Politics Aside

I think I do an adequate job describing my own experience with infertility/fertility treatments on this blog.  That being said, I acknowledge falling short in conveying the deep emotional void it leaves in one's heart. 

Friends who haven't been through this ask me how it feels, and it's as if words fail me.  But, ultimately, this emotional void is what drives us to try, and try again, for the family we have been dreaming of. 

I may fall short in this endeavor, but former first lady Laura Bush eloquently hits the nail on the head in her memoir "Spoken from the Heart."  For those of you who have experienced infertility, I warn you that her words will hit particularly close to home...   

"For some years now, the wedding invitations that had once crowded the mailbox had been replaced by shower invites and pink-or-blue-beribboned baby announcements. I bought onesies or rattles, wrapped them in yellow paper, and delivered them to friends. I had done it with a happy wistfulness, believing that someday my time, my baby, would come. George and I had hoped that I would be pregnant by the end of his congressional run. Then we hoped it would be by the time his own father announced his presidential run, then by the presidential primaries, the convention, the general election. But each milestone came and went. The calendar advanced, and there was no baby.

The English language lacks the words to mourn an absence. For the loss of a parent, grandparent, spouse, child or friend, we have all manner of words and phrases, some helpful some not. Still we are conditioned to say something, even if it is only “I’m sorry for your loss.” But for an absence, for someone who was never there at all, we are wordless to capture that particular emptiness. For those who deeply want children and are denied them, those missing babies hover like silent ephemeral shadows over their lives. Who can describe the feel of a tiny hand that is never held?"

Regardless of political orientation, I believe most would agree that Laura Bush executed her post as First Lady with the utmost class and dignity.   It is clear from her memoir that she navigated her way through infertility with the same.