The Three-Bucket Dance Of Infertility

I’ve been chasing the infertility drain since about early 2021 (probably before that, but I didn’t really know). One of my friends in Atlanta tells me it’s what “drives the car” for me, which is probably true. I’ve written about it now about 115 times.

I have a friend through church who has a kid (nice) but one of her professional colleagues (a female) and her husband are struggling with infertility themselves. This other couple, neither of whom I know, hit a wall recently psychologically — it happens, as I can tie infertility to almost totaling my car (see below) — and my friend asked me how to think about it. There’s no real way to think about infertility other than “Whoa, this kinda sucks,” but I can give you some buckets. Before I hit those buckets, though, here’s the article about the car totaling.

If you are experiencing infertility and you need/want to know “what to do next,” you essentially have three buckets:

Keep trying and hope it works out organically or with fertility aids i.e. IUI, IVF: I would say this is the path if the woman in the relationship wants to carry a child to term. I’m mostly speaking in a heterosexual context here; obviously this would all be different for same-sex couples or single females. I cannot speak to those experiences, so I will not. The upside of this approach is that you get the full gamut of pregnancy and experience and people throw you showers and all that noise. The downside is that if it’s not happening naturally and you pursue other avenues, it gets costly.

Adopt or foster: This would be where you realize a lot of children are unloved and deserve a better shot — and, frankly, a lot of people who become parents don’t actually deserve to be parents, insofar as the word “deserve” is being used correctly there.

Obviously with this bucket, you lose the experience of actual pregnancy and/or impregnating someone, and your children are not biologically yours, which is a big thing for some people. I think I am kinda leaning towards this bucket, but right now I still don’t know.

Say fuck it and spend your money on experiences while being a fake aunt/uncle to your friends’ kids and your siblings’ (if you have) kids: This is a decent option if you have that DINK (double income no kids) life. You can work hard for a quarter, then go to Italy, come back, work hard, go to Madagascar, etc. Rinse and repeat. You miss out on the supposed and real joys of parenting, but you live deeper experiences and connect to the world in a different way — and when the parents in your orbit are Empty Nesters, maybe they join you.

I have yet to find a fourth bucket for white-collar, middle-class infertility. I may be naive and missing something, though.

Also, for the purposes of anyone who wants to badger me about this article, I am speaking more about conception infertility. Multiple miscarriages is a form of infertility too, although that’s a bit of a different animal in terms of buckets of how to deal with it. As for “secondary infertility,” i.e. you had a kid or two and you can’t conceive the second/third kid, well, that’s a problem as well — although again, it’s a different beast in terms of your options and what’s already in front of you.

If you’ve experienced infertility, are these buckets right — and if so, which bucket did you lean?