Tales of Barrenness from a Mennonite Girl. Or, The No-Baby Blues

I know, I know, I know. Seven months is not a long time to wait to get pregnant without success. I shouldn’t be using such strong terms as “barrenness.” In fact, it’s perfectly normal to have to wait several months, and in no way indicates infertility on either partner’s side. I know.

But I’m still depressed as hell most of the time. Because for Mennonites, seven months is a really long time to wait. But I’ll get to that later.

I want to begin by saying that all my life, I was puzzled by the idea of couples wanting children. I heard about couples “trying” or “deciding” to have kids. Sometimes I heard about couple’s “not being able” to have kids, and them feeling “frustrated” about it. I never understood.

Who wants children in their lives? Who wants to let a bunch of noisy, uncontrollable, and utterly ungrateful little people invade their lives forever?

I have never felt anything special about children. I’ve never connected with kids. Even when I was a child myself, kids didn’t especially like me – I’ve always been too serious and nerdy – and as I got older, they liked me even less. I’m not particularly charming or funny or matronly. Kids don’t find me especially interesting or likable, and frankly, I’ve never found them all that interesting or likable either. The feeling was mutual.

So I’ve never understood how a person could reach a point where she wanted children – enough to get upset about it if she didn’t get them. She could always comfort herself by saying, “Oh well – at least I don’t have to endure that harrowing nightmare that is childbirth.”

I didn’t understand, that is, until April of 2009. Suddenly, for reasons I can’t fully explain, everything changed. At that point nothing made sense any more.

If you are like me, and have always wondered what it must feel like to actually want children, well, here are some of my experiences and reasons. And if you have never wondered, then you already know exactly what I’m talking about.

An overwhelming desire to love somebody.

It’s preposterous. But these days I’ll see a sudden movement outside, through the window, out of the corner of my eye, and my heart will skip a beat as I hope it’s a puppy or kitten who needs my love. (It never is).

I am in agony over wanting to give my love to somebody. I feel I have so much to offer a child.

I have been babysitting a professor-friend’s little boy, Avery, for about as long as I’ve been trying to conceive, and it is very hard sometimes. I think he’s a source of my problem, to a certain extent. I love him too much.  Ever since I began to care for that child, my desire for a baby of my own has been almost physically painful. I cry buckets some nights because I don’t have a little one to kiss and hold and care for. It just hit me one day when I was putting him to sleep and has never gone away.  And the sensation is made worse by the fact that it is so new and came on so suddenly. When did I become this person? Who am I? How do I deal with this? My new-found desire for children is confusing and disorienting. I’m not a mother, I’m an academic! Or . . . at least, I was. Now I don’t know what I am.

It is torture for me to hold back my fondness and affection for the little one. He provokes such intense feelings of tenderness in me. I want to pour out all my love into him . . . But he’s not mine. I feel an overwhelming wellspring of love, and yet have no one to direct it to.

I want to share this overflow of love with someone.

It frustrates me to find out I have absolutely no control over the matter.

I was under the impression that having a baby was a decision one made. And I had made my decision. I had planned it all out. I was going to get pregnant in the summer – my aim was August at the latest – so that I would have a spring baby. That way, I could carry my newborn around outside in a sling for the first months of his life.  I would be in my second trimester by now. I would know the baby’s sex, and we would have a name picked out for him or her. We would have a crib and a stroller. I would be saying things like, “Oh, little Benny was so active last night . . . I could hardly sleep.”

Now I say, “family planning? Ha! In my dreams.”  There is no planning in any of this. It isn’t a choice. It’s just something you hope for and wait for without any say in the matter. It sucks. I was totally wrong about all this.

Everyone else in the universe is having babies right now.

Those of you who aren’t a part of the Mennonite culture might not understand this, but women in my world have babies in their early twenties. At 24 and babyless, I’m already behind schedule, all because I wanted to get a degree. In my social circles, it is universally understood, “We want to be done having kids before we’re thirty.” And most of my friends, like me, plan to have three or four children, so they have to get started early if they want to reach this goal. They are already all on their way to achieving it, but I’m not.

