Hah - forget the crush. I'm in love with Grrl!!!!!

She's amazing. She either has me thinking deep thoughts, or crying at my desk because of her quiet eloquence in the face of countless tragedies, or laughing my butt off with her silly posts.

You started this. I had not idea there were blogs about infertility out there. But no, I'm spending money on people I will never meet and mailing baby gifts to far flung places like South Africa.

And Grrl introduced me to Raymond Carver.

I'm in love.

Getupgrrl's stories are so unrelentingly painful that I sometimes wonder if she's fictional. I'm reasonably certain she's not and I've certainly known many women who've had at least that hard a time conceiving. But as literature her blog can become this standing wavefront of penetrating ontological anguish that takes on the proportions of late modern Soviet sculpture: THIS is my pain and its shadow falls to the horizon!

It's amazing writing and her humor and perspective are totally loveable but I sometimes find it exhausting. I'll be sitting in my office at work all red-faced and breathless, like I just got a bad phone call from some emergency room somewhere. Punishing would not be too strong a word.

As someone who's spent most of my life trying to divorce relationships from genetics� trying to convince myself that it doesn't matter who my parents were �I often find myself wishing she would just adopt already. Parenting is so much more than reproduction, and reproduction is done so badly so often; it just seems a shame for someone who'd make such a good parent to get hung up on a detail that I've spent so much time convincing myself doesn't matter. But, having neither a uterus nor a child, I'm also aware that I have no idea what I'm talking about so I never mention it over at her blog. I can't imagine looking at all those monuments to her struggle and saying, "Was this trip really necessary?"

Joshua, this is definitely an area where gender-empathy makes a difference. I can say that because I absolutely understand your take on divorcing yourself from the very idea of the genes that produced family members you'd rather not claim. In my case, my mother.

But I don't think you really get getupgrrl. First, she's not having trouble conceiving. She's had four miscarriages and a hellish time in infertility treatment. Not conceiving is one kind of pain, but what she's going through -- loss after loss -- is trauma of the first order. Why doesn't she give up? She's braver than most. I had four miscarriages after my daughter and I went through a year of infertility treatment. I gave up when it got to be too much. Maybe if there had been weblogs back then and I could have made connections to other women who were in the same place I would have had the courage to hold on a while longer.

There is nothing as isolating as losing a baby so early in the pregnancy. The conversation with her surrogate, when she said, promise me you'll remember him -- that is something I think about every day of my life. Four children I should have brought into the world, every one of them as real to me as the one who is right here. But only to me.

So it is painful, but it's a useful pain for some of us, a place to work through awful experiences that won't go away.

Well-put, Sara.

I actually misspoke myself on the conceiving thing. What I meant to say is that I've known women who have miscarried repeatedly. Some of them have been remarkably circumspect about it, but those are also the people who can laugh off losing close family members in car accidents; not so much insensitive as just hyper-aware that life causes death.

Honestly, I have no judgment about whether continuing to try and carry a child to term under those circumstances is a good idea or not. I just don't understand why it's necessary� like, genuinely don't understand. I've known so many kids who were raised by people other than their birth parents to become healthy happy adults �and so many kids who learned to hate their birth parents, or who were destroyed by their birth parents� I can't rationalize the behavior. I can sympathize with the consequences. And I can certainly see the attraction in parenting. But I can't make that need to biologically reproduce make sense in my own mind.

I guess if I have any frustration over it, it's that I imagine the friends I've had who would have been better off being raised by getupgrrl�or you, or lots of people I know who've had trouble carrying a child to term. It just seems like a tremendous yield of pain that could be gotten rid of altogether by taking the kid with the abusive birth-parents and putting him or her in the household with the nice people who really want to have kids.

But, you know, we martians have trouble with this concept you humans call "feelings".

Dear Martian,

It's not just a human thing. It's quite clearly a female human thing. Most likely a product of social conditioning, but with a dash of hormonal influence thrown in. Do you have hormones on Mars? Well, here they cause all kinds of complications. Just as many as that feelings business.

r

Sara,

I'm not sure the need to have a child of your own blood is necessarily a female thing. I'm one of those women who doesn't feel a need to create a life in order to be a mother. There aren't many of us (even women who say they don't want kids often imagine their life with children, usually biological), but I don't think we're missing some essential woman thing.

I've also known men who feel a driving need to be a father. Stronger than I would've imagined, but there it is.

This is one of the most personal decisions a person can make. To be a parent? How important is the birthing in the parenting? These are things we usually feel very strongly about, and thus get very emotional about, and while I understand frustration and pain that can come from 'failure,' I'm not sure how I feel about this emphasis on biological relationships. It seems to limit the possibilities. But I'm not a mother and I've never lost a child, so I could be missing some essential piece in this...

christina, of course you are absolutely right. Some people feel no urge to have kids, for whatever reasons. It is the most personal of decisions. Maybe that's part of why it's so hard to explain to Joshua, to anybody, the depth of emotion that goes along with infertility when somebody really does want children, or more children.

For women like getupgrrl, like myself, who have not be able to carry to term, the loss is fraught with terrible guilt. It's a failure of a very basic kind. Not failure in the sense of competition -- the person who wants three boys because her sister has three boys -- but something far more complex. A failure to nurture, a failure that brings with it the end of a possibility. I'm am absolutey pro choice, but I also recognize the difference between biological and physiological facts and emotional ones. The minute you have a positive pregnancy test -- if you want the kid to start with -- it's a reality, a being with substance you can hold in your arms. Losing that pregnancy is having to hand that baby over, because you failed to provide whatever it was that it needed.

Of course, most of us do pick up and move on. But the repercussions are always there, emotionally.