mirrorballs and infertility shame

throwing light on dark places

The only person who knows each tiny pane of my infertility mirrorball is… me.

Those standing closest to me know them well, my rotational light fractals. But there are lights we don’t scatter readily. Not to others, not even easily to ourselves.

There was a defining moment where the cheek burning shame of my own lack of fecundity broke loose of its cocoon, transformed into a flush of indignant fury. I think this happened somewhere circa the now infamous burning of all of my ‘fertility’ books. No amount of anyone telling me corrective things I could try had made me pregnant. So I burnt the lot of it and vowed that one day, I’d be a voice of reason in the madness.

Now I’m a fertility yoga teacher and doula who puts a quieter, gentler kind of heat into writing about the emotional spectrum of fertility. Today, the words I am shaping are about shame.

Mine, yours, ours, theirs. The Interplay.

The meeting of ‘what others think’ and ‘what I think’ is a veritable hotbed of shame production. So let’s go there, dance under it for a bit and feel better.

The Beginning.

The first negative pregnancy test surprised me. After a lifetime of don’t get pregnant, morning after pills, scares and one early miscarriage after a ‘whoops’ - this wasn’t the way I understood it to work. It was on the opposite side of the colour spectrum wheel. But I wasn’t ashamed. I rolled up my sleeves and Tried Harder.

I wasn’t particularly ashamed when we were ‘unexplained’ for two years. It was miserable but undefined and therefore hope lived on somehow. But imperceptibly slowly, the barrage of subtle external shaming piled up one by one into a sheaf of papers. I could title them maybe its because you’re eating gluten. I could also use some of the many many words people deemed it appropriate to say to me and title it;

Are you timing it right? or - and this one happened - Are you doing it right?

My friend went to a functional medicine practitioner and avoided IVF

I’d try everything you could before you go down the assisted conception route.

Why don’t you call it a day and adopt, there’s a lot of children needing homes you know?

This kind of stress isn’t optimal for your body to be able to conceive.

It’s an overpopulated world, IVF shouldn’t be given on the NHS

Maybe it’s because you were on the pill for so long?

Maybe you were never destined to be a mother?

But you’ve got a nice life you know, if kids never come.

Every intricate piece of our lives and choices are held up to the scrutiny of others trying to find a reason why we aren’t getting/staying pregnant. Trying to be helpful no doubt (sometimes), and getting it improbably wrong. We are shamed by wolf words in Red Riding Hood clothes.

The Antidote to shame is to see it and speak about it. The shaming we receive during our fertility era can be so subtle we don’t notice it enveloping us. It can be so unsubtle we are dumbfounded by its slap.

So here I am, writing about it, calling it out, a small voice in a big landscape shouting ‘it’s not anyone’s fault’.

And then - we weren’t unexplained anymore.

In 2013, the infertile label was pinned to my front on a September day like a bullet from the blue. I will never forget how ‘oh shit’ morphed from shock into a shame that I only feel like talking about ten years later. Because that’s the good part - I do now, because I have no shred of shame about my reproductive story. I love my story.

Every single thought I had that ‘my body has failed me’ I have rewound and repaired. My body is incredible and does incredible things all day every day. As does yours. It sees, runs, writes, heart beats, my brain tells my fingers to type this. Your brain makes sense of the words. But we are led down paths where our knowing that this isn’t our fault is erased. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - ‘health’ and ‘fertility’ aren’t neatly correlated.

It think it can be easier, more solution hopeful, to try and find the things we aren’t doing well enough than sit with mystery and futility. But the bar can keep being lifted each time another month rolls around. We set our sights higher, we niche down. We turn on ourselves. But it’s crucial to stay aware of the external messaging and social construction that distils itself into shame.

We can interrogate where our feelings of shame stem from, following back the thread to its many beginnings. The doorway, as a series of questions, looks like this;

Why am I ashamed of my reproductive story right now? Can I identify a particular part of the story where shame lives?

What conversations with people, articles, books, podcasts or sources have contributed to the way that I feel?

Free write, brainstorm, contemplate it on a walk.

From here, a dismantling of both external and internal blame can begin. We can mentally return the parts back to their ignorant sources. We might refine our sources. Shame isn’t something we get to take off like a jumper though. It happens in the cocoon, slow motion metamorphosis and we can re-emerge, emboldened. We can hand our shame back to where it came from. We can burn the shame disco down. It’s all possible.