There are just some comments that annoy the hell out of me. They’re not things people say to be mean or petty. I’m pretty sure if I look into my past I’ve said something similar to someone without really thinking about it. They’re just those things that people say when they are trying to be encouraging.<\/p>\n
One of the most damaging, I think, is the false, but very pervasive, belief that if you just believe<\/i> hard enough, if you just think positively<\/i>, what you want will happen. I hear this over and over again, from infertility to job searches to other life crises. The intended<\/i> message is to stay positive and keep trying – which is usually perfectly good and acceptable. The unfortunate unintended message isn’t so good.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately is that many things in life are simply out of our control. Thinking good thoughts will not get me pregnant.<\/i> I can have all the HOPE and POSITIVE THINKING and PRAYERS that you want to throw at me, but I will still not get pregnant without IVF and some degree of luck. But I hear it over and over again, from “You’re stressing too much,” to “don’t overthink it,” to just general encouragement to stay positive during the cycle.<\/p>\n
So what happens when it doesn’t<\/i> work? Because, quite plainly, what I think does not affect the stims or the implantation – I’m sorry, but if they did I would have gotten pregnant with twins my first cycle when I was naive and excited and blissful, not with my second cycle when I was angry at the whole fucking world and didn’t believe I had a chance in hell of it working. The whole “if you believe, it will happen” mentality has a flip side: if it doesn’t work, you didn’t try hard enough. This pushes responsibility onto the patient. It creates guilt and self-doubt. Did I not relax enough? Did I have too many negative thoughts? Was it my fault that this didn’t work? Because that, effectively, is what we’re being told.<\/p>\n
To me it’s like telling your kid that if they really believe hard enough they could fly like Peter Pan. Obviously this is false. No matter how much they believe or think good thoughts, if they jump off the roof they’re going to hurt themselves. And if they did that, would the adults sit around saying, “Well, you just didn’t relax enough, obviously.” What a complex that would give a child. And yet people do it to adults all the time.<\/p>\n
I’m also starting to get very worn down by all the encouragement to “stay positive.” Sometimes it’s healthier to throw a pillow and cry and get angry<\/i>. It’s as if the people saying these things don’t want you to grieve and just sit and feel fucking rotten for a little while. As if that is somehow harmful to our forward progress, instead of being completely NORMAL. (Disclaimer: I am not talking about the majority of blog comments. Mostly this is people I talk to in my daily life who really don’t “get” what I’m going through.)<\/p>\n
Life isn’t always sunshine and roses. And life’s obstacles aren’t always surmountable. I’m a firm believer in being pro-active and involved… but there are some things I just can’t control, and to come to peace I have to accept that. There are a lot of variables and absolutely no guarantees.<\/p>\n
::<\/p>\n
At work I’m usually pretty good at staying focussed on what I’m doing, filtering out the noise and commotion around me. But there are times when that can be difficult – like when you notice a co-worker is dealing with an angry customer, it’s hard not to stretch your ears to catch it. And then there are times like today when some random comment just pierces my little bubble. “Expecting another! They announced it on Christmas – she said they have another present for us, but it won’t be here until July!” I froze, forgetting entirely what I was in the middle of counting out, as that comment, that concept, echoed in my ears. That was supposed to be me.<\/i> I quickly shook myself out of it and continued with the customer I was helping, but I couldn’t get the words out of my head.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There are just some comments that annoy the hell out of me. They’re not things people say to be mean or petty. I’m pretty sure if I look into my past I’ve said something similar to someone without really thinking about it. They’re just those things that people say when they are trying to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[76],"class_list":["post-1437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-ivf-3"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1437"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1437\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1439,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1437\/revisions\/1439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}