I wish I was Naive!

This past weekend we attended a wedding….and like any engaged couple, in their mid-thirties, this couple was excited to start their lives together and hopefully their family. Now, if you are or have been married, you know that every wedding throws you back to your own and for a minute you too share in that naïve newlywed feeling again.

[Now as a precursor to the rest of this post, please keep in mind that I am several days into IVF injections…so I am a particularly jacked up hormonal mess of a woman with a small litter of follicles growing in my super-sized ovaries.]  

All in all, the ceremony was beautiful, dinner was amazing, and the speeches were as expected…the parents, the maid of honour, the best man…not too short and not too long with everyone saying the right tear-worthy stuff to the happy couple. Of course, I am bloated and particularly sensitive to everything these days…so my infertile brain honed in on all the light “baby-making” undertones of every speech. If I didn’t know better, I would have confused myself with a submarine on the brink of battle reading the water for baby-making messages.

While everyone else cheered at the couple’s next stage of life together, my insides contracted with each little comment. When the happy couple got up to say their “thanks for coming” remarks, the groom started gushing to the crowd about how excited he was to get the baby-making-party started later that night. Yet another light-hearted laugh from the crowd, became a dagger in my ovaries with my hormonal self wanting to pull him aside and say…”you know what? It may not be that easy.” Of course I would never do that…instead I exchanged a tired glance with my husband that said it all, “Oh how I wish we were that naïve again.”

Watching the newlyweds that night, I remembered the lightness our world had when we were in our newlywed shoes too. So in that moment of celebrating naivety, as much as it hurt…a piece of me longed to be back at the start. Oh…those were the days! Back when I enjoyed a pint of beer or a glass of wine without a second thought…when it didn’t matter what cycle day it was. Back when we still thought birth control was critical.

So even though the simple idea of starting a family has dissolved for us and is replaced with much more complicated themes of fertility treatments, financial analysis and adoption. I know that what now stands in the place of that newlywed naivety is a strong marriage. Back when I was in their wedding night shoes, I didn’t know whether we had what it took to weather the storms together…all we had was naïve hope.

Now as much as I felt alone with my bloated IVF belly this weekend, Canadian statistics state that one in six couples will struggle with infertility…so in a room of 125 with approximately half of them couples…10.416 of us are, will be, or were in the same infertile boat at one point in our lives. So…I am likely not the only one treading lightly and wanting to whisper words of caution to the happy couple….I am most likely just the most hormonal one.