Adapted from: Wrestling Through Adversity

As I look out through the back window of my home, I see a harbinger of spring—a bright red cardinal perched high up on a large evergreen branch. He is chirping loudly and seems to be singing a happy tune now that springtime is finally here. I notice that a mama house sparrow is scurrying around my deck and is making her nest underneath it for her new  fledglings soon to arrive. Springtime is in the air, and I am breathing it in with delight. Through my kitchen window, I see a tree with red maple leaves beginning to bloom, like clockwork, and this renewal gives me hope.

Just as this event occurs in nature with the birds and the bees in springtime, it is a topic of discussion that begins annually during National Infertility Awareness Week on April 20^th to April 26, 2025. This is an important time set aside by RESOLVE, the National Infertility Association, which is an advocacy group that provides free support for those who experience the stigma of infertility and helps them to find their voices and talk about what hindrances they are facing. These conversations assist couples to naturally rebalance and to become self-aware in body, mind, and spirit, for it is to their benefit when they are challenged with infertility during their family building journey.

For girls, fertility awareness starts at Menarche

Today, girls, some as young as eight or ten years of age, become aware of their fertility early on at Menarche. I think most women can recall their first period, how they felt, what they thought, and how they got through it. For me, I was a late bloomer at 14 and woke up early on a Sunday morning with abdominal cramps and noticed I was bleeding vaginally. My mother and older sisters were not home, so I climbed up on a chair to get a sanitary napkin down from my mom’s closet, pinned it to my underwear, and proceeded to go to a church service. While there I began to vomit, and my friend graciously took me under her wing to her nearby home and cared for me. I thought I was prepared for this right-of-passage, but I quickly learned I wasn’t.

My procreative journey

At 27 my husband and I began to discuss how we would start on the journey to build a family. I did not expect the process of becoming pregnant and having a baby to be too challenging, for as a student nurse, I spent time in the labor and delivery room, the hospital nursery, and the maternity unit, and I believed I knew how to handle any eventuality that could occur, but I was wrong.

Within a month or so, I became pregnant and seemingly had little difficulty with conceiving a baby, that is, until I experienced four miscarriages and was diagnosed with unexplained infertility— which means, essentially, my doctors did not know why I was not able to carry a viable baby full term. Even as a professional nurse working in healthcare, I did not understand what this diagnosis meant as was conceived by doctors in the medical model, but I recall, as I look back to those years of infertility, how it felt as a woman.

Miscarriages of justice

The first miscarriage occurred in the South Bronx when I worked as a visiting nurse, and I aborted in the lobby bathroom of an assisted care facility for seniors after a skiing accident took place on an icy patch the previous week. Afterwards, I went about my business of visiting my patients and never told anyone about it, not even my husband. The reason for this was that I felt ashamed because, as a nurse, I should have known that I might be pregnant. This was before home pregnancy tests were available. See my video below that tells the story of my first miscarriage.

I remember the pain and torture of the second miscarriage and my frightening and lonely trip home from work on the NYC subway, while cramping and bleeding. After aborting later at home in my bathroom, my husband drove me to a maternity hospital, where I had the standard procedure of a D&C (dilatation & curettage) to remove remaining fetal tissue. I recall the tears I had when a woman asked me in the bathroom the next morning if I had a girl or a boy, and I told her my baby died. She did not know what to say. Neither did I.

With the third miscarriage, I bled on my mattress in my bedroom while house guests were eating dinner in my kitchen. The doctors began to label me an “Habitual Aborter.” After this, I took a long drive alone to a Long Island GYN physician for consultation. He told me—while I was in a  vulnerable position with my legs in stirrups on the exam table—that I had no hope of producing a viable baby, except if I took a toxic prescription drug called Diethylstilbestrol (DES) when he knew it could give me and my babies cancer.

I threw the prescription in the trash and did not take DES, because of my medical research, but felt the stigma of shame in public when friends and family did not know what to say to me during baby showers or holiday celebrations. People said it was God’s will that my babies were spontaneously aborted, and for years, with my Catholic background, I felt that the miscarriages were my fault and something I had done to cause them.

Some years later a fourth miscarriage occurred. At that time, the ER GYN doctor claimed I was not pregnant upon examination while saying my perceived pregnancy was a figment of my imagination. He said I was just having a bad period. “Women discharge large pieces of tissue all the time,” he posited. That is, until I aborted a notably sized fetus into the bloodied toilet water the next day, and the lab results found “products of conception.”

What bothered me most about this miscarriage was that the male doctor did not honor me with having knowledge of my body or give me credit for my expertise as a professional nurse who had three prior miscarriages. I felt insulted when he did not listen to my needs and my pain. The lab techs threw my baby in the trash before asking if it was okay to do so—that is, before I could baptize it.

How does infertility feel?

If it weren’t for my poem below that I wrote, no words could have captured how empty I felt at that time when I was told I was “infertile.”

 “Emptiness”  

I am an egg without a yolk—
A bloated sponge left out to soak.
I am a circle with a gaping hole.
Inside my body, I have no soul.
I am steam in a pot without a vent,
Waiting to explode, my energy spent.
I am a beach of eroding sand,
There’s no buoy I can grasp by hand.
I am a violin without a string,
With no music, no song, no anything.
I am just a fragile, broken shell,
Writing in pain, with no one to tell.
For what purpose do I survive?
How do I manage to stay alive?
I spend the day in heartfelt prayer,
Hoping that somehow God will hear.
And flood my empty well left shallow,
And fill my lifeless field left fallow.

My plans for support went up in smoke

As a reader you can feel my desperation in my poem, but unlike today, at the time of my miscarriages in the 20^th century, there were no known groups like RESOLVE  that I knew of  to help me through this difficult period. Back then, I asked for assistance from a social worker who directed me to group therapy sessions where members were both males and females, but none had ever experienced miscarriage. The only memorable moment was when the psychologist asked us how we felt about his smoking in session in an enclosed, unvented therapy room, so, I knew I had to achieve success alone that was smoke-free!

What your mind can conceive, you can achieve!

Perhaps you will gain some insight into your fertility journey by reading this blog and my poem—that won an honorable mention in a poetry contest—even though your challenge is different than mine in that you are having difficulty conceiving or you have a diagnosis of endometriosis or polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) that can cause infertility. However, whatever your infertility challenges are and no matter how long you’ve had them, there is hope when you develop what I call an “Expectant Mind” by using your Mind Power that is innate within you and by believing in yourself.

Go forth and bloom

During my fertility challenges while wrestling through adversity, I had to learn important lessons, such as how to honor myself as a woman and how to trust and forgive myself through fertility consciousness.

In Part Two of this series on “Fertility Enhancement Coaching,” I will begin to tell you my story of how I succeeded in reaching my family building goals, even though I was a late bloomer. I welcome you as members of our fertile-minded community because “great minds think alike.”

To learn more about my personal fertility journey, read or listen to my book: Wrestling Through Aversity: Empowering Children, Teens, & Young Adults to Win in Life, available on Amazon. Detailed information about the contents of my book can be found on my website drchristinesilverstein.com

You can learn about my holistic program for helping women overcome fertility issues by visiting the Metamorphosis: Fertility Enhancement Coaching page on my website, idealperformance.net.

I welcome you to my YouTube channel, The Young Navigator to hear me discuss my views on the mental health crisis of our young people and what to do to empower them.

I invite you to follow me on my Facebook page, The Summit Center for Ideal Performance.