, you're often a bit strange."

He may as well have been describing me.

I have ostracized myself from my closest friends, relationships I held dear and I fear will never be the same. The turmoil I felt within myself after every loss was too much for me to put into words, it still is really, and when I did start to open up, I felt like everyone was bored by it. No one ever said as much, but that's how it felt. Nothing else in my life was interesting to me and a I was/still am a Debbie Downer. As Elisabeth said, "My infertility fills every corner of my mind."

And it still does for me. Look at this indulgent post.

I am pregnant, and there's no denying it. I'm 32 weeks now and at this point, should she come tomorrow, there's a 90% chance she'd live. Even with those odds, even "when I can feel the baby kicking and rolling," it's still hard to believe a baby is coming. A friend who had also had a miscarriage before the birth of her son said it was months after his birth before she came to terms that he was actually there. It's absolutely heartbreaking.It's hard to break the mindset that we'll never have another child. As hard as it may be for someone who has never experienced a loss before to understand, it really is hard for us to accept still, even as her arrival is rocketing towards us. There's a lot of deep-seated hurt and pain that will probably never go away. The toll all this has taken on me, and John, is immeasurable. I do hope when I hear our babe's cries the first time that she will be real. That all of this nightmare can end and healing begin. This book has put into perspective that it's not only me who has suffered in this way, but others as well, which is obvious, of course, look at the statistics for miscarriages and infertility, but to see it spelt out in writing, where it may as well say "Sam" instead of "Elisabeth" for how similar our pain has been, it's been a lot to process.

"I want to feel like myself again," says Elisabeth and I want nothing more for myself either.

I want to be a person who others want to be around, who can laugh deeply and care even deeper again about things outside of my own troubles. And I'm trying. So very hard. I don't mean to be distant and self-absorbed, and to be truthful, I'm not thinking of myself so much as things much bigger than myself that I haven't been able to control, but it's still a work in progress. More often now, I feel my old self peek out again, but it's hard to permanently break down those walls I built to protect myself from the reality of the hell-hole our life has been. As Elisabeth explains, "the only way I've been able to get through the last seven years is by wrapping myself up like a package with a tighter and tighter string. It's so tight that if I'm talking about anything...I feel as though there is something constricting my throat, as if my mouth doesn't open wide enough for proper, unthinking conversation." I do thank Liane Moriarty whole heartedly for giving words to a feeling that I've never been able to express, that I know has often left people with a bad taste in their mouths for me. I so desperately want to talk like a normal person again.

What a weird thing to have taken for granted before.

In a way, this book has allowed me to put down some of my guard and to make me more aware of how I've been acting towards others. I don't like it, I don't like being bitter and self-absorbed. Honestly, I dislike who I've become in the last year. It's still all so confusing and hard to put into words my exact mindset but this book has helped shine some light on many of my thoughts. I don't want my losses to define me, but they do and there's nothing I can do but accept it, in the same way that caring for a baby defines you as a parent. But I hope by sharing all this, my behaviours can better be understood to many of you reading this now. I'm not looking to be excused for any of it. No, that's not what I want. But I wanted to share this all as an explanation for what I've been going through and what I still struggle with. It's also a way for me to understand it all and work through it. Writing has a beautiful way of giving us permission to express things we can't say out loud.

As a spoiler, Elisabeth does eventually become pregnant and give birth to a baby girl, using the very last frozen embryo they had before they were going to call it quits. They also adopted three other children to complete their family. I know we will never adopt, or try again in the future. In my heart, in those moments when I feel joy instead of hurt, I know that when our tiniest daughter is here, our family will be complete.

For everyone who has taken the time to read through this, I thank you deeply. If you're struggling with anything, I'm always a safe place to talk. There's no need to cause yourself more hurt by shutting yourself away like I did and still do. I can't give answers but I can listen and give a hug. Sometimes just an ear and a hug from an understanding place is exactly what we need.

Much love to you all.