S e g u l l a h
Infertility and Fulfillment
To say that I have been acquainted with infertility for two years now doesn't sound like a lot of time. Many go for double and triple that amount. Sarah, the wife of Abraham, longed for a baby for almost a lifetime. But to those of us whose sorrows seem to be intimately tied to our monthly cycle, every period a painful reminder, two years' worth is as good as eternity.
Curiously though, these last two years have been divided neatly into six-month phases of learning and progression. After several months of trying to get pregnant, I started feeling confused about my role in fulfilling the measure of my creation, thinking that it meant only to bear children. Why would the Lord give us a commandment and then impede our ability to fulfill it? This was one of the great mysteries and consequently, one of the great blessings of the Lord.
Having married a bit later in life for my Utah County upbringing (twenty-five years!) I wanted to start a family right away. These feelings, I recognize now, were partly a product of my own insecurities; I married late, therefore I needed to catch up with the rest of the twenty-five-year-olds who had a baby bouncing on each hip. My husband, a previous bachelor of thirty-one years, felt differently. He tried to persuade me to enjoy our Eden of sorts before that thrust into the lonesome, sometimes rewarding, yet dreary world of parenting. For the first six months of our marriage, I refused to enjoy our childless state, constantly aware of the dreaded menstruation that always came, right on time. Because conception was tightly linked with my confidence, I rode an emotional boat, rising on great waves of hope and sinking in tides of despair. Meanwhile I was simultaneously destroying anything good about my new marriage.
For the most part we who suffer from infertility are sensitive women. Friends and family tip-toe around us, aware of our feelings that may or may not be amplified by others' statements. We don't want to know how fertile you are, or how you always get it right on your first try, and please don't remind us how infertility and stress go hand in hand. We know all too well. I watched sisters and friends, not to mention unwed teenagers, get pregnant effortlessly. Most of the time I was last to know of their news: “I was nervous to tell you. I didn't want make you feel bad.”
One day I will write a book on insensitive things not to say to women who struggle with infertility. (Maybe from the royalties I can buy whole orphanages in China!) It would cover statements ranging from, “I think you should just adopt” or “Maybe if you lost weight . . . ” to questions like, “Are you sure you are doing it right?” or “Are you the problem . . . or is it your husband?” The truth is, almost every woman has had at least one month where her conception dreams didn't come true. This is something I would definitely remind the “fertile” women who read my book.
But enough about my book promotion.
After six months of feeling dreadfully sorry for myself, I entered into a new phase. This period of time, another six months, was easier on my husband but also less convenient. My sister, as fertile as Palm Springs (me = the Mojave), bought a book for me that covered fertility, from women who grow mustaches to honeymooning old ladies. (Oh, the things I learned!) In about a week I knew just about everything that the fertility world had to offer. A notebook of charts and fertility signs accompanied me wherever I went. I loved to show them off: “Excuse me, but would you like to see my fertility chart? This spiky line means that I am ovulating.” My temperature was taken every morning at 6:00, and what fun it was to try to guess my temp while waiting, thermometer in my mouth. Low numbers meant that I was pre-ovulation, high numbers meant that the event had occurred. Never before was I so aware of myself—every twitch had a meaning and therefore had to be recorded.
Which of course meant that sex was no longer spontaneous. This was the part I mentioned earlier about this phase being inconvenient for my husband. “Can't do it tonight, but in two nights and four hours we will be good to go!” Several times my husband awoke to find me with a flashlight in bed recording his performance in my notebooks. “Pretty good. I don't think we got it this time, though.”
Also inconvenient to my husband were all the doctors I introduced him too. Not knowing our exact problem (but having intuition after exhaustive research on my part) we were both subjected to tests. Some husbands many never know how tricky the old semen test can be. These were the steps my husband had to follow: get a container from a sweet nurse, try not to snicker as she explains the instructions, go home and do your thing, put the container in your armpits (it must remain at body temperature!) as you drive back to the clinic, hand the warm container to another sweet nurse (sometimes the drop-off nurse is different, and usually about the same age as, or younger than your husband), and wait for the results. As for me and my tests, I took them all like a brave soldier. “Take my blood if you must—just tell me why I can't conceive!”
Having pretty much passed our physical examinations we were sent to an infertility specialist, who my husband, at first glance, thought was a Xerox copier repairman. We sat down in two big chairs facing his enormous desk. Suddenly I felt like we were visiting with a bishop and I needed to confess something. “Uh . . . Doctor, would you like to see my notebooks?”
