An Outsider

Tomorrow I have the pleasure of attending my husband’s company picnic with him. It’s a family function. Which means spouses and kids can come. Which means I get to be around all these people who have multiple kids, usually less than a year apart in age. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with that, just that being an infertile in situations like this can be somewhat difficult.

I feel like not having kids already and with us being a military family, we get looked at like we’re some sort of other life form. Anyone who has experienced military life knows that typically young families have quite a few children. I know this from the on-post neighborhoods I have lived in, going to FRG (family readiness group) functions, and even being at the commissary seeing a young woman with 4-5 kids, usually under the age of 7, in tow.

I hate the questions sometimes I (we) get at these military functions sometimes. And they’re usually coming from someone who is currently pregnant or holding a baby or both. Fielding these questions from people you meet (or are meeting for the 2nd or 3rd time because you don’t see them often enough to remember who they are) isn’t fun. “Do you have kids?” “You’ve been married how long and don’t have any kids?” “Why don’t you have kids?” “Why don’t you have kids yet?” — like I better jump on getting pregnant so that I can catch up to these other people who have 3-4 kids already. I feel weird that we don’t have a mid-tour, pre-deployment, or post-deployment baby like most other military couples have.

What am I supposed to say to these people I hardly know? Yes, most of my husbands command know our situation because they work with him on making it to my appointments and knowing that he will need some time off when it comes time to do the IVF retrieval and transfer. Do I just come out and say, “Oh, we’ve been trying for 2 1/2 years and it just hasn’t happened yet, we’re doing IVF in a couple months.”? That’s not really my first choice of an answer, I don’t want to explain this multiple times to every person that asks. I also don’t want a ton of follow up questions about it or “helpful” advice on ways to get pregnant. I would say that I don’t want to make anyone feel uncomfortable, but how uncomfortable do you think I feel when I’ve been trying to have

So I’ll probably stick with the tried and true vague answers we typically give to strangers asking us invasive  questions: A plain and simple “Not yet.” And we’ll just stay for the minimum required time that my husband has to be there tomorrow, like we usually do with these functions.