Infertile People in Real Life

(For the record, I'm getting sick of referring to people by initials, so I'll start giving the important ones nicknames. My husband, who is not named Jim, from here on out is JimDear, like in Lady and the Tramp. Not just because I'm hoping for a puppy for Christmas, since there's no baby, but because I think I'd make a damn fine Darling.)

I keep stumbling across statistics suggesting that 10-15% of couples are infertile. (I assume they're not counting homosexual couples in those figures, by the way.) If that's true, I kind of have to wonder, where the fuck are they?? If our numbers are so mighty, why on earth is "Do you have children?" an acceptable ice-breaker? I understand that infertility is a private topic--I've personally only told about 50 people, and JimDear has probably told about zero. But still, really? Maybe those stats count those who are "a little bit infertile"? Or are there really this many women walking around feeling the way I do?

I'm trying to think of all the infertile people I might know in real life. Here's a list:
(1) My grandmother. Of course, now that she's 82, that's kind of a given. But, after 7 children and 3 miscarriages, she had to have a hysterectomy. She wanted more children, and was unable to have them. So I guess she kind of counts, although I have a hard time working up sympathy for her when my mother (2nd oldest) did most of the child rearing in that family. My grandmother was a big old Mormon though, so the more kids she had, the closer to heaven she got. (This is not actual doctrine, just perceived. Nonetheless, having children is considered a woman's "divine nature". I am not, alas, divine.)

(2) My first cousin once removed. She is my grandmother's sister's oldest daughter, my mother's cousin, my "aunt" for shorthand. She has the same first name as my grandmother, by the way, so no way is that name going anywhere near a daughter of mine. Unlike my grandmother, she is/was a kickass mom. She too had an emergency hysterectomy, after the birth of her 4th. She would have liked more kids. I do feel bad for her, but she's a wonderful mom, aunt, and grandmother.

(3) A coworker/friend of mine. She's only "borderline", but might be what they're talking about when they say 15%. Of course, she might have actual problems, but with her husband being deployed left and right, it's hard to say for sure. They've been trying for a year now, and when he comes back in a few months, they'll seek help. She is my favorite person to talk to about infertility. Even though we're at different places in our journey, she totally gets why I wanted to quit my job when my boss joked about me "needing to call in sick in the mornings anytime now, right?"

(4) This one breaks my heart. A high school friend of my doctor-sister. I don't know her well, and my sister and she have more or less fallen out of touch. But it was my sister's 10-year high school reunion shortly around the time I found out we'd have to do IVF, and so I identified overly much with her story. This woman has miscarried something like 8 times. She's adopted 3 children, and keeps trying and miscarrying. My sister doesn't know all the details (and really wanted to ask her, but felt like the setting was inappropriate), but my god, I feel for her. I have never had a pregnancy to lose, but I can't help but imagine that it is...oh, about 1,000xs worse than getting another negative. But then again, if she's now a mom three times over, surely it can't hit her like that, right? Surely a mom can't afford to spend about 3 days huddled sobbing in the bathroom per month? When I think about her situation, my heart just breaks and I'm not jealous at all, even though she has children. I haven't even seen her in 10-11 years, so I just keeping seeing her as she was: a superskinny carefree, somewhat awkward teenager. To think of her grief is unbearable. I sometimes think about reaching out to her, but I don't know what I would say. "Hi, my sister told me about your recurrent pregnancy loss. I'm infertile. Have you ever tried IVF with PGD? What made you adopt? Do you cry all the time? I'm glad I'm not you but you're probably glad you're not me too, since you do, after all, have kids. Are you still Mormon or would you like to do coffee sometime?" I think it's probably better that I don't.

(5) and this one. Listen, I do believe in the sisterhood of infertility, but not if I have to be sisters with this one. She is a horrible person, through and through. Thank god she lives in another state now. People on message boards often say they wouldn't wish infertility on their worst enemy. I suppose I wouldn't either, but...I have a hard time imagining this woman in my situation. I don't want to go into all of the horrible things she did (and tried to do) to me and JimDear before we moved and cut her out of our lives as best we could. But around the time she was being all evil, she was undergoing IUIs. I still hear about her through the grapevine, because her husband is friends with friends of friends of my husband. They've tried at least 3 IUIs and are doing their 4th IVF right now, or around now, before Christmas they should know. JimDear and I hadn't even started trying when we last spoke, and I haven't, and will not, made any attempts to reach out to them, to commiserate (or try to hit them up for leftover drugs), to say "you are not alone". I don't think infertility makes you a better person, and I do hope she's changed, but...yeah. I feel guilty for not feeling at all bad about her situation. I think she'd make a terrible mother and her marriage is (and always has been, though it's lasted about 5 years now, I guess) extremely unstable. But life is never fair, not even for the evil people.

(6) My mother-in-law. She has Turners. She knew she'd never have biological children, and my father-in-law must have known too. They adopted 2 children. My husband has asked that we not share our own struggles with them, because he feels like his mom would interpret our attempts at IVF as a rejection of adoption. I can respect that. Our situations are so different that I don't know how much we would have in common to discuss anyway. She always knew, the technology we're using wasn't even around then, etc. They live in a different state, so it's not hard to keep this from them. But still, it makes me somewhat sad that we do.

But that's really it. I only know 6 couples who have dealt with infertility over the course of their lives. Surely I know more...right? But where and who are they? It's possible one of my aunts, who is childfree, might be infertile. She has never once said anything, and she's rather eccentric and raises showdogs, but she's married and has been since I was very young. I don't know that she and her husband wanted children, but I don't know that they did not. (He has 2 children from a previous marriage.) But those are seriously all the people I can think of, and I know way more than 100 people, so there must be others. It's possible that some of my married-with-children friends used ART. After all, that's not something many people put on Facebook. But...I don't know. And when I have a list of 6 people, 3 of whom are now post-menopausal (well, I don't know if Turners women do menopause, but whatever), and one of whom I hate, and one of whom I don't actually know...it's not hard to see why I feel so alone, 10-15% be damned.

Thank god for the internet.