Looking Forward on my 5th Childless Birthday

This past week has felt weird. A few days ago I turned 32. I’m not sure if I’ve ever been one to overly celebrate my birthday. It’s never been a count-down for me like some other people I know. I think I’ve always been pretty modest about my birthday. As a kid, it was obviously fun with birthday parties (I had a bowling party 3 years in a row) and presents and friends and cake. I’d often be at summer camp either skipping around a room, with my face in a cake, or thrown into the lake. My early twenties also included some fun Toronto bars. I think the last birthday that was really exciting for me was 25. I had just moved to Israel a few weeks earlier, and it was a quarter-century, so I sort of cared. 26 was fun because 10 days earlier I got engaged, so I was still high from that and this was the year I’d get married to the man of my dreams. At 27 I had gotten married a few months before and was getting excited for our honeymoon in September to Thailand for a month. And then we started trying to have kids and I figured by 28 I’d be a mom, or an almost mom. I definitely figured I’d have at least 2 kids by 32.

Last week I couldn’t really figure out why I wasn’t excited for my birthday. For a few years now I haven’t really wanted to do anything. For my 30th my parents came to visit for a few days in Israel and the whole family celebrated with me. Even threw me a surprise party. Which was fun. But it feels like every year that goes by is just another year that I’m not a mom. I keep feeling like I’m getting older, like not just a year older, but old. I keep thinking about how when my kid is 30 I’ll be 62, which is fine but older than the original plan, and it could take more time. So each year I think about how I’m getting into my 60s rather than my 30s. How I’ll be an old grandmother even if I’m a “normal-aged” mom in my mid-30s (hopefully). This might seem crazy, but as the years keep progressing with infertility, my sense of urgency increases, and my age to me seems so much older than I probably am. Constantly joking about how I’m old probably doesn’t help my psyche either.

So I did end up celebrating my birthday. We had cake at the office (this is standard). I went out for dinner with my husband, parents, and brother to this really great local pub and had an awesome time. I had some close friends over for food and drinks (and more drinks) which was so fun! I can’t hide from my birthday, so why not celebrate.

Why I Love the New American Greetings Commercial

I love this. LOVE this commercial. It’s been floating around for almost a week and every time I see it I cry. They took a real couple going through infertility and summed up the whole experience in less than a minute and a half. I can relate to every single thing in the video. Great direction and marketing, American Greetings.

I think their Not Alone / #givemeaning campaign is an important one. They’ve pushed the boundaries of card giving from the usual occasions of birthdays, anniversaries, births, and thank yous to something that brings people together on a whole other, more intimate level. It’s not just for infertility, although that’s the subject of the commercial, but we can often tell when someone is going through something but isn’t talking about it. And sometimes, that person just needs to know that others are there. What a nice gesture. They also brought forth an important concept that the friend giving the card doesn’t pretend to understand what is going on. She’s not looking for solutions to the problem, not offering advice. She’s just putting it out there that she’s there. How refreshing. And significant.

Waiting

When we start our journey of infertility nobody really tells us anything about what to expect. We learn about the technical / medical side of things. We’re told not to lose hope. We trust our doctors. But no one talks to us about the level of patience involved. As in, the enormous amount of patience that’s involved. And honestly, if they did 4.5 years ago, it wouldn’t have really meant anything to me anyway. No one says, ok, you may need to prepare yourself for something that could take the next 5 years of your life or more. Here are some resources to help you deal with that. Or, here are the people who will help you through the two-week-wait. Infertility has been a huge test of my patience and oftentimes I feel like I fail that test over and over and over again. If it wasn’t for my husband keeping me level and breathing, I’d probably have let my lack of patience affect me even more.

We live in a world where things happen instantly. We’re used to getting results quickly. We expect people to return our texts and emails within minutes. And sometimes we even call someone to tell them that we emailed them about something - how ridiculous is that? And social media… enough said. You get the point. So how do we take how we behave in the real world, to how we behave in the world of “if you don’t have endless patience you may potentially have a breakdown.”