Covid Isolation and Childlessness

My sister-in-law in Perth (Australia) was complaining last night to me about the lengthy isolation periods she and all her friends were going through, as each of their kids get covid (because that's what university/high school age offspring do) in succession, every few weeks. Two of her kids have had covid over the last two months, and she is expecting more time spent in isolation as her youngest, and then she and her husband, inevitably (as far as she is concerned) get covid. (For those who don't know, Western Australia has been much like NZ, covid-free with life as normal for the majority of the pandemic so far, but omicron was their undoing, as it was ours.) She was telling me about all the meals her friends were dropping off to her because she had been sick (not covid this time), and said they had all been doing that for the last few months through these isolations.

I had two reactions. The first was one of, ironically, isolation. We only have a few friends who live close to us, so there wouldn't be a lot of food drop-offs if we get sick, or vice versa. Whereas her network comes from the friends they made through all their children and their various schools, so they are all linked, and centred around a similar location (the schools) too.

My second reaction was smugness. If DH gets covid, I'm very likely to get it, and vice versa. We'll have to isolate then, but that's it. No lengthy or multiple inconveniences brought home by kids. I shared my smugness with her. That's when the conversation ended! 

I need a bigger a support network

Yesterday, it was announced that Omicron is now spreading within New Zealand. We were doing such a good job of keeping Delta away. Since everything opened up (particularly for those with vaccine passes) before Christmas, case numbers have kept low, with an R value under 1. But now Omicron* is here, and everything will change. As I saw a headline this morning, New Zealanders are in for a major culture shock!

In the announcement, the Prime Minister yesterday suggested people prepare for being isolated at home, and suggested we find “buddies” who might be able to go shopping for us. It wasn’t long ago (just over a year) that we were the ones going shopping for my father-in-law, so it would require a change of focus to think of others doing things for us. We are reasonably well stocked except for perishables (I’ve written on A Separate Life about my pantry hoarding instincts), but it got me thinking. Who would be our buddies?

Initially, I thought (rather melodramatically), “we have nobody!” And I felt very alone. My friends with grown kids in the city would probably call on them, or one of their many friends they made through their kids. Their priority would be their kids, their work, and not some lonely old couple out in the suburbs. (I may be doing them a disservice, but it is how I felt.) Of course, we don’t have grown (or any) children, and neither of us have relatives in the city we could call on. Closer friends live outside the city now, so wouldn’t be able to pick up some milk on the way home. Bamberlamb’s post this week about isolating when you don’t have family also highlights the issues we face these days if we are close contacts or COVID positive, and have to stay at home for an extended period of time. As she notes, we are both lucky to have someone to isolate with. Many don’t.

Then I got thinking. I guess we would probably call on a friend who lives in the next suburb, or on one of our neighbours (and we would help them too), or my husband’s golf buddies. That’s a reasonable number of people who live relatively close, and it would be highly unlikely that we would all be isolating at the same time. Now though, as I look at our network, I know that we are not alone. And it has reminded me to reach out to some friends who are on their own, and might need help as well as being able to give it.

Support networks are there, if informally. But thinking about this has certainly reminded me of my intentions to socialise more this year, with the hope of having a wider group of friends in this community. It's important for me in a way it isn't so important for those who are surrounded by their children or other relatives. It won't happen unless I make the effort. And COVID-19 is making the point that it isn't something I can put off until I am older. It's important now!

 

* Yes, I hear your sighing and eye-rolling. I'm sorry!

Hope and a childless future

Hope is complicated. It can be both destructive and life-affirming, sometimes at the same time. It has been a key feature of life for many of us this last year. It has also been prevalent for so many of us when going through infertility. Hope protected us from our greatest fears. Hope kept us going – not just through the next cycle, but it kept us being able to operate in the real world whilst going through something difficult. We're all familiar with hope, its presence, and its absence.

The NYT had an article a few months ago about the benefits of hope. It was written in relation to the pandemic, but everything it said reminded me of going through infertility. It said, 

“ … experts say that fantasizing, forward thinking and using one’s imagination are powerful tools for getting people through difficult times.”

