Infertility + Spiritual Direction
When I was experiencing infertility, I couldn’t seem to find a space free of opinions and advice. I also felt like there were no truly safe spaces for me. I remember bottles of breast milk falling out of the fridge at work after I had taken a call that my latest IUI treatment didn’t work. My church knocked out sets of pews to set up a kid-friendly area smack in the middle of the sanctuary. Well-meaning acquaintances would ask questions like, “Why don’t you just adopt?” and even more well-meaning friends offering (for some reason I will never understand) to be surrogates. Even going to the dentist was riddled with land mines with dental hygienists asking questions like, “Are you a mom?” <<literally why.>>
Coexisting in this way is a reality for people experiencing infertility. Families with young kids should feel welcome at church, and working moms should have supportive work environments where they can store their breast milk. And people experiencing infertility should also have safe, inclusive spaces—places of refuge—on this isolating, misunderstood, and often dismissed journey.
I remember being so excited to learn that my workplace at the time had an employee resource group for infertility. And that ERG was great in a lot of ways, but it really was more of an IVF support group. Where could I—or others experiencing infertility but not IVF—turn? There’s a lot of infertility support out there that’s physical. Or it’s emotional, but still seeks to “fix.”
That’s why I’m so passionate about Spiritual Direction. It’s one place—sometimes I think in the whole world—where you don’t have to fix or strive or have a single expectation placed on you—or place a single expectation on yourself. It’s one place where you’re safe from kid-centered spaces and well-meaning advice and opinions. It’s a place where the sometimes dark logic of your infertility-addled brain can be shared.
Every infertility journey is unique. And no matter the outcome, each person on this journey deserves a safe space to experience the depths of pain and possibility.
