Hello new readers and visitors… If you’re here for infertility insights you’re in the right place. You’ll find 279 blog posts and 5,042 comments — all shared since Coming2Terms started in February 2007. Take a&hellip
Reconciling My Fate
A Fresh Start
The new blog name came to me this morning: A Fresh Start After all, isn’t that what we crave when we’ve come through a gut-wrenchingly difficult experience? Coming2Terms went a long way to helping me&hellip
New Decade, New Beginnings (updated)
Updated 1/4/2010 Wanted to share a TV interview scheduled at the end of last year that took place today on the ABC affiliate KXTV. I hope you find that it moves the discussion away from OctoMom&hellip
Tough Talk: Living Without Children After Infertility
Infertile folk will never quite measure up on the yardstick of life used by “fertile” folk — what with such things as pregnancies, baby firsts, kid kibbitzing, and parental back slaps among the many markings.&hellip
How Big Is the Elephant in Your Room?
Constance? Earnest? Stalwart? Fred? I haven’t named my elephant yet, but I really should since it’s been with me in whatever room I seem to occupy for quite some time now. Yes,infertility comes with its&hellip
Barren Doesn’t Mean Empty
Come on in. We’ve got room in front. Okay, everyone settled? Can you hear me in back? Good. Okay, I’ve got a few confessions to make.
First, I haven’t been completely silent these past six weeks. Those of you who follow me on Facebook or
Twitter know I’ve been writing for other sites during my Coming2Terms sabbatical. That’s right. I’ve been testing the waters and getting
comfortable writing for a wider audience. For instance:
- There’s my ongoing work to raise awareness about my book Silent Sorority (new reviews arriving regularly)
- There are my offbeat pieces like, “How Did I Get So Chesty,” which can be found on MORE magazine’s website
- My commentary on living without children in an era of helicopter parents, “No Kids?
Heap the Scorn, We’re Ready” lives on Open Salon - My Barren Not Beaten column on Fertility Authority covers a range of topics like my review of the movie Up
As those of you who have been with me from the beginning well know I started this blog feeling broken, empty, isolated — in a word: LOST. I’d been living with infertility for more than a decade and,
at 43, found myself confronted with the unthinkable. Infertility treatment of all sorts had proven futile. Time was running out on a spontaneous, miraculous pregnancy and that stark realization
flattened me. I was angry, bitter, despairing, prickly. I felt my body had betrayed me. I felt massively misunderstood and, not surprisingly, I didn’t like the world very much.
A spin through my earliest posts reveals that I channeled my blackest ire at women who conceived easily. There were even days when I felt positively hateful toward once infertile women who succeeded
where I didn’t. At times their comments felt disingenuous. Their glowing posts were a stake in my fragile heart. “Look at me, I’m so very pregnant now! Here’s my belly (which you’ll never
have… .) to prove it!”
Yes, I confess that I never came right out and said it then, but those posts cut deeper in some ways than hearing about pregnancies from women who had never visited …
Mother’s Day: From Meh to Arrghh!
Newsflash: Non-moms do not represent a unified voting block, as evidenced by the 46 responses to my recent request for non-mom perspectives about Mother’s Day
on HARO. Much of the differences in opinion stemmed from the circumstances that led to being a non-mom (e.g. those who chose not to have
children vs. those who wanted children but weren’t able to).
Sure there are some — yours truly being one — who find the over-the-top mommy marketing palooza hard to stomach, but other non-moms take a more zen-like approach. Where we can all agree, though,
is around the idea that all women — not just mothers — deserve a nod for all they do for their families, communities and the world at large. Here, in their own words, are more thoughts from
non-moms on Mother’s Day.
Thank you!! It is nice to see someone willing to acknowledge that there are woman not called ‘mother’ out here. Gritting my teeth is exactly the way I get through it. Every commercial
for mother’s day has me running for the remote control. Any other channel will do. I feel anger at the assumption that all women must be or will become a mother. My mantra becomes soon another
‘holiday’ will be here and they’ll forget all about this mother’s day business.But it is all around you. In the magazines, on the TV talk shows, ‘news’ shows, entertainment; talk about who is
pregnant, how awful it would be to not experience the wonderfulness of pregnancy and having children. It seems when the childless woman is mentioned it is as the butt of jokes or with a sad shake of
the head, if she gets thought about at all. I wish there was a better way to get through it than Haagen Daas, Hershey’s and trying to close it out of your hearing and your mind.
–Lee
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A Few Weeks Past Due…
…no, No, NO!!! Not that overdue. Seriously people, how long have you been reading this blog? Still barren as ever, but looking pretty fine these days if I do say so myself. L’Oreal’s Skin Genesis&hellip
My Mosaic Project Continues
A new year and with it the opportunity to take a look back at where we’ve come from and, perhaps more importantly, point ourselves in the direction we’d like to go. For some of us&hellip
I’m a Ferrari? Now Exhale
Damn! Where’s the tape recorder when you need it? The playback of last night’s conversation with Mr. Pamela Jeanne would have been a keeper. I’ll try to recreate a portion of it here. It started&hellip
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