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Christmas is sort of the perfect storm of holidays for someone infertile. On one front, it is a holiday about the birth of a baby--and a virgin birth at that--on another, it is a holiday centered on children, and finally, it is celebrated with family. Those three fronts come together to either create pure bliss if you are expecting or recently delivered and pure hell for those who are still in the trenches of infertility.
Think about it this way: what if there was an enormous holiday called The Great Peanut Day that everyone celebrated non-stop for two months or more every year? Families would plan their lives around the Great Peanut Day, stores would play music hailing the legume, and all food prepared for weeks on end would involve the peanut. Oh, and the final part of this analogy is that you have an enormous peanut allergy. You're still invited to everything because, damn, it's the Great Peanut Day and you can't sit home by yourself. But you can't participate at all (lest you go into anaphylactic shock and ruin everyone else's good time) and the whole day serves as a reminder of what you can't do. At least not now, not until they have figured out a way to cure your nut allergy, which you are promised will be in the future. At some point. Though perhaps not before the next Great Peanut Day.
And if you want to make an argument that infertility is not about life and death, I beg you to read No Swimmer's recent post about the holidays.
The analogy may seem extreme, but it points out the fact that there are many different ways people view Christmas and they're not all filled with boughs of holly. Christmas can be one of the most difficult holidays for those experiencing infertility as well as one of the happiest ones once you are parenting. And those two extremes are so deeply apparent at this time of year between those in the trenches and those actively parenting.
There have been wonderful posts through the blogosphere this year on the topic of Christmas. There have been the funny ones: Conceive This! has a vlog about the Barren Christmas while Sticks and Stims May Break My Bones has her version of the 12 Nights of Christmas, IVF style.
There have been the reflective ones. The Young and the Infertile writes about measuring your year while The Road Less Travelled talks about the people missing from the table.
But the one post that sums up how infertility colours holidays is Baby Smiling in Back Seat's show and tell of a Christmas card she found and how the meaning changed each time she pulled back her focus a bit to see the bigger picture. How it went from being a moment where she found her own to being not about infertility at all, and she writes: "It’s kind of funny from a neutral standpoint, but from an IF standpoint, it is funny on so many levels. And also not funny at all."
Melissa is the author of the infertility and pregnancy loss blog, Stirrup Queens and Sperm Palace Jesters. She keeps a categorized blogroll of almost 1600 infertility blogs and writes the daily Lost and Found and Connections Abound, a news source for the infertility blogosphere. Her infertility book, Navigating the Land of If, is forthcoming from Seal Press in Spring 2009. She is also the editor of the Creme de la Creme list, which will be posted next Thursday.
