I’ve never ‘really’ been a minority before. I used to balk at political correctness. I’m ashamed to say that I just didn’t understand the need to be constantly changing the names of the pigeon holes that we put groups into, until I became a minority myself.
It is estimated that one in six couples will experience difficulty getting pregnant. Doctors, in my experience, will often refer to this difficulty as being infertile. A word I find very, very dirty!
According to Wikipedia the definition of Infertility is: sterility: the state of being unable to produce offspring; in a woman it is an inability to conceive; in a man it is an inability to impregnate.
In Canada if you’re under 30 you need to spend a year and half trying to conceive before Doctors will investigate any difficulties, between 30-35 it’s a year and 36 and over, it’s a six month wait. Once this time frame passes an investigation into your “infertility” begins. For me, after my one year wait, that’s when the dirty word came out to play. And not by me, by medical professionals! Without knowing what my issues were I had been given a little black cloud of negativity to follow me around throughout the process.
My world got very dark for awhile. Everything in my life became connected to the fact that we weren’t getting pregnant. There were moments of beauty, but nothing seemed to stick, everything was over shadowed by the slow dismantling of my future and the reworking of the identity I thought I would have, Mother.
At Christmas, last year, my cousin was ‘gushing’ over her latest read, The Secret. She was trying to explain to us how it had inspired her to think positively. “I need some positivity in my life” I remember thinking to myself. “I need to get rid of the negative self talk”. So, when I got home I went to the library and I got The Secret.
The idea behind the book is that in order to attract good things into your life you need to surround yourself with positivity. They call it The Law of Attraction. The Law of Attraction also works the opposite way, if you think negatively, you attract negative things. This theory brought a bit of hope back into my life. But it also scared me a little. I knew I liked the idea because it felt like it would give me control over my life and that I didn’t just have to throw my cards in the air and see where they landed. This theory allowed me to believe I had a say in the way my future turned out.
I started out with positive retail therapy. Much to my Psychologist’s weariness I began buying baby clothes. I never spent much money, and they were always on sale, but for me this was a positive message to the universe, I was ready. With each passing day I found new ways, both big and small to bring light back into my life, but I couldn’t shake the nasty title I had been given at the beginning of this whole process.
I had written about the negativity of the word before and still strongly feel that it’s not the way you should be ushered through this process if you want to bring positivity into it. I now understand the term ‘Differently Abled.’ If you’re told over and over that you’re disabled, people might as well be telling you you’re defeated.
It’s taken me months to finally coin a phrase that I think casts some hope on a pretty difficult situation. For some couples it’s a matter of finding the right combination of meds and procedures that work best for you. In the end, the one couple out of six who are having difficultly getting pregnant are ‘Conceivably Different”.
