Situational Infertility - a lightbulb moment

In the heady rose-tinted, heart-thumpingly exciting very early days of DH's and my romance (back in 2003), he sent me an e-mail and said that he needed to talk to me about something serious after work that day. So many scenarios ran through my mind about what he was going to tell me. After the cappucino's were ordered, he said (ad libbing here), "Tiger, please don't leave me but I have to tell you something. I know you want children but I must tell you that I had a vasectomy 9 years ago. We will have a child together no matter what it takes."

While I was TTC I was plagued by thinking that I shouldn't ask for support after a failed IVF or a difficult time as I had no right to complain as I was not infertile like by far the majority of people I was interacting with. If you desparately want to raise a child, step one would be to marry a man who had a vasectomy 9 years previously NOT!

Everyone else was facing difficulties and heart-braking failures and losses due to a totally unfair biological inability, whereas I knowingly married a man who had surgery to avoid ever having children and then wanted to complain when it wasn't that easy to conceive a biologically related child.

A couple of days ago I came across Melissa Forde's "Navigating the Land of IF" on my Kindle and had a light-bulb moment. She mentions Biological Infertility and also Situational Infertility. I finally had a group to belong to, a classification where I fitted!

Situational Infertility includes TTC post sterilization and also Advanced Maternal Age. The two types of IF are different. Different emotions, journeys etc but the point she made was that the two were united by the over-whelming desire to raise a child. That is the goal or happy ending for everyone. As different as each person's journey is, the overriding commonality is wanting to raise a child. A community like FC works dispite people differences because everyone's goal is exactly the same.