When my husband and I were trying to become parents, one of the ways we would cheer ourselves up was by eating out at a nice restaurant. As I shared in Taking Clomid While Dining at a French Restaurant, "nice" is a relative term. To us, eating a leisurely dinner at Outback Steakhouse was a welcomed treat. So, if we found out that I was not pregnant (again), my husband would take me out to dinner at Outback in an effort to cheer me up.

I cannot tell you how many of those "cheering up" dinners were ruined by babies. Without fail, if we were going out to dinner to forget about our fertility woes and try to focus on our relationship instead, our dinner would be filled with the wails of some lucky woman's crying baby. I would get so angry because there was no place "safe" for us to go.

Babies plagued us at church, too. We wanted to join a Sunday School class, but there was nowhere to put us. Most of the classes were for senior citizens. Those that were not were broken down into "Singles," "Newlyweds," and "Parents of Young Children." We were married, so clearly the Singles class was out. We had been married for over 7 years, so we were hardly newlyweds. There was no way we were going to sit in a class with a bunch of parents talking about their children, so we wound up not joining a Sunday School class at all. And don't even get me started about the little kids singing songs during the church services.

I used to work fairly close to where we lived, so I would drive home for lunch and watch TV while I ate a Lean Cuisine. Without fail, I would drive by a mother strolling her baby along the sidewalk, and I would tear up because I wanted that to be me so badly.

By the time we had been doing fertility treatments for a while, most of my friends had babies, so getting together with them was hard. I got tired of being the only woman sitting at the table with the husbands while all of my friends tended to their babies.

It felt like no place was "safe." No matter where I went and no matter what I did, I would come face-to-face with someone else's baby. It felt like the world was saying, "nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah."

Related Topics:

• How to Stay Sane While Going Through Infertility
• Keeping Your Emotional Footing through Infertility
• When Is It Okay To Have Babies Around?

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