When you are struggling with your fertility, it is easy to fall into the misperception that you are "just an infertile woman." Because so much of your life winds up revolving around trying to conceive a child, particularly if you are going through fertility treatments, it is easy to lose sight of the other aspects of your life.

You are a wife, a daughter, an employee, and a friend. You are a neighbor, a church member, a pet owner, and (hopefully) a law-abiding citizen. None of these aspects of your life ceased to exist the day you were diagnosed with infertility.

How do we lose sight of these other aspects of our lives? How do we wind up buying into the lie that we are nothing until we are mothers?

I am not sure how that happened to me, but it definitely did. I became so consumed with trying to conceive a baby that I lost sight of all of the other aspects of my life.

I believe part of the problem is the all-consuming fertility process. Just about everything in my life revolved around my menstrual cycle. I would schedule meetings around my predicted ovulation date because I had to drop everything and race over to the doctor's office for an intrauterine insemination (IUI). I would schedule when to do light paperwork based upon when I would be going either on or off hormones because of the resulting migraines. Because everything in my life had to play second fiddle to my fertility treatments, the treatments seemed to take on a life of their own.

I wish I had joined a fertility support group or spoken with a counselor during that time in my life. If I could beam myself back in time, I would tell myself that fertility is just one aspect of who I am. I would encourage myself not to lose sight of the things in my life that make me the person who I am. Whether or not I was a mother, I was still a friend, wife, employee, and neighbor. The fact that I was having trouble creating a mother-child relationship did not negate every other relationship in my life. I was more than just an infertile woman. I still am.

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• You Might Be Fertility-challenged If . . .
• Infertility and Body Image

Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt