Infertility makes Mother’s Day painful
Moms find joy after hard-won babies
Amy Riley remembers the time someone wished her a happy Mother’s Day and she broke down in tears, right in the middle of the supermarket.
“I found Mother’s Day to be impossible,” she said. She had been pregnant six times, but none went to term. She worried she might never be a mother.
A former board member of the Recurrent Pregnancy Loss Association, Riley, of Collingswood, New Jersey, finally became a mom to Betty Sue 41⁄ years ago.
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After another nonviable pregnancy, she gave birth to twins Pearl and Lucy via in vitro fertilization.
Riley is among the many women who know firsthand the hope and heartbreak of infertility − and who are grateful to celebrate Sunday with families they thought they might never have.
Yet even now, the holiday brings up complicated feelings: “I still feel very emotional about it, because I didn’t think I could ever be a mom.”
She understood the good intentions behind people telling her not to lose faith, but it didn’t always bring comfort.
“People would say, ‘Be hopeful,’ and I would think, ‘This is such BS.’ But it’s true,” Riley said. “There is hope − it just may not be along the path you thought it would be.”
‘ The dark years in between’
Stacy Schwab of Buffalo, New York, had her daughter Kelsey when she was young, and she desperately wanted to give her a sibling. She would tell Kelsey she’d be a big sister, then lose a pregnancy and spiral into despair. When she gave birth to a full-term stillborn boy she named Levon James, the pain was almost unbearable.
The losses “were heart-wrenching,” she said. “I would see other moms with
strollers and cry. People would say, ‘But you have Kelsey,’ and I wanted to say, ‘Which of your children would you give back?’ ”
It was the ’90s, and “there was no offer of emotional support back then. I felt unseen and unvalued,” she said. Mother’s Day brought memories of loss, and guilt over her grieving.
When Schwab got pregnant in 1999, she didn’t tell anyone at first, fearing another loss. She named her son Cassidy after a song by her favorite band, the Grateful Dead, about a child who carries on the memory of someone lost, a child who can “close the gap of the dark years
in between.”
A different kind of darkness followed; Schwab struggled with depression and substance abuse and escaped an abusive marriage. She tried to hide her pain, especially from her daughter. Until Kelsey, searching for mementos to create a Mother’s Day gift, found old sonograms, clothing and a blanket.
“She came to me and said, ‘I had another brother, didn’t I?’ ” Schwab recalled. “It was a beautiful moment.”
Years into her recovery, Schwab calls her children “my best friends and my adult roommates” and said Mother’s Day is “glorious.”
Grateful to another mother
After marrying in 2017 a little later in life, Tracy Bach Gillespie and her husband wanted to start a family.
Fertility treatments, and bitter disappointment, followed. “I peed on so many sticks,” she said.
Her husband thought they could adopt but waited until she was at peace with the decision, too. She threw herself into research, chose an adoption agency − and waited.
On Nov. 2, 2019, the New Jersey couple flew to Utah and had dinner with a pregnant young woman and her mother. “We connected with her from the first Skype call, and when we met her, it was just such an easy, natural conversation,” she said.
Gillespie has maintained a relationship with her daughter’s birth mother as well.
“I hate when people say someone ‘gave a child up’ for adoption,” she said. “The love she had, the emotions she showed, the magnitude of it all, I’ll never forget it. It makes her every bit a mother, too.” The Gillespies send a card and flowers each year for Mother’s Day, and a short video with their daughter.
“Her birth mother has a very special place in my heart. After all, she gave me the gift of motherhood,” Gillespie said.
‘My son saved my life’
When Christine Burnette was a teenager, a medical diagnosis led her to believe she would never have children.
Two semesters into her college career, a struggling family member asked her for help. She agreed to take custody of her 1-year-old cousin, a girl with colitis, asthma and other medical struggles.
“I didn’t know what it would take to raise a child,” Burnette said. She was 19.
She earned two degrees, got married and continued raising her cousin, but as her friends started having babies, she realized she wanted one, too.
Her sister in their hometown of Camden, New Jersey, approached a pregnant woman she knew was living on the street and addicted to drugs, and asked whether she had considered adoption. Burnette’s sister made sure the woman got food and medical care, and did her best to keep her safe. Burnette and her husband adopted the baby.
Burnette, 37, who works for the New Jersey Department of Children and Families, fostered and later adopted another child, then had a baby through IVF in 2017 − and that pregnancy revealed Stage 3 ovarian cancer. She underwent treatment while caring for her newborn, who has Down syndrome.
“My son saved my life,” she said, because doctors told her they probably would not have otherwise found her cancer until it was too late. She and her husband adopted a fourth child as well, bringing their family to seven people, including three children with disabilities.
Her life “is nothing like I thought it would be, but it’s better than what I could have ever imagined.”
‘People want to hope’
Megan Hanson is a co-founder of the Recurrent Pregnancy Loss Association, so even though she now has two children – a daughter through surrogacy and a son via her own pregnancy – she’s fully aware of how painful Mother’s Day can be.
Her own Mother’s Day will be spent with her family, she said, but with her thoughts on women who struggle as she did.
Hanson is grateful, too, to her daughter’s gestational carrier.
“I thought it would be transactional, but it’s ended up being this wonderful friendship,” Hanson said. “I send her a Mother’s Day card; I say thank you because she helped me get to this place. She’s got her own child and she’s a mother in her own right.”