Success stories

Humans aren’t born with a fear of failure. Failure is how we learn. I wish as girls we had all been taught that, encouraged to embrace it. I’ve seen girls terrified of failure, maybe instilled from parents or family or a society that holds up behaviours and expectations that are impossible to achieve. They see their mothers subjected to standards of being able to achieve and have “it all” when their fathers are not subjected to that. They learn that failure is shameful. When actually, it means that at least they tried.

And so when women start to face infertility, they have already been trained to achieve what is expected of them. People assume infertility issues are those of the woman. People judge women without children very differently from how they judge men without children. We’re expected to achieve in our careers and social lives and marriages, and part of that achievement is to have children. So when infertility looms, our fear of failure is accentuated.

I hate that fertility is talked about in such strong, success/failure terms. It's one of the reasons I refuse to use the “failure” word when I talk about IVF cycles that don’t result in a pregnancy or even a live birth. The truth is, we are not responsible for fertility treatment that doesn’t get the result we were looking for. The medical profession don’t know why some cycles result in pregnancy and some don’t. I had a specialist who once said to me, “we know more about the surface of the moon than we do about women’s reproductive systems.” So really, we should never feel as if we have failed. The treatment might not have worked. But failure is a very strong term. It’s not through lack of application, or desire, or commitment. It’s due solely to biological processes working differently than we and our doctors had hoped. To me, that’s not a failure.

I know. It’s easy to say that now. But it’s how I feel. Biology is responsible. There’s no failure. I don’t feel a failure, or even that my body failed me. It did everything it could! The only failure would be if we refused to accept the outcome and the resultant life we have for the rest of our lives. That’s why, at the risk of repetition, I think that so many of the childless are actually the true success stories of infertility. That despite not getting what we wanted, we are still prospering, living good lives, feeling contented and happy, and being decent people. Not taking advantage of the life I had would be the true failure. 

Don’t you agree?

 

 

 

Resilience not failure

Some months ago, I heard an interview discussing failure and resilience. I forgot who it involved, but I think it was about Linda Graham, and her book Resilience. She talked about dealing with disappointments and failure, about bouncing back, and a number of things I thought were relevant for those of us who haven’t had children.

The most important topic was that of failure. It's not a word* I like, for a lot of reasons. But for those of us who are childless not by choice, failure is – to be blunt – how we got here. Or should I say, that is too often what we think and fear when we enter our No Kidding lives. It is common – dare I suggest, universal? – to feel as if we have failed, whether we have not been able to conceive or carry to term, have not been able to adopt, have not found the person we want to have children with, or who wants to have children with us. We berate ourselves – should we have done more, done it earlier, done it differently? We aren’t kind to ourselves. We aren’t always rational. We are often distraught in our failure. I think that is why we so often feel shame. The shame of failure. I know I did. 

And that’s because we personalise it. It failed – the medical technology, or the adoption process, or broader society failed. It doesn’t mean that I am a failure. It might be my body that technology couldn't help, but I personally am NOT a failure. And neither are you. Realisation that it was the process that din't work, not us, comes sooner to some than others. It helps us recognise that there is no shame involved. It helps us understand the situation we find ourselves in, rather than fear it. It helps us accept that so much of life is really just luck. It is random. There’s no blame involved. That’s critical to me. My favourite quote, as so many of you know, is that of Gertrude Stein, saying “there is no answer, there never was an answer, that is the answer.” It was a huge help to me, and enabled me to grieve without blame, and without shame.

That acceptance of the situation we are in allows us to stop turning inwardly on ourselves. We can then start showing self-compassion, and start thinking about the future –about how we can navigate the future in our new No Kidding lives.

The interviewee pointed out that when don’t personalise failure, we leave ourselves free to try again, or to try something new. That is so important. That freedom to turn our efforts and hope to something new – to our No Kidding lives without children – opens us up to successful lives, lives where we can be happy, kind, and generous. Lives where we can look outwardly. Lives we can embrace fully. And that is what resilience looks like to me. As I've written before, I often think that we are real success stories. And we should be proud of that.

* See my post The F Word

 

Wanting it enough

 You can achieve anything series – Part 3

One of my favourite reality shows is Project Runway. I watch it for the fashion, to feel how out of touch I am and for its celebration of creativity and inspiration. One thing always puzzles me though. In one of the last shows, they always ask the last four or five people why they should be included in the final three to show at New York Fashion Week. And almost without fail, they all say, “because I want it so badly. I’ve never wanted anything like this ever before.” As if that’s a decent reason to give them a place. Only rarely will they refer to their creativity, their skills, their record of wins, their unique aesthetic, their commercial appeal, etc. Perhaps they’re part of the generation who have been raised to believe that wanting it is, in fact, enough.

