The Boundaries

“I felt like I was being tortured,” I whimpered sadly.

My complaint was a search for sympathy but the psychologist did not offer any.

“Why did you stay then?” she asked gently, yet firmly.

I looked at her with surprise. Was she serious? I couldn’t just get up and leave in the middle of a dinner – or could I? The thought had never occurred to me.

“Wouldn’t that have been rude?” I asked, second-guessing myself.

“No one forced you to be there,” she replied firmly again and confirmed my suspicions that she was NOT going to indulge my search for sympathy: she was forcing me to take 100% responsibility for my life.

I had gone out for a friend’s birthday dinner and had unfortunately sat at the end of the table with several girls that I didn’t actually know.

Their entire dinner conversation revolved around (what appeared to me as) their ‘perfect’ home lives: they were the classic upper middle class women with big diamond rings, good jobs and ‘2.5 children’.

“Are you going to have a third child?” they asked each other, “I always imagined that you would have three,” they laughed as they regaled memories of their earlier years together.

“I don’t know,” one said, “Life is really good with just the two right now.”

The others nodded in agreement. “Yea, two is really good. Besides, we’ll probably need to get a new car if we have a third.”

They talked about parties and schools and holidays and their future plans.

I felt like I wanted to vomit.

I wasn’t angry with them for talking about their children for the ENTIRE dinner: I was angry at myself for being tortured by it – and I wanted sympathy from my psychologist, but she wasn’t giving it to me.

“You should have gotten up and left. If you felt like you were being tortured then you did NOT have to continue to expose yourself to those triggers,” she reinforced again.

I was speechless.

Taking 100% responsibility for your life is one of the hardest things one can do, and yet it will revolutionise your entire existence.

We then discussed baby showers.

“No more.” she stated firmly.

I gulped. I didn’t want to offend people.

“If they are your real friends, then they will understand. And if they are not, then you do not want them in your life,” her firmness would not wain.

I gulped again.

I was terrible at saying no. I was terrible at self-care. I was terrible at setting boundaries. I cared too much about what people thought of me.

In Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Big Magic she quotes a creative and powerful woman who offered her up some life wisdom when she was in her insecure twenties.

We spend our twenties and thirties trying so hard to be perfect, because we’re so worried about what other people will think of us. Then we get into our forties and fifties, and we finally start to be free, because we decide that we don’t give a damn what anyone thinks of us. But you won’t be completely free until you reach your sixties and seventies, when you finally realize this liberating truth – nobody was ever thinking about you, anyhow.

I know my personality type is in part responsible for how much I care about other people caring, but the truth is this – boundaries are learned.

You learn them from your parents at a very early age, and then you live out those boundaries (or lack thereof) unconsciously for the rest of your life until you are hit with a crisis that forces you to reassess your mindless zombie-like existence where you live out your programming without ever asking why you even have that programming in the first place.

But here is the amazing thing – you CAN change your programming, it just takes A LOT of hard work.

During that session I made a commitment to start setting healthy boundaries, for the realisation dawned on me that I would not survive this journey if I didn’t – at least not with my soul intact – but I could not have predicted how HARD this was actually going to be.

The next session with the psychologist found me in tears.

“I never imagined that I would be in this situation,” I said, as tears streamed down my face. “The grief from infertility is bad enough, but I NEVER imagined that on top of that I would be grieving the loss of friendships.”

I felt like my broken heart was on fire. It hurt so much.

I had set some boundaries with friends and they had gotten “offended”. I was so hurt that I could barely breathe. Could they not see how broken and fragile Jarod and I were?

I was so angry that happy people, full of hope and excitement about their future, were offended by the boundaries that we set amidst our suffering. All we were doing was avoiding triggers (like that girls’ dinner or a baby shower) so that we could conserve our depleted emotional energy for another torturous round of IVF.

They were taking our boundaries as a personal attack on them and they were offended by our pain, offended by our behaviour, offended by our suffering, and offended by our boundaries.

A few of them never spoken to us again and I had to GRIEVE the loss of those friendships, though I didn’t actually have a single ounce of extra energy to invest in that emotional process as it was. I felt like I was going to faint from the emotional exhaustion – I couldn’t possibly take any more.

The psychologist assured me that those friendships never held much depth in the first place.

“Those friendships were bound to end eventually,” she assured me again, “but your crisis tested the friendships and brought it to an end sooner rather than later.”

I knew she was right, but this was another aspect of this complicated journey that I had not been prepared for.

In a book called Boundaries by Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend they state this painful truth.

Tell them NO – you will either come out with increased intimacy, or learn that there was very little to begin with.

Not only were there boundaries to be set within friendships, but my own husband set a boundary with me.

“I can’t support you anymore,” he said, “I have nothing left to give. You need to find some friends you can lean on.”

I blinked in surprise.

My emotions were conflicting.

I was proud of him for setting a boundary with me but at the same time I didn’t like it; I had leaned on him for so long.

I tested him a couple times, obviously not fully convinced by his resolve, but he proved me wrong: I lay weeping on the floor, tears of sorrow and disappointment flowing into the carpet, and I expected Jarod to comfort me, like he always did, and hold me until I stopped crying.

Instead he sat on the couch with his arms folded. In that moment I perceived him as cold and mean, though my rational side knew he was just empty.

If this journey had lasted only one or two years, our emotional capacity would have been very different – but 5 years of suffering had proved to be profoundly depleting.

I could see why people divorced in this journey. It wasn’t because they didn’t love each other, or weren’t compatible, but it could be as simple as unrealistic expectations of your partner (exhibit A – an expectation that my husband should comfort me endlessly) and the inevitable miscommunications that emerge from just being the opposite sex (not even touching on personality types here).

And of course, there also is the complicated reality that we all express grief differently. We have a special “allowance” for ourselves and our irrational behaviour but easily take offence to our partner and their behaviour. It’s supremely hypocritical, but we all do it.

So I swallowed my pride and tried to not be offended by my ‘cold’ husband.

“I can’t support you,” he reiterated, arms still folded ‘coldly’ across his chest.

This time I knew he meant it.

So I reached out to 7 women who were going through infertility: we caught up over coffee and discussed the frustrations and disappointments of this journey. It was so nice to talk to people who “just got it”.

You didn’t have to try to explain what it felt like – you could just debrief.

At first I was grateful that my husband set this boundary with me; it forced me to find support elsewhere, but unfortunately it didn’t last.

My psychologist had once mused that “support groups for infertility” were difficult and complicated – this was not an understatement.

Each woman’s journey is so different; their diagnosis different; their timeline different; their treatments different; even when you connect with them you’re not sure how long the support will last.

Sometimes connecting with other women makes things better, but sometimes it just makes things worse.

Within a few months ALL seven of these women had achieved pregnancy – their journeys so much shorter than mine. It was so hard not to compare. I was thrilled for them, but once again I’d lost my entire support system.

“What’s wrong with me????” I would scream into my pillow. “Why can’t I get pregnant, but they can?????”

Comparison is the thief of joy

Yes, I know this.

I’ve spent years working on this.

This journey is hard enough and comparing yourself to others makes it ten times worse, and yet I couldn’t help myself.

But once again the ISOLATION of this journey encompassed me: I felt so hopeless.

In my state of disappointment and desperation I vowed to no longer reach out to anyone ever again. I decided it was just too hard to watch everyone else have success over and over and over again – like a slap in the face – leaving me behind to ponder my ‘failures’ and wallow in my grief.

Whether this was a “healthy” boundary or not, I wasn’t sure. But I was navigating complicated territory (without a map) and, once again, I needed to do whatever was necessary to survive this journey.