In Family
Mother’s Day is no picnic for infertile families.
Jen Arndt burst into tears as she sat in church on Mother’s Day two years ago and watched all the mothers walk to the altar for a special blessing.
She and her husband, Jason, had been trying for four years to have a baby, and this was a strong reminder of what she didn’t have.
“I just sat in the pew and I cried,” says Arndt, of Fayetteville. “Because, you know, nobody talks about it, nobody thinks about what it’s like when you’re trying so hard. Mother’s Day is all about the mother, but what about the woman who is trying so hard to be a mother? That was really, really hard.”
Bobbi Butterworth knows that pain, too. For the first four Mother’s Days after she and her husband, Chris, decided they were ready to be parents, they went out and celebrated the holiday with her mom. “I still had hope then,” she says. Butterworth, of Cabot, got pregnant through in vitro fertilization but had a miscarriage just before that fifth Mother’s Day. With her optimism waning, she opted to stay in that year, away from the hoopla that reminded her of the one thing she longed for most — to be a mom.
Butterworth went on to give birth to
two children, James, now 2, and Elizabeth, 9 months, although at great cost, financial and emotional.
According to the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 7.3 million women are infertile.
Their days often revolve around ovulation predictor kits, charting basal body temperatures and tracking other indicators to find the window of time when they are most likely to be able to get pregnant. If they are undergoing intrauterine insemination or in vitro fertilization, they follow even more intricate regimens.
Stacy Schriver, donor egg program coordinator at the Arkansas Fertility and Gynecology Clinic in Little Rock, points out that all holidays can be hard for women who are struggling to have babies simply because they are so often times for family gatherings and activities. Baby showers, too, can be challenging, for obvious reasons.
‘STRESS LEVEL IS CRAZY HIGH’
“We’ve had to tell patients who are beyond upset that everyone around them is pregnant that they can’t stay at home and avoid the public just because they’re afraid they’re going to run into somebody who’s pregnant,” she says. “Everything they’re going through is difficult and the stress level is crazy high and the hormones don’t make it any easier. But we tell them they just can’t let this absorb them.”
Arndt was usually successful at putting infertility out of her mind long enough to honor, alongside her supportive husband, her mother and mother-in-law on Mother’s Day.
“We tried to just stay busy and take it in stride,” she says.
In 2010, though, with her husband serving in Afghanistan instead of by her side, she found it impossible to be stoic.
Ken Clark, a marriage and family therapist at Chenal Family Therapy in Little Rock, counsels patients dealing with infertility to be alert to emotional triggers.
“They’re trying to maintain the confidence, they’re trying to remain positive and have hope that at some point they’ll get pregnant or they’ll adopt or some option will come up,” he says. “When they see other people celebrating motherhood it becomes a very poignant reminder that it hasn’t happened yet, and that usually starts this cycle of a kind of obsessive thought and worry where they think, oh, is it ever going to happen, and it tends to spiral down from there and they find themselves in a depressive funk. Even one day, like Mother’s Day, can trigger a slide like that where somebody who has been optimistic and hopeful is all of a sudden despondent and hopeless.”
He lets them know they can excuse themselves from certain situations.
“It is very OK to limit your exposure to those things that cause you hurt and mental anguish,” Clark says. “A lot of women feel very guilty about not wanting to be around those things, not wanting to be at a Mother’s Day celebration or whatever, but they need to give themselves permission to skip events that are causing them mental anguish or to pull back from events or conversations that are triggering those slides.”
AVOIDED BABY SHOWERS
During her battle with infertility, Erin Cohen avoided baby showers, baby stores and Mother’s Day outings.
“But I didn’t avoid my mother,” explains Cohen, who tried for three years to get pregnant with her first son, Isaac, now 6, followed by a lengthy wait to adopt her second son, Solomon, 2. “She was supportive and sad right along with us.”
Isaac, conceived through in vitro fertilization, was a micro-preemie, born 16 weeks early and weighing only 1 pound, 10 ounces, and Cohen knew a second pregnancy would be dangerous.
“People say, ‘Well, it shouldn’t be hard for you because you have a child already,” she says of the time she spent waiting for Solomon. “But it is hard. It’s like the abandonment of your dreams. Just because you have one baby doesn’t mean you shouldn’t want to have another one. Having Isaac did make it more bearable. But I also knew what I was missing — the love of another child and the dreams of having your children being born a certain amount of time apart, and pregnancy ... giving up on the idea of being pregnant or having a healthy easy pregnancy was sad.”
According to the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 7.3 million women are infertile.
Solomon’s adoption was finalized around Mother’s Day 2010, though, giving her more reason to celebrate.
“Even though I guess my family is complete, Mother’s Day can still be bittersweet for me,” she says. “It’s amazing and I’m thankful, but it does remind me how hard it was for me to come to motherhood. I can still get really sad about the things that my family and I had to go through to get here.”
Cohen was open with people around her about her fertility journey and their adoption process, although not everyone shares their struggles.
“Everybody tiptoes around a person when they discover that something tragic is happening or has happened — and infertility is no different,” Clark says. “Those people feel like everybody kind of handles them with kid gloves and it’s awkward, and nobody likes being the pity case or the charity case.”
ESTABLISH BOUNDARIES
The best thing to do is ask straightforward questions and establish boundaries accordingly.
“Say, ‘ Does it bother you when we talk about our kids?’” Clark says. “Give them some ownership over the direction of the conversations instead of denying them the opportunity to be a part of it, avoiding certain conversations, or forcing it upon them.”
Arndt says an infertile woman doesn’t begrudge other women their children — and she doesn’t want the pity of those women either.
“I think the best thing you can do for an infertile woman is to acknowledge it and say to them, ‘I know you’re struggling and I’m hoping for the best for you. Know you’re not forgotten,’” she says. “Show support for those people. Don’t show them pity, don’t look at them with sad eyes.”
Cohen knows all too well that people who aren’t sure what to say are likely to say nothing at all.
“If you’re going to interact with somebody who is struggling to have children — simple and sweet, say, “I don’t know what to say but I’m thinking of you.’ Don’t ignore it. Don’t pretend it doesn’t exist. But don’t try to fix it. Don’t say, ‘ Oh, just try to relax.’ Or ‘Well, at least you get to sleep in.’ Or ‘Well, you can borrow my kids.’ Don’t say that junk.”
Arndt looks back on Mother’s Day two years ago as one of the worst times in her life. But one of the best times followed the next day when the clinic where she had undergone IVF called to tell her that she was pregnant.
She’s not sure yet how she’ll celebrate this Mother’s Day, but it will be hard to top last year’s, when they stayed home with their son, Erich, now 15 months old.
“I just enjoyed it and kind of soaked up all the time with my son,” she says. “On Mother’s Day I just loved him up and spent all kinds of time with him. It was fantastic.”