“I was going through IVF, drinking Chinese teas, you name it.
I was throwing everything at it.”
And it didn’t work.
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And she wastalking about it.
But, for the most part, those stories had the happy ending: a baby.
The science worked for them.
For Aniston, and hundreds of thousands of others, it didn’t.
According to theSociety for Assisted Reproductive Technology, almost 300,000 IVF cycles were performed in 2020.
I got enough sleep, I drank responsibly, I didn’t do drugs, I had protected sex.
I didn’t do these things to prepare for pregnancy, but I assumed they would help.
By all accounts, I was primed for pregnancy.
It should have come easily as easily as it had seemed to for everyone else.
But a few years into our marriage, it wasn’t happening.
No Clomid, no IUI [intrauterine insemination], no fooling around.
It was not fun.
It was actually excruciating.
I couldn’t exercise, which was a huge part of my life.
I did all the peripheral things: teas, tinctures, supplements,acupuncture,cupping, tapping.
If I heard of a remedy to increase the chance of pregnancy, I did it.
It took over my life.
But it was going to be worth it.
It was time to stop, to find ourselves again.
The worst part was, I was completely isolated.
No one knew what we had gone through.
Not friends or family, who had six- and seven-year-olds by this point.
Not neighbors, who slowly watched me turn into a shell of myself.
Not colleagues, who were leaving work early to attend their children’s games and recitals.
All these people with their normal and happy lives had no idea I felt completely abnormal and miserable.
I would have loved the childbirth scars, the saggy breasts.
I would have given birth in the street if I could have changed places with them.
A woman in her early 40s with no kids was an anomaly to them.
A woman in her early 40s with no kids was an anomaly to them.
I still felt alone, set apart from other women.
I began to think that I should do what I encourage my clients to do: Talk about it.
The pain exists because it festers, it has nowhere to go.
The response was not overwhelming empathy or relatability.
It wasn’t evenunderwhelming empathy or relatability.
It was just… nothing.
For me and for some of my patients, I have tried to find support groups.
I have scoured the internet, reached out to fertility clinics, calledtherapistswho specialize in infertility.
People fear what they don’t know.
They don’t know how to respond to something that is foreign to them.
What is hard about the issue of infertility is that peopleshouldknow.
But it remains a strange thing that no one talks about.
When conversations like the one Jennifer Aniston had will be less shocking.
Or all of the above.
Empathy isnt hard, and it can really help someone claw their way out of that hole of isolation.
