Ok. I’m doing this too. We’ve done everything else together, so we’re in this blog thing together too. I (Seth) am interrupting your regularly scheduled blog release to add a few thoughts of my own.
First of all, I’m very proud of Maygann for doing this. It’s not easy do dive back into the memory of some dark days. I can feel it again deep in my guts (medical term) as we talk about it and remember. I can feel the thudding heart, lump in the throat, and incongruous numbness/anger/fear/despair. I’m proud of her courage and the impact she is already having on her readers.
Infertility and miscarriage is a lonely road full of both inadvertent and self-imposed isolation. Most of what you’ll find written or available for support is understandably directed toward women. Men are not stereotypically good at sharing their feelings and even worse at having a network of emotional support. I hope to offer a few words that may ring familiar to the other half of the equation.
One of many things that really sucks about infertility is that it never ends. It started to feel like the cycle of hope/disappointment/rationalization/try-again-while-not-really-hoping made up our whole history. For any other challenge in life, I felt I had some influence on the outcome. Not this. Any other situation, if you don’t win, you loose. Not this. There’s always another option, another month. It’s hard to know where to draw the line. That next chance might be the one. Everyone seems to have a hopeful story of someone who got pregnant after years of waiting. Maybe hopeful stories help some people. I found them an irritating reminder of the fact that it was more likely we would be one of the countless untold stories that did not end happily.
I loved Maygann so deeply it was hard to see her hurting so much. It was hard to hear her feeling responsible for something she had no control over. My reassurance to the contrary seemed to do so little – actually I think she just needed to hear it a million times. I was uncomfortable not being able to answer the constant question “Why?” The statistics and resources of my profession abandoned me. At work, I tried not to be bitter about being childless while treating kids sick from varying degrees of neglect or the young woman devastated at the positive pregnancy test in my office. As Maygann mentioned, even church was too hard at times. No one did anything wrong, but the focus on family and children made the weekend “break” exhausting too.
By the time things started getting tougher, we had been married about 10 years – not exactly novices at facing adversity and knowing how to comfort one another. I saw my role as being steady and unshakable. My own fears and hurts were to take a back seat to the needs of family. That only goes so far. I had a hard time trusting that it was ok to say when I was feeling hurt and overwhelmed. What if we both fell completely to pieces? The truth is, Maygann was always there and ready to handle it. So much for Superman. It is better, after all, to be vulnerable than invulnerable. 
The miscarriage hurt me deeply. I couldn’t even manage anger. Numbness and tears while we stared dumbly at each other with no answers. Existing in survival mode. I didn’t know if I could handle reaching out. I have some regrets about failing to try, but I never worked up the courage. So we relied on God and each other and waited some more.