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Letting go

September 2, 2007

As I guess anyone who has gone through infertility knows, there are always casualties along the way. Hopefully we will end up achieving our dream someday, but it will not be without cost. I'm not talking about deaths, of course--no matter how many times I dramatically suggest I will die of a broken heart! I'm talking about friends who don't stand up to the test of supporting you in your time of need, and have to be let go.

Normally I'm the type of person who will hang onto a friendship long past the point when it should be dropped, when neither of us has anything left to give the other, when we no longer have anything in common except the fact that we have been friends for a long time, when sometimes we don't really even like each other anymore.

Recently I've had to let go of my first group of friends due to this infertility. I wonder how many more I will lose. It makes me sad even though I should have let them go a long time ago.

I met this group of girls at my first "real" job after college. They were fun and funny and nothing like any of my other friends. Most of my friends from college were a lot like me--they didn't drink, liked to play games and watch movies, and we could spend hours just talking. This new group was made up of girls who lived what I then considered to be wild lives, drinking every night, doing some light drugs, and considering dates a success only when they got to sleep with the guy at the end. The thought of being in a relationship was completely odious to them. At this point, I was already engaged, so our lives were in totally different places. All we had in common was that we worked at the same company and shared the miseries of an entry-level office job.

Eventually, we all got new jobs and left our first after-college company. We drifted apart, of course, but still kept getting together now and then. It's been six years, and they still are all at a consistent point in their lives--they're all starting to drink wine instead of beer, and have started to enjoy being in relationships rather than avoiding them. I've since moved out of the city (where they all still live), bought a house, and started trying (hard!) to start a family.

This summer, after more than a year of ttc #1, Jeff and I started telling our friends and family what we'd been going through. We believed that we would need the strong support system once we started going through treatments, and boy, have we been right so far! We've told our parents and sisters, my best friend and my oldest friend, my college roommate, my two close work friends, and two of my friends from high school (one of whom turned out to be going through the same thing as us; the other completely didn't understand at all).

I've been trying all summer to get together with this one group of friends so I could tell them, too. There are some friends we've decided not to tell--people we aren't very close to, people we don't keep in touch with more than once a year, people who wouldn't benefit from knowing (like Jeff's friends). But I did want to tell these girls. I wanted them to know why I've been a little distant and distracted for the last year or so, and why I'll continue to be so for quite some time probably, as I try more and more treatments every month.

The worst part is, one of them is also one of my old high school friends (we all have such complicated, overlapping groups of friends!) so she does already know. And she, along with the others, flat-out refused to drive half an hour to meet me halfway between where they live and I live for dinner. They all, including her, said that I should drive an hour there and an hour back to have dinner in the city with them, deal with the stresses of driving in a city while I'm already dealing with so much.

My relationship with them has been slowly ending anyway, over the last few years, and I finally saw no reason to try so hard to get together with people who cared so little about seeing me that they wouldn't even meet me halfway between us for dinner. Although I have several times in the past given in and driven out there to meet them, I have never even suggested they drive out to where I live for dinner--the idea would be laughable.

What I'm dealing with--not being able to have children, consistently trying and failing--is hard. But, difficult though it is to admit, some good things have come of it. Jeff and I have become a stronger couple than ever. Where we once doubted how well we would work as a parent team, we now both have utmost confidence in ourselves after going through all this together. And another good thing to come of my infertility is that I've finally been able to trim the weeds of my friendship garden. Some of them were beautiful, but who needs weeds, even beautiful ones, in a garden that is already so full of flowers!