Sam's Monthly Column: From Her Heart To Yours!
/After my loss, “trying” again seemed impossible. Not that we didn’t “try.” We did, for months. And went through a cycle of IVF which the doctor encouragingly suggested I not bother trying again. I ached in the way I know you can understand. My body hurt, my arms hurt, my heart hurt. I called the NICU at Baystate to see if I could volunteer to rock babies. This at least, I thought, would ease some pain, would put my own pain in a good direction.
I was told that there was no longer even a waiting list for volunteering in the NICU. Because the waiting list was four years long.
While we worked through the adoption process, our social worker put strange and unnecessary obstacles in our path. She literally created roadblocks.
It felt like being in a room with no doors. Every time I headed in a direction, I met nothing but a brick wall. I could not escape the density of my own grief by “fixing” my circumstances. There was no fixing, no “trying” no getting out.
When we began to learn about embryo donation, I felt strongly disinterested. It did not struck me as the right path. Not that I can say why. But slowly over time, I learned more about this amazing practice where people gift created embryos to couples who long for children.
Once I fully immersed myself in the communities of gifters and recipients, my heart expanded a hundred fold. A little bit like the Grinch, it grew three sizes. What I found was a group of what you might call the most “infertile” folks on the planet. Those who had turned to embryo donation were those who had tried for years, a decade and more. I read stories of loss after loss. Woman going through cancer early in their twenties who’d been told they could never conceive. Women who’d had seven, eight losses and still dared to long again.
I saw things I did not see anywhere else in the world. I saw a black couple gifted a white embryo then giving birth and raising this while child, their child, their blessed and most desired child. I saw trans couples and born again christians in relationship. I saw generosity that changed lives in every practical and real way you can imagine. In grief is smallness. While grieving, I felt my own smallness, my life getting smaller, having less life in it. I felt a deep infertility of every kind. My body was infertile. My heart was infertile. My thoughts were infertile. What I discovered in the world of embryo donation was profound fertility. Real fertility.
Loss brings us to a place of feeling that everything that matters can be stolen from us, that we are at the mercy of unkind, careless forces we can never effect. We can try and love and want and prepare. We can do everything right. And we can still lose and lose again.
In the world of embryo donation, there was autonomy and power from a fertility of the mind. The idea of taking these frozen embryos, some stored for years and years, and gifting them to those who struggled, of creating a new kind of family, woke up my heart.
But it was not simply that. It was the family that wanted to gift to us, that did not care about our myriad imperfections, that did not judge us for our living children and therefore judge our desire for a child as “less important,” it was their love that healed. With them we could and we did form a radically new kind of family, and I was changed by the gift of another child. Overarching all of that, as a rainbow radiates high above the land, was the glorious gift of understanding fertility itself. There is a way out of that empty, small and bounded room. In fact, there are a hundred ways out. I was not the victim of merciless circumstances or mysterious fate. I was on a path I hadn’t chosen, yes. I was heading in a direction I did not quite understand, yes. But I was moving my own feet, one at a time, supported by the earth itself, and the voices ahead of me calling back to me and—so lovingly, so compassionately, so generously—encouraging me on.
You can hear Sam weekly on her Fertile Feminist podcast, check out all her work atthesamanthawilde.com . She offers mentorship for fertility and motherhood journeys, teaches weekly yoga and is the founder of a community for personal and collective transformation, The Sacred Order of the Great Mother.
