Personal Essay

My Sex Life is Not Public Domain

But I’ll tell you about it anyway.

I’ll never forget the look on my husband’s face when I told him. My personality is intense, big, and unafraid to be uncomfortable, but this conversation may have taken the cake.

“I told her that if she asked again, I would hold out until she was dead.”

Not exactly what a grandson wants to hear about the wedding shower conversation between his fiancé and ailing grandmother.

Still, I said it. And I would say it again.

I remember being so grateful when I realized my own mom would never have asked about when I would become pregnant. It may have been due to the unending April Fool’s Day pranks from 1998 through 2006. I didn’t know better, because I was a child. She didn’t know better, because she was a sweet, trusting lady that never realized the date on the calendar.

And now that I know better, I’ve started addressing the inequality and lack of compassion around infertility conversations. We have huge social expectations on couples around reproduction, but in our eagerness to make small talk, we actually stumble upon one of the biggest and most poorly understood conversations around loss.

Infertility is caused by… anything, really. For the woman hopeful to start a family, unexplained infertility is the worst feeling in the world. And for those raised within the Christian worldview, making babies rapidly and without complication is almost treated like a biblical mandate. The shame associated with sex (not to speak of gender) inside purity culture nearly destroyed my ability to even talk about sex prior to marriage, let alone complications with conception.

After marriage, my sweet husband and I spent years discussing how waiting to have children was the right choice for us. And it was. If *this lady* had had a baby at 24, the entire world would have fallen apart. However, we also struggled with 3 years of unknown infertility. Eventually we became pregnant and now we have an awesome little girl. But when we finally found out we were pregnant, we couldn’t really answer why. Nothing had changed other than the year on the calendar.

My pregnancy was full of anxiety — not joyful anticipation. While we hadn’t received any confirmed miscarriages at that point, I am fairly certain I had at least once to date (and at least one since). Very few people knew of our struggles to conceive, and it was scary to celebrate a pregnancy publicly. I didn’t want to talk about it because talking about it would make it real. And real things can be lost.

When I realized I would be 30 weeks pregnant on my 30th birthday, I remember thinking, “This will make it alright to celebrate. I love my birthday, and while I can’t have a big liquor-laden blowout, at least I can celebrate that we are both alive.” I don’t remember what we actually did to celebrate that year. I just remember feeling relieved that I had two strong heartbeats inside me.

And that’s just it — when a baby is growing, it is purely a miracle. When a baby dies, it is the most heart wrenching loss a parent can suffer. And yet, infertility, infant loss, miscarriage… society minimizes these grief-filled moments with talk of rainbow babies, hope, and alternative options.

There is nothing wrong with celebrating a future. Hope? Yeah, people battling infertility know of hope intimately. But at some point, even we hopeful parents are tired of sex being formulaic. We’re tired of counting the dates, monitoring our bodies like machines, and wondering what’s next. We’re tired of explaining to acquaintances what we’ve barely spoken of to family. The pain increases with each conversation, because each reminds us that the vision we carry for our family is not a reality for us.

So the next time you have an inclination to ask that childless couple you’ve known since college about their sex life, make it a point to ask about their dreams instead. Give them a chance to tell you if children are on the horizon or if they’re more excited to talk about a trip to France. When we can stop assuming that all families need children to be whole, we can finally support and help the families without children remember they already are.

Mandy Capehart is a small business owner, editor, certified grief and life coach, and creator of The Restorative Grief Project. The Restorative Grief Project is an online community focusing on one another’s stories and new methodologies for grief, creating a safe environment for our souls to heal and our spirits to be revived. To learn more, visit www.MandyCapehart.com/grief or follow along with weekly columns on Ask A Grief Coach! She also thinks she is pretty funny. The jury is out.