To my intense surprise, since society has trumpeted the stigma and prevalence of teenage pregnancy every week since I was 11, I wasn’t able to have children. After two cycles of IVF with no mature eggs, my husband and I got the non-diagnosis of “unexplained infertility”.
Shortly after our non-diagnosis, I went to Australia on a trip. At dinner, I was asked the usual “And do you have kids?” and rather than fudging it as is polite (although polite for whom?), I said no, we’d have loved to, but we couldn’t have them. It’s something I’ve since repeated, partly because I’ve found people often then share their own losses or thoughts, and it’s often more interesting than talking about the weather, and partly because it might make the asker think twice.