It explains the vocal “never-give-up-hope brigade” who promote this philosophy both when they are still going through infertility, or when they have exited it with the result they wanted. But if only people felt able to hope for different things too.

 “They are fantasizing about what they’re missing right now,” said Deirdre Barrett, a psychologist who teaches at Harvard Medical School. “These daydreams serve as a substitute, which gives them some of the pleasure the real experience would.”

I could relate to that. I remember imagining having the babies I was trying to conceive, the children they would become. I remember imagining the feeling of getting that positive pregnancy test, or the scan that said the baby is in the right place (that’s my ectopic history showing through), or the birth of a healthy baby. I remember the pleasure of all that. It made the stress of waiting, of dealing with negative results, so much easier. I do understand the desire and instinct to do this.

Imagining the future in this way is called prospecting, and in the article, a doctor was quoted saying, “The essence of resilience about the future is: How good a prospector are you?”

Well, I’m pretty good at this, I think! After all, I can imagine the future in which I win Lotto. And we all know, that’s not going to happen! So I think I would put it another way. Can you imagine a future that is different from the one you’re trying to get now? Do you imagine being happy in that future? Is this even encouraged in our societies, when we are told that “if we work hard, we can achieve anything?” (And we all know that’s not true either!)

For so many going through infertility, they can’t imagine the alternative, No Kidding childless life as anything but their worst case scenario. Some are lucky, and don’t have to imagine that. Yet for those of us who do, resilience requires us to be able to see some brightness in that future.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if clinics and doctors and teachers and society in general taught us to imagine all possible outcomes, and to see the joy that can be in both. (There’s that Accurate Thinking again.) Wouldn’t that make life easier? Wouldn’t that bring joy more quickly when one avenue is closed to us? Learning how to imagine a new life with excitement and joy. Learning to feel hope for something new. That’s our mantra here. If it were encouraged more broadly, maybe it wouldn’t take so long for it to come to us. Or for others to accept it for us.

 

 

Misunderstandings: Pandemic and No Kids version

Ironically, given last week’s post, the pandemic and my No Kidding life clashed last week and is still making me think. It was the first week after school went back following the summer break that began in December. My husband and I had a day off from working on the in-laws’ house, and we decided to go out for lunch, a rare treat this summer. The roads were clear, there were tables available at the café we chose, plenty of parking spaces, and the beach across the road was relatively empty. We had a lovely lunch overlooking a beach, and the harbour channel. The sea was a deep greeny-blue, the wind had whipped up white tips on the waves out in the channel, yet in the bay the water was calm and clear around the rocks, the sand was golden, and the sun was shining. It was gorgeous. I posted about it on Fbk, mentioning that the kids were finally back at school, and declaring, “I have my city back!”

It was a statement that many No Kidding people would understand. We avoid the crowds at malls and movie theatres and museums etc during school holidays, knowing that we can visit when there aren’t families on holiday crowding our city. My sister (whose child was back at school herself) laughed, and wished she could be with us. But I was initially confused when there were responses praising our PM, and even more so when I found myself being accused of crowing about our good fortune, and given the usual excuses why NZ had been successful in dealing with the pandemic (“such a small country” etc). Another person also seemed to want to point out how well their area was doing. (I bit my tongue and refrained from pointing out that 700 deaths in a single US county with the same population of my city -  was not “doing well.”)

The misunderstandings were multiple: 

First, I didn’t realise that my friends in the US and UK would not realise that our summer school holidays occur … well … in our summer! They know it is summer here, if they follow me at all. So that surprised me, and reminded me once again of the tyranny of the north, and that being in the southern hemisphere makes half the world outliers from the dominant culture!

Secondly, my social media friends didn’t seem to realise that I was celebrating a city without holidaymakers – because of course, when the schools start, the parents get back to work too. So celebrating a city without kids means a much easier city to navigate. Perhaps they’ve never felt the need to avoid children and families because life has been easier for them. I don’t do that now through pain or envy, although that hasn’t always been the case. Avoiding children and families used to be an act of self-protection, to avoid the ouch moments we all know so well. But now I avoid them if possible simply because I don’t like crowds, and prefer to wait till the families have resumed school and work before I voluntarily visit certain places. After every school break, I rejoice when the schools open again, and I reclaim my city! But this simple state was completely misunderstood by some of my friends.

