Parenting After Infertility - What You Need to Know

I'll never forget the depression, anger, frustration and heartbreak my husband and I experienced as a result of several years of infertility, miscarriages, endometriosis, testing, and surgeries. When I gave birth to my son, Ethan, I thought that I had left all that pain behind me. Finally, I was a mom! I had gotten what I had longed for, prayed for and hoped for. As I nursed him for the first time, my sweet husband standing with his arm around me, I felt an elation that I had never experienced before. I was sure that was the end of the story and that we would all live happily ever after.

Our first night home from the hospital brought a rude awaking. Literally. Gone was the tiny, peacefully sleeping baby we had seen at the hospital. He was replaced by a screaming, writhing little octopus who refused to be calmed by anything but my nipples. And those nipples were cracked, bleeding and tired of nursing! I remember sitting in the glider in the nursery, breastfeeding him for the fifth time that hour and feeling desperate for sleep. That was the first of many sleepless nights we had. The days were not much better. Ethan would cry frantically if we tried to put him down for anything. I cleaned with him in my arms, I ate with him in my arms and I even used the toilet with him in my arms.

We eventually found ways to meet Ethan's needs and ours as well, but the experience of those first grueling months brought new feelings to the surface that I had never expected to have after experiencing infertility. The most shocking feeling was the anger I had towards my son. Before I got pregnant with Ethan, I heard stories of women hurting their children and felt so enraged that someone could do that. As someone who had cried buckets of tears because of my desire to have children, this was something I simply could not comprehend. Yet, when my own son would not stop crying, or when he woke for the fifteenth time during the night I found myself having thoughts of doing whatever I could to make him be quiet or go to sleep. I never hurt him, but I said some very ugly things to him and slammed his bedroom door more than once after plopping him in his crib so I could take a few minutes and catch my breath. I felt awful that this innocent little boy, whom I had so desperately wanted, could cause me to be so upset with him. Perhaps I didn't deserve him.

After talking with other moms about my feelings, I discovered that most - if not all - mothers experience thoughts of anger and resentment towards their children. What compounds these feelings for women who've suffered infertility or loss before having children is the feeling of guilt that rushes in once the anger wears off. I felt guilty because I wanted to be a mother and to experience everything that comes along with motherhood. It was made all the worse when others who knew I spent a long time trying to get pregnant found out that I was struggling with Ethan - it invited all sorts of "you asked for it" comments. On top of that, there was the knowledge that there were other women out there still waiting to get pregnant who would have switched places with me an instant.

I know from my experience that when an infertile woman sees a worn-out mother yelling at her four-year-old to stop shouting the alphabet at the top of his lungs while her two year old puts a sucker in his brother's hair, she thinks "That will never be me." The longer you wait to have children, the more confident you are that you can do better at parenting than the people around you. I began to think that if God chose to bless me with kids, I would pop out two or three perfect children who would always mind their manners and sleep through the night from day one. Of course, reality rarely matches that idyllic image and that leads to disappointment and feelings that you have failed yourself and your children.

A "normal" woman knows that she is not any less of a mother because she is angry with her child - nor does she love him any less. However, a woman who struggled to bring her baby into the world might feel that because she so desperately wanted to be a mother, she should not feel these same feelings of resentment and anger. That just doesn't make any sense. Anyone who experiences sleep deprivation and then is forced to spend hours bouncing, rocking, nursing or whatever else they can think of to calm their baby down with no success is eventually going to wish that their baby would just hush up and go to sleep. Or when you've heard "Mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy" all day long like a broken record - even if it's the word you've waited so long to hear - it's going to grate on your nerves. These feelings are completely normal. To think that just because you wanted that baby so badly would mean you shouldn't experience feelings that a "normal" woman feels is silly.

Ideally, no woman would ever face the agony of infertility or loss. But since that is not that case, the next best thing would be for a woman not to feel guilty for the natural feelings that arise when she becomes a mother. A mom is a mom no matter how she got there. If I could somehow forget that I waited so long and went through so much before my children came along, I wouldn't feel as though anything should be different from any other parent. For years, infertility robbed me of the ability to feel normal - it's crazy that even now, as a parent, I'm unable to experience "normal" feelings without infertility overshadowing my thoughts. It's time for me to let go of the past, as hard as that is, and let myself realize that yes, I did have to work harder to get them here, but my children are not different from anyone else's children as a result. IUI, IVF, Clomid and other treatments don't help make "perfect" babies - they just help make babies.

So the next time I have a bad day - when it's pouring down rain on us at the zoo and my two-year-old is having a melt down because he's terrified of thunder and my twins are screaming because they missed their nap and have dirty diapers but there's no place to change them unless we run out of the shelter we ran into to escape the rain - I won't pretend that everything is cherry pie and sunshine because it's not! On the contrary, my desire to rip my hair out (and maybe even my children's hair while I'm at it!) is well founded and I would defy anyone to be in the same situation without feeling the same way. I might give them an extra kiss or two that night at bedtime, though. After all, I'm a mom, it's only natural.