‘There’s A Fine Line Between Defeat And Surrender’
This essay is part of Women’s Health’s coverage of Infertility Awareness Week (April 24-30, 2022), focused on stories that shed a light on the less-talked about aspects of trying to conceive.
On a warm and sunny spring morning, about half a year after we started trying to conceive, I walked out my back door to find a dead bird on my doorstep and immediately burst into tears. I don’t know how the bird met its wretched end, or how it ended up on my property. All I know is it felt like an omen.
I had just woken up, ready to take a pregnancy test. Surely, this would be the one. It was May, my birthday month, and I was turning 35. I had hopefully collected a urine sample but when I wiped, I spotted a smudge of blood. Period. End of story. This wouldn’t be the one. So when I saw the bird, a deep sense of hopelessness took over.
I had only been trying for six months at the time. But somewhere deep down in my soul, I knew I had a much longer road ahead of me. I mourned the future, mourned the baby still waiting in the heavens, and mourned the dead bird haunting me from my backyard.
I’ve always wanted children. As a queer person, I know there are so many ways to define “family,” and so many paths that can lead to parenthood. It just so happens that for me, the idea of carrying and bringing life into the world with my body is something I’ve always wanted to do.
It feels like my whole life I’ve been planning it out. I’ve always kept pregnancy charms in my living spaces and paid special attention to my menstrual cycle, whether that was washing out my period underwear and feeding my blood to my plants or simply marveling at the way it comes and goes with the moon. I really believe people who menstruate experience something magical every month.
I never questioned whether it would be difficult to get pregnant once I decided the time was right. In fact, I would have bet a million dollars that it was going to happen on command, just like magic. When I got my period after our first month of trying, my initial reaction was confusion. I had already stocked up on anti-nausea vitamins and pregnancy tests. In the aisles at the drug store, I scoffed at the ovulation predictor kits. I’ve tracked my cycle for years, I’ll never need those, I told myself.
By month four, I was seeing a midwife and getting acupuncture. By month six, when the dead bird arrived like the mail, I was at my worst. I couldn’t stop crying, and I couldn’t understand. Because I was 35, it was time to admit defeat and start seeing a fertility specialist. I felt betrayed by my intuition.
It’s been a year and a half now of trying. We’ve done two cycles of IUI, one of which led to a non-viable pregnancy. Next month we start our first round of IVF. I am still waiting for my baby. But the surprising thing is, I don’t feel desperate. If anything, I am stronger and more hopeful than the grieving person I was so many months ago.
I found out I was pregnant from my second IUI on Christmas Day 2021. Relief washed over me. I reveled in all the signs I was pregnant. My boobs hurt, my skin broke out, walking up the stairs made me feel exhausted, and I couldn’t have been more ecstatic about all of it. But then one day, I woke up feeling like my breasts weren’t so tender. “Do you think maybe there’s something wrong?” I asked my partner, Nico. They assured me I had nothing to worry about.
Bloodwork confirmed my pregnancy, but the ultrasound results were…off. There was a yolk sac, but no embryo. My doctor initially offered some hope: it was a very early ultrasound, so maybe we just couldn’t see it yet. Maybe my implantation happened later than we originally thought. But intuitively, I knew it was over then. One week later, they confirmed a blighted ovum, or anembryonic pregnancy, which is when a young embryo never develops or stops developing and is reabsorbed by the body, leaving an empty gestational sac behind. Many times, there’s no obvious reason why this happens. Our pregnancy would result in miscarriage.
My doctor wanted to do a dilation and curettage (D&C) procedure right away, but I resisted that at first. I wanted to pass it naturally. I felt that the baby came in its own time and I wanted it to leave in its own time. I wanted to say goodbye, to bury the pregnancy tissue in my garden and more than anything, to avoid as much medical intervention as possible. (And in my case, it was safe to wait and see if I could pass the pregnancy without surgery.)
For the next five weeks, I walked around as a chemically pregnant person who wasn’t actually pregnant. That was really hard, but it ended up serving as time for me to grieve. After I ultimately went forward with the D&C procedure this past February, I was glad that I had that time to work through some of my emotions before I had to work through the physical pain and recovery. I made the decision when it was right for me, instead of jumping into a surgery I wasn’t fully comfortable with yet.
The miscarriage opened up a new phase in this journey for me. It taught me that there’s a fine line between defeat and surrender. It showed me that I’m not in control, and maybe that’s okay.
Control is a funny thing. As a movement instructor, I literally spend my life teaching people how to feel in control of their bodies. When I was a kid, I loved the classic TV show “Bewitched.” The magical main character, Samantha, wiggles her nose to cast spells on her hapless non-magical husband. I was convinced I could be magical, too, if I could just figure out how to move my body to make the magic happen. I’d sit in my bedroom and try different things to unlock it—snapping my fingers twice and blinking once, or slapping my thighs once and clapping twice.
Looking back on my first year of trying to get pregnant, I can see how I was trying to do the same thing. I thought if I could just find the right meditation or the right prayer, if I could find the right doctor, if I could just light the right candle, if I could time sex just right, then I would get pregnant. It was all on me.
Then, I finally got pregnant. I did all of the things. I succeeded. And even then, it still didn’t work out. As hard as it was, both physically and emotionally, the miscarriage removed a veil for me: this isn’t a code I can crack.
I am learning to accept now that this is just my journey into parenthood. Everyone has their own story, and this is mine. For some people, it is a straight line from sex to pregnancy to parenthood. For others, there are twists and turns, and I just happen to be in the latter category.
In many spiritual traditions a dead bird really is a symbol of grief and despair, the desperate end of something. But it can also be a sign of what comes after: transformation and rebirth. Now when I think about the person who met a dead bird in their backyard and broke down in tears, I don’t feel so hopeless. Of course there is a part of me that is still fearful of facing another failed attempt or another loss. Will I go back there again, back to that desperation? I might. But this time I know at least that I can survive it. I know every step of this journey has only made me stronger and more ready to finally meet the magical challenge of parenthood, however that happens for me.
Bethany C. Meyers is the founder of the be.come project, a body-neutral subscription-based fitness platform.
You Might Also Like
Solve the daily Crossword
