One of the hardest parts of dealing with my fertility issues was hearing about women becoming pregnant who were not even trying. Jamie Lynn Spears’ recent pregnancy announcement is a good example of this. She is only 16 years old and clearly was not trying to become pregnant. And yet, here she is figuring out at sixteen how to raise a baby when thousands of married infertile women would give anything to have that kind of surprise. Sometimes life is just not fair.
My son watched Jamie Lynn Spears’ TV show, Zoe 101, the same evening that I learned about her pregnancy, and it really hit me just how young she is. She is still very much a “baby” herself. Her voice is still much closer to a child’s voice than a grown woman’s voice. I remember what I was like at sixteen, and I truly cannot imagine caring for a newborn baby at that age. I truly wish her well because I know how hard it was to tend to a baby as a married woman in my thirties. I cannot fathom having taken care of a baby that young.
Even though Jamie Lynn Spears’ pregnancy has nothing whatsoever to do with anyone else’s fertility issues, learning about another pregnant teenager drives home the unfairness of infertility. While this teenager learns to rise to the occasion to care for a baby, thousands of married women in their twenties, thirties, and even forties are grieving their empty nurseries as they hope and pray for a positive pregnancy test. Again, life is just not fair.
When I would learn about other people’s pregnancies, I would try to remind myself that whether another person was infertile or had 10 children was a completely separate issue from my own inability to conceive a baby. However, no matter how many times I told myself this, hearing about another person’s pregnancy hurt. It cut deep inside, and I had to shed tears each and every time. It hurt that I was not a member of the club of being able to experience pregnancy. Even now, after being a mother through adoption for almost seven years, this still hurts. Jamie Lynn Spears and thousands of other teenage girls are experiencing something amazing at age 16 that I will never experience in my lifetime, and there is something very unfair about that.
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Photo Credit: Lynda Bernhardt
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