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Do you feel alone?

Infertility Shared Stories.

Because it’s good (and easier) to talk about yourself on the web

I waited for you as something that I thought was rightfully mine. I thought that as a woman, I had the right to become a mother. But it was not so”. It is a story of infertility that is both unique and similar to many told on the web. When we talk about the birth rate decline in our country, we also need to look in the face of every “failed” mother of Fertility AMH Profile .

Economic difficulties and sense of insecurity.

But also infertility and waiting for the famous “right moment” that never comes. The reasons for the demographic winter that our country is experiencing are many and complex. The issue is serious, as evidenced by the data released during the “Natal is Future” forum.

It’s a record: 1.24 children per woman.

For the first time, fewer than 400,000 children were born in Italy in 2021. Our country is below the number of children per woman that would guarantee balance between generations, i.e. 2. Today, we are at 1.24 (in 1965, we were at 2.67). Meanwhile, this test are becoming popular as the population is decreasing and ageing visibly: in 2030, there will be 1.6 million fewer inhabitants.

Guilt

Yet, the drama is individual for a couple struggling with their desire for parenthood. Indeed, the fact that having a child is now conceivable at an increasingly advanced age weighs like a sense of guilt on those who feel like they have “missed the train” forever.

Why tell your story?

«This is why it is essential to tell your story and share your infertility story with other women who have faced the same experience. This is why Parolefertili. It was born, a story-sharing platform, to share one’s journey in search of a child”, » says Cristina Cenci, anthropologist and founder of Parole Fertile.

«Hiding the desire for a child in social, friendship and emotional networks helps to avoid representing oneself as “sterile“, sick, inferior, guilty». A load of fears, information and comparison needs, emotions and ambivalences: everything weighs on the couple. «On the contrary», continues Cenci, «between strangers with the same experience, an emotional harmony, an anonymous intimacy is created. Truly fertile words can come from them. And with them, a narrative community can be born that allows us to process what happens, step by step.”

Waiting for the “right time.”

Because in an ART and assisted fertilization process, you face very different moments: from the unspeakable desire to the enthusiastic hope that it “works”, from the anguish of waiting to the frustration of failure. To the pain of loss.

On Parole Fertili, you can read Stefy’s story, for example. “Never before have I been a woman. With this blood that treacherously flows between my legs and reminds me that I have failed. Also, this time. I have been 36 for two months, and I am one of those women who waited for “the right moment”, one of those who wanted the certainty of a house with two bedrooms, a mortgage granted, a love story that could become a life story, a job to which one dedicates more hours than necessary, almost in search of legitimation, of authorization for nine months of stand by”.

A story, as Cenci explains, contains elements common to many.

«First of all, waiting for the right moment. And that is the social times considered legitimate for a child.”

On the one hand, she expects to create the economic and emotional conditions to guarantee the child a stable home and future. If a 19-year-old girl told us she was pregnant, we would experience the news as an unexpected adversity. On the other hand, the public discourse on the birth rate weighs on the shoulders of aspiring mothers like guilt: do you reach this age and want a child? But what do you expect?

«At his age! Why did she only decide now? »

Elena writes: “I turned to specialists to understand if there were real possibilities. I was turned inside out… Expensive checks, sometimes painful, often humiliating… it’s not nice to hear: Oh ma’am, at your age… Why have you only made up your mind now?”

Also, on Parole Fertili is Manuela’s story: “I was used to living with the sense of inadequacy, that subtle, constant and somewhat bastard sensation that always makes you feel that you are not up to the task, of not being “quite something.” But this time, it was different. Exams are fast, cheap, and easy to get. Different because we grew up with the idea that having a child is the most natural and simple thing in the world. It’s not a question of being capable but of doing or not doing it. Want it or not want it? We were not ready to face a third way: not succeeding.”

Children are the culmination of adult life. And the obsession

If once, explains Cenci, children marked the entrance, especially for a woman, into adult life, today they are the culmination. What if they don’t arrive? It’s the fault of those who don’t know how to do them. But this is a social construct. A construct that also holds the individual subject, that is, every woman, in the grip of contradictory messages”, explains the anthropologist.

The obsession with looking for a child

It is a vertigo that affects the lives of many couples. Women, above all, who, during the journey, become absorbed by the journey. Even in these cases, reading the stories of others is a support: “It doesn’t free you from the obsession, but it opens up opportunities: other women have accepted that they can’t have children and have found different ways of putting their lives back together.”

The metaphor of Words is the gift of one’s life story, emotions, and how one can always feel fertile. Therefore, story sharing is one of how stories can take care: offering words to express fear and discouragement, offering meanings, inspiration, courage, strength.