Infertility Survivors Finally Heard
While my gray roots benefited from a rich brunette color drenching in a new hair salon recently a younger stylist handed me a glass of champagne. She was not my usual go-to hair expert so there was the usual get-to-know-you chitchat. (Yes, I decided to splurge a bit this time around since it was the…
Editor’s Note: Updates (10/26) included below from BBC Health. It’s been more than a month since the op-ed prompted by failed infertility treatments, “Selling the Fertility Fantasy,” ran in The New York Times. Infertility stories that don’t end in a baby don’t grab headlines. But this one did. It reverberated across the infertility blogosphere to the…
My expectations for September 27 and The Cycle: Living A Taboo were very high — not only for those of us presenting at the forum, but for those who would join us. What transpired surpassed my expectations. As the evening drew near, we speakers assembled in Tribeca from Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, Spanish Harlem, Boston,…
Humans don’t do well with emotional discomfort of any kind. This has been proven time and time again, but no more so than with infertility. It can be traumatizing on many levels, but I guess I didn’t realize how difficult an infertility diagnosis can be on other people. They just do not want to see…
Very few women (or men for that matter) reach the lofty business heights of the latest Mrs. Alphas in the headlines: COO Sheryl Sandberg and former CFO Erin Callan. Sheryl, 43, has been on an extended book tour to encourage young women to lean in to their ambitions and speak up so their voices are…
In the late 1990s Crown Princess Masako of Japan faced enormous pressure to produce an heir, such pressure that some believe it changed her life for the worse and contributed to mental illness. If you had told me 15 years ago that stories on the value of the royal womb would be playing out in…
This post is dedicated to new readers — those who found their way here from the Bitter Infertiles (podcast Episode 20). If you’re new to this blog, I hope you’ll see it’s quite pleasant here. Contrary to conventional wisdom, flowers grow. Laughter is encouraged. All in all, we strive to make this blog a place…
As part of my blogoversary week of lessons learned… #2 The Blogosphere Can Foster Strange Bedfellows One of the toughest aspects of being part of a group routinely held up for scrutiny (e.g. women without children) is facing detractors who feel perfectly at ease casting aspersions or passing value judgements on our lives. I don’t…
The older I get the more intrigued I become with where we derive knowledge and what shapes our view of the world. Apparently we are born with an innate predisposition to favor those who are similar to us (more on that later in this post). Fortunately we also have the capacity to expand our thinking,…
Editor’s Note: The following guest post comes from Megan, a novice to the blog world. She teases at the complexity of an infertility conundrum: How do we educate people about the infertility experience and how it reshapes us without making childlessness the only thing they see about us? I am normally a “silent” silent sorority member,…