Ultimately though, only one is the winner. Others, who have “wanted it” just as much or more, worked just as hard or more, and shed just as many tears or more as the winner, don’t take home the prize, receive the title, or bask in the accolades.

So clearly, “wanting it enough, working hard enough, believing in themselves” are not, in fact, enough to ensure we achieve our goal. We certainly see evidence of that in the infertility world, nowhere more so than here in our No Kidding blogging community.

So many of us cling to the idea that if we want it enough, we somehow deserve the reward. Who can blame us, after all the messages pushing the ideas that we must become mothers, and that it is within our grasp if we try hard enough? But those of us on this side know that wanting it, sticking at it, and working hard are in fact, never enough. They might help. They might in fact work for some people. But for the majority of us, we know that ultimately, luck and/or fate and/or genes and/or location and/or wealth and/or privilege or whatever you want to call it is going to play a part.

And that will be my next post - Privilege in the infertility world.

The F Word

A continuing theme I read in other IF or No Kidding blogs is the shock of having to deal with failure. I’ve written about this before, but I always think it is worth it to revisit it, for the benefit of new readers, or to remind old readers (and myself) to practise some self-compassion.

So many of us believed that if we worked hard we’d achieve what we wanted. There is still a theme of this amongst IF blogs, both amongst those who had their children (“we stuck at it,” “never give up,” “I knew I’d never give up” (how can you possibly know that?), “my faith will deliver,” and other slightly superior/judgemental statements). Or perhaps we grew up in the “girls can do anything” age, and truly believed that we could have it all. Or maybe we grew up being told we were "special" and we believed that meant we could have whatever it was we wanted..

Now, with hindsight, I look at people who say, “if you work hard enough, you can achieve anything.” They’re always the ones who were lucky enough to achieve whatever is their anything. Yes, they may well have achieved their goal through hard work, but hard work alone doesn’t do it. You’ll hear others – particularly in the IF community – refer to “wanting it enough.” Wanting something, even coupled with hard work, doesn’t do it either. I really hate hearing the implication in that statement that perhaps I don’t have children because I didn’t want it enough. Or maybe my friends here didn’t “want it enough.” I completely dispute that.

The truth is that achieving anything in life is so often by chance - genetic, parental, circumstantial, geographic, and many other circumstances that aid or hinder us in our goals. Working hard, whilst it is good, isn’t going to overcome other problems that occur by chance (or genetics). We need luck, finances, energy, good health, talent, looks, speed, strength or a high IQ (or a combination of some or all of these) to be in our favour, as well as hard work (or wanting something, or believing in it) to get what we want. Example: I’m not pretty. I have to work at looking presentable, but I’ll never be beautiful. Chance. I’m tall and athletic, and was a talented netballer when I was young. Chance. I wasn’t tall enough to represent my country though. That wasn’t going to be alleviated through hard work. Chance. I have a high IQ. I can learn things easily. That’s not through hard work. It’s pure chance, in the same way that my eyes are green. And I feel it is less praiseworthy than someone who works hard to learn something that I would pick up quickly. How is that different to fertility and infertility?

And as we all know, being fertile has nothing to do with working hard or wanting something enough. We all hear of people accidentally getting pregnant when they’re using contraception. And we all know (or are those people) who have gone without contraception for ten years, tried ten rounds of IVF, and still never conceived. But likewise, conceiving through fertility treatments isn’t a result of hard work or even perseverance. Sure, some people might say that they’d never have had their children if they’d stopped after one cycle of IVF. That might be true. Others say – after having their children – that they would have done anything to get them. But they don’t know that, because they weren’t forced to follow through. Still others know that they could have done 20 cycles and never conceived. Wanting it enough and hard work aren’t always going to reward us with the result we want.

Still, it is hard to change the habits of a lifetime, and stop believing that we’ll get what we want simply because we want it, or because we have tried and tried and tried, because we have worked so hard to the exclusion of all else. So we berate ourselves, we feel like failures, and we find that hard to cope with. That’s why I really dislike the word failure in the fertility context. It brings a degree of judgement, as if it is a failure of character, or effort, or virtue. Being infertile simply is - as much as the colour of our hair, or whether or not we wear glasses, or how athletic we are - part of who we are. It’s not a failure.

Most importantly, it doesn’t mean I am a failure either. Because I am not. Neither are you. Far from it. Knowing this intellectually is one thing. Accepting it emotionally is another. But it is possible to get there. Accepting that I wasn’t a failure, that the outcome really wasn’t my fault, helped me go a long way towards accepting not only my no kidding lifestyle, but other things that have happened in my life since. 

I accepted I’d never be beautiful a long time ago. I have also accepted I’ll never have children. Neither of those are my fault. Neither of those make me a failure. However much society tries to make us think that.