I have this friend.
Okay, I have these friends. They’re a couple, recent migrants who used to practise their English on me because I was their neighbour home all day with the young twins and, well, pretty safe to flub your tenses on.
When the common language became fluent enough (rather embarrassingly they learned my language far, far better than I have to date picked up any of their Mandarin, unless you count effusive THANK YOU’S as fluent speech) they asked.
I can’t recall exactly how it went, but clearly twins aren’t common in China. They were curious but without all of the sideways glancing and ‘do they run in your family (DID YOU DO IVF?????)’ bulldust that the locals do.
I told them the truth. All of it.
At this point, after about a year’s worth our informal cultural exchange, she told me about her miscarriage three years ago, newly arrived in a strange country without a word of the local lingo and little counselling or understanding of the process here.
She also told me she’d never been pregnant since.
They wanted help, wanted to know who to see, the words for the right kind of doctor. If there was any hope. The herbs sent from China weren’t working. Their parents were anxious.
I referred them onwards to somebody I trusted.
They got help.
Their first IVF worked.
…and then they had another early miscarriage.
We all spent hours talking it through and I explained the likely bad reproductive luck, the additional tests they could do to make sure, the normalcy of the grieving process. How awful it feels.
That it’s okay to be so sad and so stressed. To be scared of trying again.
They are trying again, now. Another fresh cycle.
…and LS keeps using them as babysitters for the twins while he dashes off to do this and that.
My memory may be faulty, but that is just Not Cool and I don’t know how he of all people doesn’t instantly get it.
It’s insensitive. He doesn’t get it.
G
January 18, 2012 at 10:23 pm
ugh. I would love to point to the inherent differences in the male brain (mainly a withered empathy area & a immature emotional center) but it ~is~ insensitive. Biology is just an excuse- experience should have taught him something!
Then again- my hub suffers from a similar lack of empathy & experience of our (minor) IF taught him none of it.
January 19, 2012 at 12:16 am
I see your dilemma. It is probably not cool. But, you have already established a relationship with them, so maybe it’s not quite as bad?
He doesn’t get it because it probably was not quite as immediately painful to him in the way it was to you. It’s a different sort of processing technique, I suppose.
January 19, 2012 at 4:44 am
Blah.
But you know, I have babies that I love and babies that I am jealous of. Perhaps the twins fall into that first category for them? You could ask?
January 20, 2012 at 2:37 pm
LS, stop being a jerk! Sounds like you’ve got a good relationship with them. Maybe you could ask them to tell you honestly if looking after your girls is at all painful for them. That you’d certainly understand if it is, and would then force LS to make other arrangements.
I hope they find success soon! So glad that you are able to give them advice and support.