Please, Happiness: Infertility and Depression

We’ve all tossed a penny into a fountain or blown out our birthday candles with a wish.  If you’re like me, you’ve done that and you’ve wished on a shooting star, kissed the blarney stone and blown eyelashes all over the place; every time hoping for a baby.

These days, I’ve stopped wishing for a baby because it seems too hard and too certain to disappoint me.  Instead, I wish for happiness and inner peace with my life as it is.  Happiness is a big goal, but somehow it seems smaller than a baby and, after so many disappointments, more attainable.

One way that I try to keep myself peaceful and happy is by writing about my life, my experiences and my feelings about infertility; but not just writing, blogging.  You see blogging gives me a community of people like me.  You may not look like me, act like me or think like me, but you get me.  We have one very important common experience – infertility.

This weekend I attended the BlogHer conference in New York. It’s the largest conference for blogging women in the world and a great source of inspiration for me.  This year was no exception.  During the conference, I attended an event at the Museum of Modern Art and saw Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree in the Sculpture Garden.

I was struck by the tree, not just because its poor branches were weighted almost to capacity with tags, but because of the large number of people who were waiting to add their wishes.  As I watched, hundreds of people waited, wrote and tied their deepest desires to the tree for everyone to see.

It was amazing.  And it reminded me so much of what infertility bloggers do every day.

Infertility has taken me to some dark places.  I was depressed, scared and felt alone, despite the friends and family surrounding me. And while my quest for my first child happened before I began blogging on Lawyer Mama in 2006, the legacy of my depression still lingers.

In 2007, I started to write a bit about what I’d gone through and my struggles with depression, which began with my infertility diagnosis.  Even after two children, the pit that opened up under my feet as I had miscarriage after miscarriage was still there.  The pit was usually covered with lush branches and piles of leaves, away from sight, but it was always there, just waiting for me to fall in.

In 2008, I did fall in.  And it wasn’t pretty.

Blogging saved me in so many ways.  A community of bloggers listened and offered support.  And so now, as my husband and I try to add to our family, I’m looking for that community of support again.  I reach out to the community here on Attain Fertility and on the Attain Fertility Facebook page; I read infertility blogs.  I read some of the big ones that everyone knows, like Uppercase Woman and Stirrup Queens and A Little Pregnant.  I don’t read them because they’re big, but because they’re amazing women who have inspired me for years.  In fact, A Little Pregnant was the very first blog I read on a regular basis.  Ever.  (I’ve been stalking Julie online since 2003.  She’s that awesome.)

I also read blogs that simply speak to me, like Just Two Lines Away, Life & Love in the Petri Dish and The End of My Line. (In fact, please read his beautiful post Honesty. It says so much about how infertility changes us, even when we eventually come out the other side with a baby. I couldn’t have said it better.)  I don’t always comment on these blogs; they don’t all know I’m there or who I am, but I know that if I ever need support, all I have to do is leave a comment on one of their blogs and I’ll get it.  Because they get it.  Just like all of you.  And that’s pretty awesome.

So in my search for happiness and peace, I’ll be writing and listening and talking this time.  Because I know that blogging and this community can save me, even when everything else is overwhelming. I’ll continue to write my deepest desires here on my tree for everyone to see.  Just promise me you’ll keep coming back to read them.