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"So when are you going to have another one?"
For a long time, that was a painful question for me to answer. More often now, since I'm over 40 and my daughter, Miriam, is a teenager, I'm asked: "Do you have any other children?" My reply always catches in my throat: "No, she's my only one."
I've spent the last 15 years brushing off the subject of pregnancy with a shrug, a light-hearted comment, or a curt remark, often while fighting back tears. Before I had Miriam, I endured a variety of fertility treatments, and my husband, Joe, and I were thrilled to finally hold Miriam in our arms. We figured our infertility problems were over.
Joe and I figured wrong. We staggered through treatments—this time bearing the extra medical expenses on one less income, since I quit my job to stay home with our daughter—before we decided to stop. Because we still longed for another child, we opted to pursue adoption. But our adoption plans either went awry or were prohibitively expensive.
I've discovered I'm not alone. I'm one of more than half a million women in the United States who know the joy of parenthood while experiencing the heartbreak of reproductive failure. I have secondary infertility.
Caught In-betweenLike most people, I assumed that despite my initial fertility struggles, because I bore one child, I could have more. But secondary infertility's even more of a shock to those who've had no previous problems. "If someone would have told me I'd be infertile four years ago, I would have laughed my head off," says Lesley, an Illinois woman. "How could someone who got pregnant twice without trying be infertile?"
Perhaps the bitterest irony of secondary infertility is having to live in a nether world between larger families and childless couples. Helane S. Rosenberg and Yakov M. Epstein, authors of Getting Pregnant When You Thought You Couldn't, put it this way: "You have lost your membership in the primary infertility group by attaining the dream (they) still long for. … Yet you feel you do not really belong to the world of the fertile." They call secondary infertility the "loneliest kind," a depressingly apt description.
In addition to this sense of isolation, I'm aware of a constant inner turmoil, a tug of war between joy in the child I have and heartache over the ones I don't. For years I tortured myself, thinking I must be dissatisfied with my daughter and greedy for wanting more. Rosenberg and Epstein explain that "few couples experiencing primary infertility feel their desire to have a child is inappropriate … on the other hand, couples with secondary infertility often feel that one should be enough. … The inability to have more children can be just as psychologically and socially devastating as being childless against your will."
This isn't unique to single-child homes, I've discovered. Harriet Fishman Simons, in her excellent book Wanting Another Child, relates the conflict as a mother of two: "I didn't feel I had the right to want more when so many people had no children."
Well-meaning friends and relatives unwittingly contributed to my anguish with not-so-subtle comments that implied I was obliged to provide siblings for my daughter. My mother, an only child, hated not having brothers or sisters, and felt no qualms in telling me I shouldn't let that happen to her granddaughter. To her credit, when Mom finally understood that wasn't possible, she backed off. Still, I've sometimes felt as though I should apologize to everyone for producing only one child.
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