To put it simply, my cervix sheds proverbial globular icebergs that even the best of swimmers can't defeat (I'll spare you the details of how we actually saw this in live action under a microscope). Our best bet, from a medical standpoint, was artificial insemination. Basically the specialist, with the aid of his nurse, injected my husband's semen into my cervix. After the procedure we sat in the examination room. I was upside down in the gyno chair for ten minutes, while my husband tried not to heave in the corner (giant syringes generally make him queasy). As I stared at a tacky poster of the ocean deep, purposely mounted on the ceiling to amuse those lucky artificial insemination candidates, I thought, “So this is that wonderful event called conception.”
And it didn't even work.
Fortunately fate stepped in and we bought a house that desperately needed an invitation into our decade. I couldn't paint and try to conceive at the same time (now that is tricky) so our focus shifted from conception to construction. It was okay because our house needed the money that was disappearing fast on things like ovulation predictor kits and expensive chocolates for me every time our efforts failed. Plus, I think the infertility specialist charged me for every question I asked because sometimes an ultrasound exam was fifty dollars; other times it was two hundred and fifty.
The house allowed me to let go of all my anxieties and focus on something I could complete. I loved picking out paints and designing spaces. I suppose I was really just suppressing feelings, because I gained a whole lot of weight. So it was six months of feeling free, eating and doing whatever I wanted. I actually tried to resign myself to never having children. We even got a puppy, a gorgeous chocolate lab, to satisfy any lingering motherly intuitions. I loved our lifestyle—just me, my husband and a loyal dog. I finally had that newlywed bliss that I had robbed myself of earlier. In a new neighborhood I could reinvent myself, and no one would ever need feel sorry for me and my derailed quest for motherhood. I would fulfill the measure of my creation by self-indulgence, food, movies, and (conscience be damned) celebrity gossip!
I might have continued the fun indefinitely, but as winter approached, I had an experience which marked the beginning of another phase. There is something about the first of November that inspires a change in me—it has been that way for much of my life. Maybe it's the coming holidays or the changing light, but whatever it is, this time of the year is magical. On this day I was pulled out of my bemused existence as I went for my morning walk. All bundled up in sweats and a wool hat, I was passing by my neighbor's home when I had an inspired thought, “I am fulfilling the measure of my creation.” Terms and conditions that grew out of ignorance such as, “I will be happy once I get married,” or “I will only be satisfied when I am a mother,” no longer seemed valid. Before, I had been looking to my husband, doctors, or psychological complexities to fill a void. Suddenly I realized that because I was so stuck on my achievement of motherhood to make me happy, I had ignored inspiration about being a wife, let alone a woman!
My hard heart changed. I wasn't a mother, but I was a woman, a wife, an aunt, a Primary teacher, a school teacher, a neighbor, and a friend. By the time I made it home the thought (no doubt planted in my mind by a superior source) strengthened; indeed I was, even on that cold morning in November, satisfying the very point of my existence.
Since interest in my body was no longer simply how to make it pregnant, I felt empowered to do the Lord's work in other ways. First, I wanted to develop my relationship with Deity. To be at peace with the life I had been given and the trials I was called to bear. Second, I had a desire to really care for my husband. (It was the least I could do after all that I had put him through!) I wanted to cook for him using daring ingredients, meet him at the door when he came home, dress up when he took me out on dates, and fold his laundry! Before, these were demeaning tasks in an unfilled woman's life; now they were the quintessence of my destiny. And I was happy to know it.
What will come in the next six month chapter of my life? I don't know, but my husband and I love to speculate! A run for Congress, perhaps? I will however, take comfort in knowing that no matter the phase of my body, pre-conception or no conception, menopausal or post-menopausal, it can always do the work of the Lord. I am certain that fulfillment will change throughout my life. For now, fulfillment is learning about the sacredness of wifehood and the divine nature of womanhood. I would love to be a mother, but until then I have other responsibilities, other things to learn. I feel blessed to have had all this time to prepare for what may be. I could be years away from conception, or even adoption, but I know this time has not been wasted.
Until that time . . . I have a book to write!
COURTNEY KENDRICK lives in Provo, Utah with her husband and two dogs. She is currently employed by the Provo School District. The sixth of nine children, Courtney grew up starving for attention. As an adult she enjoys her weekend job as a wedding singer, being part-time manager of her husband’s acting career, and getting people to talk about themselves. She isn’t really a wedding singer but she’d love to be one someday.
