Our Fertility Expectations Start When We Are Very Young
As a little girl, I played with my friends; playing the same game that children in lots of other countries loved to play. Happy families. We were so eager to grow up and become parents, and we were often in a rush to stop being children, so that we could be the parents. It was a fundamental expectation of growing up. We were training from an early age to become parents and grown-ups. In fact the two roles seemed to go naturally hand in hand.
I often played the role of Mummy in our make-believe family, or else the role of a healthy, happy child, if I couldn’t get the role of Mummy. And when we didn’t play with each other, us little girls would play with our dolls, learning how to take care of a doll; practicing for when we would become Mums.
So we had our make-believe life firmly rooted in how we “just knew” our life would be when we grew up to be parents/adults. It was fun and it was exciting, acting out what we were sure we would become in a good few years time. Years that seemed too far away to contain the thrill and excitement of what lay ahead.
The birth of a younger sibling to one of my friends’ mothers was an occasion that was truly marvellous. I guess the first time I remember this I was around 4 or 5 years old. I was an only child with, surprisingly enough, no siblings-such is the condition of the only child! For me, my friend’s mother was this wonderful person who gave me the opportunity to see how I would change a nappy and breastfeed when I was a mother myself.
Family And Our Fertility Conditioning
Having a family is deep rooted conditioning that we carry with us from an exceptionally early age. Most of us never doubt that we will become parents. Most of us expect that this is some type of automatic right, but as more and more people have experienced, it is not.
Anyone who has gone through any question marks or complications regarding their fertility knows that it is a huge issue. It is a massive issue, not only because most we want and expect to be able to have our own genetic family, without the intrusion of strangers, however well qualified and kind, but also as fertility lies at the core of the creation of life.
Our Fertility And Survival
As human beings our biggest concern is survival. To survive we need fertility both reproductively and in nature. On a subconscious level I believe we have not forgotten this, so in addition to the trauma, shock and disappointment of not being able to conceive naturally or have a healthy pregnancy without miscarrying, we have even deeper almost inexplicable feelings.