Infertile enough

This post has been ruminating for awhile.  It's one I toyed with writing back in January, when I was approaching the one year mark of finding out I was pregnant with AJ.  That one was going to be called "Survivor's Guilt".  Again in April, I wanted to sit down and write about how, although my own IF journey is resolved now, I still very much identify and want to remain a member of this community.  Then I read a post by one of my bloggy friends Jennifer at It's Jennifer Juniper wrote a post about how she didn't feel like she fit in as a member of the IF community and I came back to wanting to write this.  So I took some time between June Challenge posts to write this up.

So here it is...I'll start by saying that when I first ventured into this world, this community of sisters all across the world who struggle with infertility, pregnancy loss, and infant loss, I felt like I too, didn't belong.  After all, I already had a child, conceived naturally in an "average" amount of time.  I'd been trying to get pregnant for about 9 months when I joined my first TTC/Mommy website, Baby Gaga .  I crept in at first, posting a question here or there, joining in a few popular threads.  Over time, I made friends.  I joined more intimate threads, even ended up leading one of my very own after awhile.  After a little bit of time, it was clear that I was "infertile enough" to fit in, despite my initial worries.

Sometime later, around month 15 of TTC, I stumbled on a blog section on another website I liked to frequent. http://www.countdowntopregnancy.com/.  I saw a link that said to contact the site creator if you were interested in contributing.  Oh a whim, I contacted her, and my blog there was born, http://www.countdowntopregnancy.com/blog/category/ttc-stories/hoping-to-be-blessed-twice/.   

I wrote on this blog about TTC a little bit.  Due to the rules of the CDTP blog, I couldn't post things in both places, so my posts here were more abbreviated during that time. One day I started searching for blogs about women who were TTC and I've built a blogroll full of them over time.  When I'm bored, I got to my favorite blogs and peruse THEIR blogrolls!  Whether or not most of those women know my name or read my blog in return, I feel so connected to them and somehow invested in their personal stories. I've spent hours in front of the screen, reading, crying, praying...their stories touched me deeply.

So that brings me to the message I felt moved to put out there.

• THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS INFERTILE ENOUGH.  
• Infertility is not how long you've been trying. 
• Infertility doesn't care how many children you already have
• Infertility sometimes means you can GET pregnant, but not STAY pregnant
• Sometimes they can't find a clinical reason for infertility--That doesn't mean there isn't one, they just haven't found it yet!
• MEMBER FOR LIFE--scars of infertility run deep and we have a special understand for others on the journey.  A resolved IFer like myself still identifies strongly with the community and still can have a place in it.

So there we go.  I don't have a larger reader-ship, but I wanted write this anyway.  Sometimes it's hard to find where we belong and if I've wondered about it in regards to the IF community, others probably have too. Maybe one or two of them will read this. I hope so.