A Quarantine Confession: Guilt

I was in my mid-30s and my husband was in his mid-40s when we got married. Neither of us had any kids, and we both wanted them. The deal from the beginning was that we’d figure it out by the time he was 50.

I figured we’d conceive long before then, but we didn’t. In fact, we never did. In six years, there was not one pregnancy, not one miscarriage. The official diagnosis is unhelpful: unexplained infertility. I had health issues at the time, so I tried a lot of natural things to try to move things in our favor — Feng Shui, acupuncture, tapping, herbal infusions. And he patiently humored me through all of it, drinking and eating whatever I gave him; rearranging furniture; taking phone calls in the middle of his work day so I could cry. It was 75 cycles of normalcy, then hope, then despair with no signs that it would end favorably.

In the end, we didn’t have the money for private adoption or infertility treatments and public adoption was an emotional roller coaster of hurdles that we didn’t think we could handle, particularly as we entered our 40s and 50s. It took an extra year, but we officially gave up the fight when my husband turned 51. Dealing with infertility is a large onion of layers to get through — some days you’re mourning the loss of a little person you’ll never get to meet, some days you’re worried about who’s going to take you to the doctor when you’re 80, some days you’re angry at your body for not working the way it’s supposed to, some days you feel left out because the person you just met doesn’t know how to relate to someone without kids.

Getting over it was a process that has taken years and has included an intricate list of goals to accomplish. We may never get over it completely, but we’ve worked through most of the emotional stuff — sometimes alone, sometimes together. For me, though, lockdown has surfaced another layer I didn’t know existed: guilt. Guilt because quarantine is a different experience for me because it’s filled with a bunch of new experiences filling my time — gardening, baking, a podcast, blogging, a class. I’m not trying to juggle my full-time job and my business while trying to entertain and educate a child. My experience is very different from many others and, although I help my friends and family members from my home when I can, there’s not really much I can do.

There’s also a lot of guilt because a part of me is grateful that there isn’t a child in the mix. We both work essential jobs — his outside the home and mine from home — so there’s a lot of anxiety for both of us already. It’s a small blessing that I don’t have the extra anxiety and worry that would inevitably occur over a kid — and I’m ashamed I feel this way.