In an effort to comfort the fertility-challenged woman, some insensitive people will ask, “Do you really need to have children?” This often comes from experienced parents who focus on the struggles in raising children rather than on the joys.
I have been a parent for almost seven years, so I am very familiar with the struggles involved in raising a child. My son also has some special needs – attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and asthma – so I am very familiar with the additional challenges of parenting a child with special needs. However, I choose to focus on the amazing blessings of being a mother rather than on the frustrating stuff. I would never tell another person that parenting is not worth the trouble because that simply is not true.
When I was trying to conceive, I had people telling me that I would not want to be a mother so badly if I appreciated all of the responsibility that was involved. That really ticked me off. What I heard was, “You are not responsible enough to be a parent,” and I knew that I was much more responsible than most people my age and many who were older than I was. I have never been a person to run from responsibility, so why would I take comfort in having the inability to conceive forced upon me?
When mothers would tell me that I was better off not having children because I got to sleep in, travel, etc., I would ask if they would choose to give their children away. Of course, each mother would say, “No!” with a horrified look on her face. I would ask why, and the mother would rattle off the good things about being a parent. Then I would say, “Those are all of the reasons that I want to be a mom.” This helped some of them to get it.
Many people simply do not know how to comfort others, especially if they have not faced a similar challenge. So, they come up with idiotic pat answers, like “be grateful that you don’t have kids.” To the extent I could, I tried to avoid these people because comments like that were not helpful and only fueled my frustration at being infertile.
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Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt
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