My dirty little secret

At our church, we have a special time at the beginning of the service for celebrations and prayer concerns. The church also keeps track of prayer requests in its monthly newsletter. M and I have only offered up a prayer concern a couple of times for relatives with health issues.

I have sometimes wondered, if we eventually go ahead with IVF, would we put our names on the prayer list? On one hand, it is an invasive procedure whose outcome is uncertain. Prayers certainly can’t hurt. On the other, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen someone’s infertility woes and procedures become the topic of church prayers. Why is this?

I can easily answer my own question: Because nobody ever talks about infertility until it’s over. That is, until the couple either decides to go on without children or adopts. I don’t add “or until the couple conceives” because many couples never tell anyone how difficult it was for them to have a child. And so the “veil of silence” continues. My co-worker (due to give birth any day now) and her husband conceived twins after three or four IUIs. Yet when people ask if they underwent ART, they say no. She only admitted it to me after I shared my own story. She says they’re very private and don’t feel that other people need to know. That’s their choice. But when they were going through three years of hell, how many misunderstandings or badly timed inquiries could have been prevented if anyone besides close friends and family had a clue what they were going through? Could they have been strengthened by other people’s thoughts and prayers?

We vent on these blogs about the annoying questions other people ask about possible children in our future. But if the other people don’t know anything about what we’re going through, how can we blame them for saying the wrong thing? It’s not a sin for a friendly acquaintance to ask when/if a couple plans to have children. It’s all part of the process of getting to know someone. If they continue to badger the couple, that’s a different story, but we infertiles are so sensitive, we bristle if someone even mentions babies.

Not that I’m any different. My SIL, who knows all about our problems, will occasionally talk about some sort of baby item she will give to us “when we have a child.” She’s not wrong in saying that. M and I plan on adopting if my ovaries turn out to be duds in the end. We WILL be parents, someday, one way or the other. Yet I don’t even like her talking about us as parents! It’s hard for me to even envision it, when it seems so far away right now. We are fortunate; M and I have only been married two years, so we haven’t yet reached the point where everybody who doesn’t know about our problems will be wondering what’s going on.

Still. I hope that if IVF is in our future, we have the courage to share our worries with our church family, who I know will try their best to help us carry our load. Infertility is not our dirty little secret.