invisible parents

How do people who have children feel about people who are trying to conceive without success? So many people are in that position that there's a board for it on Rollercoaster.ie - trying to conceive is a valid part of the parenting experience, whether it's successful or not. There are secret parents, parents in plan, in dream, in yearning, just not yet in actuality.

I just found Xbox's site, and reading backwards through the struggles they've had was even worse because you see the hope but you know it was not to be realised.

I feel... so sad. Guilty, that things were easier for me - and guilty that I'm not doing a better parenting job having got what I wanted. And I desperately want to wave a wand and share my fertility round, make wishes come true. It is such a cruel irony, that pregnancy happens so inopportunely for some while it is so desperately yearned for by others.

One thing I maintained, from my broody teenage years up, was that if I was unable to have children I wouldn't go the IVF route. But that was before I tried to have children and perhaps it carried no weight then. And now I have children, so it still carries no weight... perhaps if I was not such a user of alternative therapies I wouldn't be so ready to reject the hormones and probings and the way the language and personalities of the fertility clinics reduce people to no more than failed body parts.

Eavan Boland described that well:
The Famine Road
“Idle as trout in light Colonel Jones
these Irish, give them no coins at all; their bones
need toil, their characters no less.” Trevelyan’s
seal blooded the deal table. The Relief
Committee deliberated: “Might it be safe,
Colonel, to give them roads, roads to force
From nowhere, going nowhere of course?”

one out of every ten and then
another third of those again
women – in a case like yours.

Sick, directionless they worked. Fork, stick
were iron years away; after all could
they not blood their knuckles on rock, suck
April hailstones for water and for food?
Why for that, cunning as housewives, each eyed
–as if at a corner butcher – the other’s buttock.

anything may have caused it, spores
a childhood accident; one sees
day after day these mysteries.

Dusk: they will work tomorrow without him.
They know it and walk clear.
He has become
a typhoid pariah, his blood tainted, although
he shares it with some there. No more than snow
attends its own flakes where they settle
and melt, will they pray by his death rattle.

You never will, never you know
but take it well woman, grow
your garden, keep house, good-bye.

“It has gone better than we expected, Lord
Trevelyan, sedition, idleness, cured
in one. From parish to parish, field to field;
the wretches work till they are quite worn,
then fester by their work. We march the corn
to the ships in peace. This Tuesday I saw bones
out of my carriage window. Your servant Jones.”

Barren, never to know the load
of his child in you, what is your body
now if not a famine road?
--Eavan Boland
So things have changed a bit since that was all the comfort women were offered - God knows fertility is now a multi billion dollar business, ruining lives and bankrupting people, as well as bringing miracles and joy... a hard choice to make. A soul destroying route to go down too. I would not have dealt well with long term ttc, I know.