Green

I've never considered myself a particularly jealous person. I struggled with the same minor pangs of envy that everyone experiences from time to time but in the big picture I was always able to put the blinders on and focus on my life as its own entity - what others had was largely irrelevant to me. But that was the old, pre-infertile Kim and now everything has changed.

Of all my personal changes I think it is the intense jealousy that has really knocked the wind out of me. Nobody is fully prepared for what infertility will do to them but I still have trouble believing that I could ever be as jealous as I frequently am these days. I have never felt such intense feelings of envy - and maybe never such intensity in any of my emotions to date. The jealousy - in my case a dangerous coctail of envy and a keen sense of injustice- cripples my ability to maintain a gap between my emotions and my actions (something I used to think I was pretty decent at).

The crippling jealousy invades many aspects of my life - first and foremost my friendships. Of course, as fate would have it, I have many friends who are pregnant or are new parents. My best friend is due next month. She is the prime recipient of most of my jealousy, a victim of circumstances often mired up in my misery. As many young and naive women do, when we were relative newlyweds we fantasized about getting pregnant at roughly the same time, quitting our jobs on the same day, supporting each other through midnight feedings, and taking our babies on walks together to pour the foundation of their inevitable life-long friendship.

Now she has everything I want and I feel as though I am left in the dust with nothing. It was easier to ignore when she didn't look pregnant and I got pretty adept at pretending nothing was different. But now, with her cute basketball bulge I am forced to confront the subject along with every painful insecurity it brings up every time I see her. There are darker days when I feel as though I can't even look at her below the shoulders because the jealousy and rage swirl up like a tornado - I can almost feel them in the pit of my stomach - in my empty uterus. I have been brutally honest with her about my feelings, and once I even humorously suggested that she pretend to be a sitcom actress who has to hide her pregnancy on camera by carying large objects in front of her at all times.

Though my sitcom actress idea was meant to be absurd there are plenty of examples of my jealousy induced behavior reaching absurd levels. I sometimes feel angry when my friend makes the tiniest complaint or observation about her pregnancy or some days even when she mentions the pregnancy or baby at all - to me or anyone else we might encounter. Though our friendship has always centered around a playful banter that outsiders have often mistaken for mean-spiritedness I often find myself taking the banter too far and even voicing venomous critiques of her opinions. Many times I realize mid-sentance that I'm crossing the line but fail at my brain's attempts to censor myself. And at the end of the day when I replay the shameful conversations over in my mind I know that they were about my infertility even if we were talking about something completely unrelated.

My shameful jealousy continues even on days when I have a brighter and more productive attitude that assures me I will become a parent one way or another, through fertility treatments or adoption. The envy shifts then from being about actual pregnancies and babies into the realm of finacial injustice. I feel supremely bitter, forgotten, and picked over when I think of how much I will ultimately have to spend on getting my baby while others get theirs for free. I sometimes feel what I feer is genuine hatred toward anyone who just took a couple rolls in the hay and wound up conceiving without a needing even a thought as to how to pay for it. My hatred grows when I imagine these Fertile People as ungrateful and unaware of how lucky they are (which I often do).

My hatred/jealousy of the fertile world has affected so many aspects of my life. I'm not as good a friend as I used to be. I have a victim mentality. I think about myself all the time. I don't enjoy social situations like I used to. I think that many of the other changes I have noticed in myself stem in some way from the jealousy and all are intertwined, sometimes hard to differentiate. The jealousy has had the principle role in changing me, my personality, and my outlook. I don't want to be this person and yet I have become this person. So I am turning to the advice of others who have been there - others who can assure me that I am normal - that many go down this road and make it to the other end.

"Infertility changes you. It is a time when you find yourself disconnecting from those you love the most, your family and friends. A time when you pull back from the world and focus inward becasuse isolating youself can actually feel better than remaining a part of the fertile world.

Its not that you want to separate from those around you: in fact, you want to be right there with them, a part of the fertility club that includes your mother, your sister, friends, even the next-door neighbor's fifteen-year-old daughter. But you have no choice. The gap between you and the fertile world widens, and it becomes harder to be around those who now seem to disappoint you at every turn...

.....Luckily we have found that most of the time the people you moved away from will 'stay on the line' and wait for your return after the crisis of infertility is over. It is an amazing phenomenon which we have seen happen over and over again. With the arrival of resolution there comes a peace to relationships that at one time seemed damaged beyond repair."

-What to Expect When You're Experiencing Infertility

by Debby Peoples and Harriette Rovner Ferguson