The Infertile Couple’s Guide to Surviving the Holidays

One of the most painful of all human experiences is that of deeply longing for a child and yet not having this child. Infertility is one of the most profound of all personal sufferings. Even so, this suffering is somehow intensified by the same conditions which bring such gladness to others during the Holiday Season. At a time when many feel merrier and more social than usual, those who are infertile may want to shield themselves from more pain by escaping into relative isolation (which often translates as isolation from relatives!)  Like Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, we can find ourselves hiding our deep wounds beneath a growing bitterness. Fearing only more hurt from those who don’t understand us, we want to avoid the noisy holiday gatherings we used to love. Unlike Scrooge, we might also feel embarrassed or strangely guilty for our feelings.

Remember how Scrooge had his Christmas Eve slumber interrupted three times by ghosts  from his past, present, and what might be in his future?  These spirits were not welcome, but their visits enlightened him.  They helped him make new decisions and because of their visits, he made changes to his life that were healing.

We too can use our own painful memories, our current crises, and our fears of what lie ahead, to inform and instruct us.  We can make decisions that are sensitive to our need for protection, comfort, honest reassurance, and nurturance of ourselves and our marriage. Let’s begin with our memories of a time before we knew all of the hard things we know now.

Ghost of Holiday Past
We are reminded of the time in our marriages when we were still pregnant with hope, expectancy, and dreams of conceiving our children in our very own bedrooms by candlelight and music.  We were planning the hanging of tiny Christmas stockings and still able to enjoy other peoples’ children.  These babies and children delighted us, not only for themselves, but also because they moved us to wonder with great anticipation about who are own children would be someday.

Ghost of Holiday Present
In a time of failed cycles, miscarriages and the pain of pregnancies lost, we find our Present filled with uncomfortable doctor visits, angry rifts between spouses, and the monthly return of menstrual blood to mock our fruitless efforts.  It is here we experience an emotional plummet, as if we have awoken from a Christmas Eve filled with expectancy only to find that we were somehow left off of Santa’s list. Our own stockings are empty. Innocence is lost. Hopes seem dashed. And the future is misty, unclear, frightening.

Ghost of Holiday Future
Charles Dickens describes the Ghost of Christmas Future with these words, For the very air in which the Spirit moved it seem to scatter gloom and mystery…. “Ghost of the Future,” Scrooge exclaimed, “I fear you more than any spectre I have seen!”

This is the ghost of our deepest dread and worst nightmare.  Will we forever remain childless?  Trapped and isolated in the infertile world while those with children go about their lives, we feel angry, damaged, alone and totally uncertain about what our future holds.  The unfulfilled dreams of our past and our most recent losses have come together and move us to feel hopeless.  Does our future hold more disappointment and despair? Yet, so many times we remain silent, fearing to speak what frightens us the most--a childless life. 

The holiday season is an especially painful time for those who have experienced significant losses in their lives. And infertility is all about loss!  Lost babies, lost dreams, and lost innocence is set ag ainst the backdrop of bright-eyed children, so alive with the magic of the holidays.  If that isn’t gut wrenching enough, these child-filled images are everywhere:  stores, television, or our places of worship. There seems to be no safe place.  At every outing the beautiful faces and images of children assault us and emphasize our own empty wombs and hearts.

And to make things worse, there’s a unique holiday pressure: the pressure (both from within us and from outside of us) to attend these festive events with a smile on our face and a heart full of joy. After all, who wants to be a Scrooge during the holidays?  But being childless during this season replaces holiday cheer with strong feelings of anger, deep sadnes s, despair and hopelessness.

So how do we survive it?
How do we keep from absolutely falling into a deep abyss of depression?  How do we keep ourselves from taking a fist full of tinsel off the tree and wrapping it around the neck of some insensitive relative who asks,“So! When are you two gonna start your family? You’re not getting any younger you know! What are ya waitin’ for?” As infertile people, how do we find our way through this time when emotional landmines are scattered all along our trek from November to January?

First, recognize and acknowledge the depth of your loss and its impact on you so that you are more likely to take actions which are self-protective and sustaining.  Just the very experience of infertility, before you add the strain of the holidays, has been described as similar to the level of stress and grief of coping with breast cancer or aids.

• Loss is loss. The fact that others around you don’t understand the depth of your pain only serves to make it all the more painful.  Our experience has been that every lost cycle, especially after an assisted cycle (like IVF) can feel like a miscarriage or a death.

• Research indicates that depression and anxiety regularly aggravate the suffering of infertility… and vice versa.  Approximately twenty percent of infertile women are clinically depressed with the remaining eighty percent often somewhere along the depression continuum.

• Both members of the infertile couple tend to experience similar levels of stress but women tend to suffer more often from depression.

• There can be the added burden of being in a different emotional place than your spouse. Men and women tend to experience infertility very differently. The longer a couple grapples with infertility, the greater the risk that they will find themselves feeling more and more separated emotionally.  Emotional separation is always distressing. During this journey these separations seem to particularly compound the feelings of loneliness and isolation.

• Financial stress often accompanies infertility.  The money you may have been saving for that special nursery is instead going toward more tests and procedures.  It’s hard to fathom that finances will dictate whether or how you will have a baby, but it often does. The holidays can also be a drain of finances and are one more reason to resent the season.

SURVIVING THE DILEMMA OF GIFT GIVING
This brief exchange occurs often between couples and you may have had a similar conversation in your own home.