My sister never tires of saying “Mennonites have an uncanny ability to get pregnant the second they have sex.” And it’s true. I’ve heard that Mennonites statistically have the highest fertility rate of any cultural community in the world. (Well, technically the Hutterites beat us, but they are Anabaptists too, so I consider us all a part of the same, ridiculously-fertile family).

Just listen to my own situation. Right now, there are four unwed girls in my church who are with child. These girls didn’t choose to have babies; they got them by accident. One of my close friends recently found out she unexpectedly got pregnant right on the heels of her first child’s birth, and another got pregnant on purpose, after her second month of trying. Two of my married friends recently had unplanned honeymoon babies even though they were using birth control.  The real kicker: almost every single one of these girls – seven out of the eight – is younger than me.

Every other day I get a new Facebook update from a distant acquaintance telling me that she too is carrying another child, and is asking for advice on how to deal with the nausea.

And in the non-Mennonite world: half of the bloggers I follow right now are currently expecting or are brand-new first-time parents. I actually had to stop subscribing to a few because it was too depressing.

Even Jim and Pam from The Office are expecting, for heaven’s sake, and theirs was also unplanned.

I myself entered this world by mistake, two months before my parents were married. Mom’s fertility was through the roof – she got pregnant eight times in ten years, giving birth to six children.

It seems like the only way to have babies these days is by accident. Alternatively, my friends just have to think the words, “I feel I would like to start a family,” and they immediately begin gestating.

Why is it so easy for everybody else – so easy that it happens by accident – and yet so hard for me and Ben?

The women around me, their bellies swell with new life and their breasts swell with life-sustaining nourishment. Next to them I feel gaunt, barren, pre-pubescent – like a patch of gritty, inhospitable desert amidst fecund, luxuriant rainforests.

Most absurd of all: I feel like God is withholding a child from me because he doesn’t think I would be a good enough mother.

This is ridiculous because I don’t even believe God works like that. It goes against everything my theology teaches me. And if he’s letting all kinds of irresponsible single girls around me have babies, surely he doesn’t pick and choose his mothers that way. I’m married and I’m taking all the friggin’ vitamins and reading all the parenting books, for goodness’ sake. But a part of me still entreats him to change his mind. I worry that he thinks I would forget to feed them, that I would be too negligent. I cry out, “God, I promise I will wake up for her every time she cries, and I will even send her to that lame Sunday school if you want me to, and I will read her stories every day so she will be smart, too.” But he doesn’t hear me. He thinks I would be forgetful and careless. That’s how it feels, anyway.

There’s also something impossibly depressing about thinking (hoping!) that maybe there is a baby inside of me and constantly finding out that there is not. It’s disheartening to pray, month after month, “God, if there is a child inside me right now, please make him healthy and safe,” and then to have a stupid little stick tell you month after month, “You wasted your time. There was never anyone in there to begin with.” To think, “Maybe my baby – little Benny or Kathy Junior – is living inside of me right now,” and then to realize, “Nope – the only heart beat that has ever been inside this body is your own.”

There’s no one there. There never was.

Of course, it’s not all bad. I remind myself that I can get a ton of writing done without kids around. I remind myself that I don’t have to worry about morning sickness, hemorrhoids or stretch marks. I can sleep in whenever I want. I can see a late movie with Ben at the drop of a hat if we feel like it.  I also remind myself that for some unfathomable reason our society prizes the appearance of malnourishment and infertility in women, so that other women actually covet my gangly body. After the fifth consecutive month of getting a negative test back I went out and bought a bunch of tight-fitting clothes to make me feel more valuable as a person. I may not be a scholar and I may not be a mother, but frig, at least I can be “hot.” Maternity clothes be damned. I’m wearing skinny jeans, because they don’t look good on curvy women.

These are just some of my irrational feelings. Don’t try to reason with me, I already know all the logical responses to these feelings. Logic is scheduled to resume on Friday.

How about you, though? Have you ever felt the desire to have or care for children? What was your experience? Or do you find the desire to reproduce as bizarre as I always did?

I’d love to hear from you. But if one more person tells me I need to “relax and it will happen” I will personally sock them in the nose.

Tagged as: children, family, fertility, God, Mennonites, pregnancy