I have been trying to write this post for the past few months. This has been a hard post to write.

I don’t listen to Country music very often, but my husband does. We share a Pandora account, and I was listening to our Thumbprint Radio on my way into town one. The song “Every Storm (Runs Out of Rain)” by Gary Allan came on. Now most of the time I just click next till I get back to music I typically listen too, but this time I didn’t, I let it play. Then continued to hit replay until I made it home. While this song was written for different reasons, the chorus summed up what I wanted to say so incredibly well.

One in eight couples will struggle with infertility. How each couple deals with infertility will vary. How each spouse deals with infertility will vary.

When we found out that we would not likely get pregnant on our own, we knew no one who had struggled with infertility. Once we started to open up it was amazing the number of people we knew who had also struggled, yet no one talks about it.

Infertility is a very personal struggle. It’s a very intimate part of a couple’s lives. I cannot begin to explain how much it hurts when you are in the midst of this storm and have someone ask you:

• “When are you having kids?”
• “You’ll make a great Mom/Dad someday, have you thought about when you’re having kids?”
• “You’ve been married for x – number of years, when are you going to start having kids?”
• “I want grandbabies, when are you going to have kids?” (Not directed towards either of our parents)

While none of these comments are meant with malice they still hurt. My favorite response back was, “When my ovaries decided they would like to work we will have children.” For me I found being open and honest about our struggles made it so much easier to deal with. After we started to talk about our infertility journey we found the questions we were being asked changed, some were appropriate questions while others were…. just frankly not. We would hear things like:

• “How are things going?”
• “What types of treatment have you tried?”
• “Have you tried xyz? It helped my friends friend get pregnant.”
• “You just need to relax.”
• “Oh well if you can’t have your own children you can just adopt.”

I need to address a few of the above statements. Some are just plain hurtful. The first I would like to address would be “Have you tried xyz?” That it worked for your friends’ friend or your cousin three times removed, etc. The problem is more times than not these were far out suggestions (think hold your breath for a minutes and spin around ten times as fast as you can kind of far out), very rarely was I asked if I had tried some sort of medical intervention. There are women who have unexplained infertility. I am not one of those women, I have two medical conditions that contribute to my inability to get pregnant. My medical care was focused on forcing ovulation to increase our odds of conceiving. Your far-fetched suggestion is not helpful and instead is frustrating and inconsiderate.

The next statement I would like to address is “If you just relax” or some other variation was probably the most common statement I would hear. Telling someone who is dealing with infertility that they need to relax is just plain insensitive. Those who are given reasons why they are having difficulties conceiving can tell you relaxing doesn’t fix those issues. Telling those who are undergoing fertility treatments to just relax obviously have never endured a fertility cycle. There is nothing relaxing about going through a fertility cycle.

The final statement I would like to address is, “If you can’t have your own children you can just adopt.” There are some many things wrong with this statement. First, regardless if you have biological children or adopted children they are still your children. This statement should read “If you can’t have biological children you can just adopt.” But, again some couples don’t want to adopt. They prefer to exhaust all avenues of fertility treatments before exploring adoption as an option, others like ourselves kept adoption on the table the entire time. The final thing wrong with this statement is for someone to “just adopt.” Couples going through infertility treatments experience an array of emotions. Dismissing those feelings because they can “just adopt” is not ok. Adoption is not an easy path it has its own emotional toll, couples don’t “just adopt.”

For me I knew from before I knew Jesse that I needed to adopt. For me when faced with spending money of fertility cycles that may or may not work or spending money on adoption fees it was easy. I would rather adopt. For Jesse that decision was not so easy. He took about a year thinking about which direction he wanted to go. I had to be patient in waiting for his decision. We had to be in this together.

If you yourself are in the throws of infertility know that you most definitely are not alone. One in eight couples have been in your shoes. One in eight know the plethora of emotions you are feeling at any given time. One in eight will look at you and say it is hard, there are days you want to quit, there are tears, there is frustration, and there is sorrow. Eventually those feelings will dissipate, just like any storm, and you are left with something beautiful, maybe even a rainbow.

– The Moorman’s