Parenting Through Infertility

For the past few years, my profile on here described me as someone who was parenting AFTER infertility. Kind of misleading, no? Because, from my vantage point (recent FET, miscarriage, looking into other methods of alternative family building), I can't see any sign of a period on the end of my infertility sentence. Now, my profile accurately describes me as someone parenting THROUGH infertility.

This led me to wonder: will I always be parenting 'through', or will the 'after' come eventually? Or is the idea of a definitive beginning and end too simplistic here? When I have completed my family building (with whatever path that might be) and when I am not actively thinking about where my next baby will come from, will infertility become an afterthought one day-something that will stab me in the heart only once in a great while as opposed to almost everyday?

As you can see, I have more questions than answers. That's the way life pretty much is these days.

This sounds strange, but for a brief, shining moment in G's infancy, infertility really was an afterthought. Whether it was the product of being too enveloped in mommyhood to care about anything outside that state or the desperation to shed my IF wares, I *almost* felt as if it had never come to pass, this crazy infertility thing. I started getting these delusions that perhaps, after having given birth, I might magically become pregnant without five people in lab coats in the room. I mean, I had a baby--that meant I was cured, right?  I was ready to join the fertile world! I'd like to label this brief period of time as non-fertile mommy psychosis, perhaps even pomposity.

(Haha, now I would be glad to get pregnant with the lab coats)

Maybe this only exists in my head, but being that I'm not nearly as unique as I'd love to believe myself to be, I think there are others who also think that having given birth somehow makes them 'less' infertile (whatever that means), regardless of how much effort, money and medical intervention it took to get there. I know this is crazy talk, but this is what I once felt. As I mentioned, I think I've so desperately wanted to not be infertile, to just move on and embrace a new life with my child(ren) and family, that it's seductive to believe the limitations of our bodies no longer exist. I can tell you that doing the kind of soul searching I've done recently for which direction we'll go has cured me of this thinking.  I am reminded, by the mountains that I currently climb, that this journey is not over. Perhaps it never will be, but one day I'd like to at least be going downhil for once.