Husband		Honey, what would you like for Christmas?
Wife:		There is absolutely nothing I want besides our baby!
Husband:		Nothing?
Wife		Nothing.

What do you give to someone who has everything they want except for their heart’s deepest desire?  Any other gift feels trite, meaningless and unwelcome.

Possible ways to deal with the feelings around gifts:

• Discuss, as a couple, how you wish to handle gifts.  In your pain, don’t just avoid the subject.
• Some couples decide to take a trip together.
• You may decide to save money for your next cycle.
• Be careful not to use gifts to try to “fix” things:  diamond stud earrings for her, new golf clubs for him, or a new car for you both will not make your infertility hurt any less. 

SURVIVING THE DILEMMA OF HOLIDAY GATHERINGS
You dread holiday gatherings and it can be difficult to negotiate your needs with the pressure from family.  Let us share with you a typical exchange between an infertile couple:

Wife:		I couldn’t care less about this holiday season.  I really thought we would be pregnant by now.  I just want to get this behind us.
Husband:		Let’s try to make the best of this…our families are expecting us.  We can’t stand up everybody!”
Wife:		I’m telling you that I can’t do it….  You go.  Just go without me if you want to.

The pull between your needs and the pressure from family is one of the holiday landmines! It’s more important that you present as a united front to family and friends, than it is to save face, avoid scorn, or side step all the awkward questions about why you two won’t be at the family gathering.

You can’t force yourself to feel what you don’t feel. The added pressure to do so just increases the feelings of isolation and depression.

• Choose carefully together what gatherings you think you can attend. Well meaning family and friends will invite (and often EXPECT) the two of you to attend all kinds of functions which, under normal circumstances, you might love to attend. But now these same gatherings can be excruciating, especially if children are involved.
  
  Usually, the wife feels this pain more intensely than her husband. Guys:  if its painful for her before you two even leave your house for the event, it will only become more painful for her once you arrive. So don’t go! Husbands, you are loving and protecting your wife when you are the one to call the host and decline the invitation.  Husbands often feel helpless, unable to fix her infertility or pain.  Focus instead on the practical ways you can support and protect her. And, please remember, that throwing her under the bus, by blaming your absence on your wife’s suffering, is not loving her or your marriage!

• Wives:  If you feel you can’t attend an event, whether it is with family, friends or a church service, give yourself permission to decline--even at the last minute.  Or you may choose to leave early when enough is enough.

• Husbands:  Be aware of the “Because” clause.  You do not need to explain or justify your choices.  Make a simple and direct statement about your decision, and leave it at that.  Once you start explaining and giving reasons, you put yourself in a defensive position.  Infertility work-up and treatment are already so very invasive of our time and privacy, so don’t let even well-meaning friends and family be intrusive.

• As a couple you need to negotiate whether one of you will attend a family event without the other.  This arrangement can be a set up for disaster if your communication isn’t truly honest.  Wives:  don’t encourage your husbands to attend an event without you if you already are feeling abandoned and alone. If the two of you decide he should go and represent both of you, then have a clear understanding that at any time you may call him with a request to come home early and be with you.

SURVIVING THE DILEMA OF RELIGIOUS GATHERINGS
Imagine with us this scene.  (A couple sits in their chilly car as they watch fathers and mothers carry their young children to a candle-lit service.)

Wife:		Honey, I know I said I could do this.  But, as I sit here and watch all of these children in other people’s arms, it’s just too hard.  I’m so sorry, but I can’t.
Husband:		Don’t you want to stay for a little bit?  Give it a try and I’ll bet you’ll  feel better.  We can just leave early if it’s too much.
Wife:		No.  It’s already too much.  Let’s go get some coffee… just the two of us.

Whereas once your place of worship brought you comfort, solace, and meaning, now it may bring you heartache.  Once this place may have felt like a shelter in your storm; now it may feel like the eye of your storm, especially at the holidays.  We can feel overwhelmed by images of baby Jesus lying in a bed of straw, little children singing Away in a Manger, and Christmas pageants, complete with tiny angels and little wisemen in their bath robes.

 Instead of feeling solace you find yourself wondering, “Where is a loving God in the midst of all my pain and loss?”  Words and hymns that previously held much meaning, now lead you to an existential crisis:  “What does all of this mean anyway?’

In this season we celebrate light in the midst of darkness, but for the infertile couple it feels only dark.  Does God even hear our prayers or do our petitions just bounce back to us from the ceiling of our darkened bedroom? Many of us had a much simpler faith before we became infertile. Trust came more easily before we were deeply injured and re-injured.  Peace of heart and mind was probably more common for us before we found ourselves angry with our bodies, our physicians, each other, and God.

Each one of us knows these three Holiday Ghosts.  We know them because they’ve been with us in previous holidays and because they haunt us every day of the year.  They make us cringe, weep, rage, and run.  And just like it was for Scrooge, these ghosts, if we’ll let them, will teach us more about ourselves.  Facing them can inform our choices.  They can empower the decision to not lose each other and ourselves as we desperately search for our heart’s greatest desire.

 

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It's more important that you present as a united front to family and friends, than it is to save face, avoid scorn, or side step all the awkward questions about why you two won't be at the family gathering.

 

 

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I have waited so long for someone to truly understand me....ands its finally here in this book.   Kim Argabright, LCSW