Three years ago today, I gave birth to a stillborn baby boy at 20 weeks. My husband and I had found out less than a week beforehand that our son had no kidneys and would never live outside the womb. We made the heartwrenching decision to induce labor early. It was especially devastating for us because we had endured infertility before I became pregnant with this baby.
When I joined Mothers & More, I wasn’t sure how I would relate to other moms since for me, the path to motherhood had been long and painful. I assumed it hadn’t been painful for anyone else. How wrong I was. Not long after I joined the group, I dined with three other members and discovered that each of them had either experienced infertility, pregnancy loss or a combination of the two.
A while ago, one of our members sent out an e-mail asking for infertility clinic recommendations. She told me later she received dozens of recommendations from Mothers & More members. I was floored. I couldn’t believe how many of our members had either experienced infertility themselves, or were intimately acquainted with clinics because of family members or close friends.
For me, hearing all these stories has helped me feel less alone. So many of us have experienced challenges with building our family—or know someone who has. Historically, it’s often a taboo topic—or it just never comes up in conversation. Anyone who knows me is chuckling right now, because I often bring our family-building past up in conversations with new friends and acquaintances. I guess it’s partly because I feel like a person can’t really get to know me until he or she knows what my husband and I have been through. It was a life-changing experience for us. Thankfully, the historical taboo is changing and women are better able to bring up these heartbreaks and benefit from a community of support.
Even in an organization like Mothers & More, where nearly every member is a mother, women are still experiencing family-building challenges. I know members who are having difficulties conceiving their second or third children, or who are contemplating whether they want to go through the roller coaster of adoption again. And those are just the ones I know about. Who knows how many women in our organization—even the ones I think I know pretty well—are experiencing the pain of infertility or loss?
I am remembering my stillborn son Zach today. But I am also thinking about every other woman who knows what it is like to mourn a baby—or the lack thereof.
--Beth
