Dear Daughter

Dear Daughter, 

My grandmother, your great grandmother, was a strong and independent women. She waited until after World War II to have your grandmother, until she was a little older and it made sense to finally begin a family. My mother, your grandmother, also waited until she had established her career and fully settled into her marriage, and then she had me. I wanted to get my doctorate before having children. I wanted to be settled in my career. I wanted to get married and enjoy being a wife before having to adjust to being a mother. I wanted to have my finances in order. Now I'm ready for you, and I've been diagnosed with infertility. 

I am in the process now of tests, procedures, and so many different drugs. Every aspect of my hormonal cycle is regulated by a different medication. They make me irritable, tearful (and you know I don't cry), and give me hot flashes. Month after month I am told that my body isn't responding to the medications, despite the changes I notice in my moods and the weight they've caused me to add. I've started to resent mothers, fertile women, pictures of children and their happy parents posted on the internet, women planning to get pregnant, and those seeming naive when they talk about their specific "plans" and "timing". I am reminded of the saying, "Man plans, and God laughs."

Some day, you will be older and in love and deciding you want to begin having a family of your own. I want you know that I have sometimes doubted my decisions to wait, to hold off on trying until I was ready, until I was a little older. I wonder to myself how things might have been different if I was a few years younger, or at least if I had known what I was in for, if it would have changed some of my decisions. 

Then I think about you and about your grandmother and great-grandmother. You come from a very long line of strong, independent, and bright women. They did not allow fear to dictate when to begin a family and they did not allow their dreams and ambitions to be altered by societal or biological pressures. You shouldn't either. My wish is that the fear I feel now, the uncertainty of infertility, is something that you will never face. But to be dictated by this fear, to allow it to stand in the way of your dreams and goals, would bring me the greatest sadness. You don't exist yet, but I love you already more than you know. 

-Your future mother