Perfection Industrial Complex

Before I begin, woooo Ravens!  Super Bowl bound!  I’m not a huge football fan, but the Ravens are fun to root for and Baltimore is such an awesome sports city.  Everyone is so happy and excited that you can’t help but feed off of it.  And, seeing as how I have to relate everything back to my infertility, I can’t help but think about how the Super Bowl it at just about the time I’ll be starting my birth control pills.  Somehow it always makes time move faster when I have something that I’m looking forward to, and a Super Bowl party where I’ll actually care about more than the commercials definitely counts as something to look forward to.

In a stroke of luck, Henry and I ended up with Ravens playoff tickets

I had a couple of friends come to visit me this weekend.  One is a friend I’ve mentioned before, who knows about my fertility issues and is actually going through her own.  We’ll call her Hillary.  The other friend, we’ll call her Charlotte, since if we were assigning everyone Sex and the City identities she would definitely be the Charlotte.  (I’d be the Carrie… I know everyone claims to be the Carrie but I am more bohemian than most of my friends and I write, so I think I have a pretty good claim on being the Carrie of my group).  (I swear I'm not obsessed with SATC, we just watched a few episodes this weekend so it's on my mind).

Anyway, those of you who have been reading for a while know that I have a constant internal struggle going over whether or not to tell people about my fertility issues.  For the most part, we’ve landed on the side of no – Henry and I have each told our immediate families (although his sister doesn’t know) and one friend each (whose spouses also know).  Altogether, that means that there are 13 people who aren’t us or our doctor who know.

I’m pretty happy with my decision not to tell many people anything.  Sure, there are days when I imagine writing a melodramatic you-might-not-be-as-fertile-as-you-think-so-start-trying-now e-mail to all my girlfriends, or randomly posting an infertility awareness article on Facebook (this one, especially), or dropping the news into the middle of a conversation like a big ol’ awkward bomb, but I resist.  If the people who know have taught me anything, it’s that once it’s a topic of conversation, I don’t have control over it.  Sometimes my mom feels positive while I feel negative, and nothing in the world is more annoying than that.  I console myself with fantasies of how I'll shock everyone with my IVF revelation once I get pregnant.

Anyway, not wanting to tell people led me to bite my tongue with Charlotte this weekend.  Charlotte broke up with her long term boyfriend about a year ago, and is feeling a little… lost.  She’s just in that funk, the same one we’ve all been in, where you realize that your life isn’t exactly how you imagined it would be at this point (told you she was the Charlotte) and start comparing it to everyone else's.

So there Hillary and I are, several mimosas in at brunch, giving Charlotte the same crappy platitudes everyone gives their friends in a funk of self-comparison:

"No one is as happy as they act on Facebook."

"Even if you were married, life wouldn't be perfect."

"You never really know what other people are going through."

"You don't know what tomorrow holds."

Do I think that it would have made Charlotte happy to learn that I'm infertile?  Of course not.  But at the same time, I can't help but feel like I am part of the perfection industrial complex that is contributing to Charlotte's malaise.  I'm married, financially secure, have a cute husband and an awesome dog, and seem to be living a fabulous life, even if I do mostly keep it off of Facebook.  If I were Charlotte, I might hate me.  But of course, I bit my tongue and - rather than sharing proof that everything we were saying was true - continued to spout the same tired cliches.  Sorry, Charlotte.  I'll tell you one day.