I just saw on another blog that this weekend ends National Infertility Awareness Week. I had been planning on writing something for it, since I struggled for seven years off and on trying to conceive. Heck, I’ve even been planning to write a book about my experience since I blogged the entire thing in my first (and anonymous) blog.

But I go to write and I just stare at the screen. I start reading my old blogs and I tear up and stop and walk away. It was just such an incredibly emotionally charged time that I’m having trouble going back there and putting myself through it again, even if it is just mentally.

“Because you’ll never know how badly you want something until you are told that it may not be possible.” – RESOLVE, National Infertility Association

After announcing my pregnancy, so many people told me they didn’t even know I wanted kids. I wasn’t even sure I wanted them most of my life. And I spent the last several years pretending not to want them just to have an answer when people asked why we didn’t have kids yet. It was an easier answer than launching into our fertility struggles.

So when we finally decided to do IVF, we didn’t tell anyone outside of close friends and family. And even then, we didn’t say much. I don’t know what I would have done without my blog and the blogging community I connected with while sharing my story. It gave me the emotional outlet I needed. I could scream, cry, laugh about what I was going through and was connected with women going through the same thing. We cheered each other’s successes and consoled each other through the losses.

And remembering that is what keeps pushing me to write the book. I remember searching and searching for stories to read about women going through infertility, looking for happy endings, looking for anything to connect to while going through such an alien procedure. I’m the kind of person who avoids the doctor unless I think I’m absolutely dying, and here I was volunteering to shoot myself full of drugs and subject myself to countless doctor visits. It consumes your life when you are going through it.

So I feel it’s a book that needs to be written. It’s a book with a purpose. I feel that if I can help even one person by sharing my story, it’s worth it. So here I am, just trying to amp myself up to revisit that blog and the rollercoaster of emotion connected to it and write that first page.