Finally, my simple statement about a kid/family free city  – or at least, what I thought was simple – became a trigger and hurtful to others, who are so focused on the pandemic that they immediately assumed that was what I was talking about. It reminded me again about infertility. How many times has someone made a simple statement that we have taken the wrong way? I’m sure I have at times, when I was deep in pain. Were my casual comments about going out and eating lunch the equivalent of fertiles talking about their kids? Perhaps. What I do know is what I didn’t say. I didn’t say, “I am blessed,” or “it wasn’t meant to be” or “some people/places aren’t meant to have this luck.” Because I know how pointless and hurtful and simply untrue those comments can be. So I’m still thinking about it. Those who responded badly were more politically supportive of administrations that have performed poorly in the pandemic, and perhaps feeling defensive. So I'm trying to be fair. Trying to be sensitive. Trying to do better.

 An aside: The woman who told me it was “distasteful” to “crow about” NZ’s pandemic (relatively) free status, which I was not doing, was someone I knew through the ectopic online support group. We had commiserated and comforted each other together, I met her in real life, and I was supportive and happy when she went on to have a child. I discovered some years later that she already had two much older children, and I remember feeling duped and betrayed. I don’t know the story around that, and there obviously is one. But I did think it was a bit ironic that she, who is a fervent poster about being a mother and now a grandmother despite pretending not to have children in the first ten years of our relationship, objected to my innocent comment. I remind myself. Try to do better. Bite my tongue!

A Pandemic and Infertility

I’ve been watching many of my international friends struggle the last few weeks. They are struggling with winter, with the pandemic, with the lack of hope, even though they know theoretically that there is hope that this will end. It is piling in on them, winter doesn't help, and it is really tough.

It strikes me once again – as it did last March when we all started going into lockdown – that there is much about the pandemic that is familiar to those of us who have been through infertility.

The lack of control is very familiar. The uncertainty and fear. Living in a state of limbo. Even the unhelpful and unscientific stereotypes that abound.

The exhaustion also seems prevalent, after 10 or more long months of this. I remember a former blogger, Beef Princess, commenting that she was Childless by Exhaustion. I suspect some people have caught or spread COVID-19 by Exhaustion too.

I shared the fears and uncertainty of you all in March and April when I was in lockdown. I used lessons I’d learned from infertility to help me through it, in the same way IP is using her hard-won wisdom here. But that has not been so necessary since then. I know I am lucky, through no effort of my own (other than following the rules). And so by now, I am well and truly on the other side of this pandemic. Not immune. Not cured. Simply not really affected day-to-day. I’m not truly experiencing this pandemic, in the way that some people never experience infertility, or think about it only as a future but unlikely possibility.

So I am having to learn something new – how to sit with you, to listen to your frustrations and fears without dismissing them. I say things like, “I can only imagine …” rather than “I can’t imagine,” and then I actively try to imagine what it is like, to understand what you are all going through, and to try to help in whatever small way I can. But I don’t really know how to do that.

I have one friend who tells me she wants to see photos and stories of life “as usual” in New Zealand, because it gives her hope and reminds her that life can be good. But that reminds me of hearing all those "success stories" and really not wanting to hear any more! So I fear others think that I am being unkind, or smug. So I try to stay alert to that. It’s a good reminder to me that those people who said insensitive things to me during infertility might have been trying to help, but – like me now – didn’t know how. I know they needed me to help them help me, even though at the time I was too exhausted and couldn't face or even resented the need to educate them. 

I'm trying to understand. I want to be able to help. I know nothing I can do though will change things. So I'm here, with you. Listening. Ready to talk if you want to talk. You're not alone. You'll get through this. You are resilient, even if you don't feel resilient, and don't want to have to be resilient because it sucks and it is hard work! You are strong, even if you don't feel strong right now, or because you are tired of being strong. Letting yourself feel vulnerable and rolling with your emotions is in itself resilience, and a how of strength. I hope you know that. And remember, too. You are loved.