I've written about our issues with infertility, the IVF process and my pregnancy so far on here, mostly because I never told anyone I started writing on here again and I knew it was unlikely that anyone would stumble on it. I purposely have not posted anything about our IVF timeline, or subsequent pregnancy on any (other) social media sites. The reasons are....complex.
At first it was obviously because if the IVF hadn't worked it's not something you want to discuss with your 665 Facebook friends and 192 Instagram followers, half of whom you haven't seen in person or talked to in lets call it 10 years. Then once we knew it had worked, it was so early and anything can happen, so we kept it quiet for the same reasons. Once we were a few months in and had started to tell our family and close friends (the ones that if something had gone wrong we would have needed to get through the trauma) I realized I still had no desire to do a cutesy Facebook announcement and started to think about why.
I realized it was because for the last 3 years I've seen countless pregnancy announcements and as time went on and we weren't getting any closer to having our own tiny human they got harder and harder to see. At one point seeing one resulted in me downing glasses (ok fine, bottles) of wine and ugly crying. It wasn't because I wasn't happy for whatever family was getting their BFP (big fat positive, like on a pregnancy test), but I was just so, so sad for me and Spence. It made me feel broken, highlighted feelings that I wasn't good enough and made me question why this was happening to us. It made me feel like God wasn't listening to me when I prayed, for answers or for guidance or at the very least for peace. It makes you start to draw comparisons, and not in a flattering way (like the judging other people and wondering why they are "good enough" to get to be parents and we aren't type thing, I'm not proud of it but it totally happened). I realized that I didn't want to make anyone else going through infertility feel the way I've felt the last few years.
At first it was easy to just not mention the fact I was growing a tiny human on social media, I'm not someone who posts every little thing on there anyway, and I write on here for updates and pictures so I am still documenting this awesome thing that's (finally) happening. The first trimester I was basically a blob and slept 12+ hours a day and didn't do anything anyway. Then after the 14 week mark I started to get more energy and see friends more, and we started to tell people as we saw them, or talked to them on the phone etc. It hasn't been a secret that I'm pregnant, and it started to feel disingenuous to not post things on social media for some reason.
So that brings me to this post. I wanted to say something on social media, but I wanted to give people some warning in case they are dealing with infertility. Trying to be sensitive to other people, without dimming the excitement we're feeling at finally moving forward with our family.
Spencer and I are over the moon about our little man joining us in January. It's been a long terrible journey to get to this point but the outcome promises to be worth every tear, sad glass of wine and question about why it wasn't our turn yet. He is worth every test we had to go through, every shot I had to take (and trust me the needles in that picture are not all of them by a long shot- pun intended).
We can't wait to meet him!
