The expression “a picture is worth a thousand words” has pretty much worn itself out.
Tonight I was comforting Elliana on her first full day of fifth grade and her first ‘point ballet’ lesson because she not only lost her pins and buns that Lisa just bought her this afternoon, but also managed to lose her Ipod (despite being given specific instructions not to bring it because she has no breaks in her dance schedule this year).
I was struggling with what to write about when this popped into my head:
“One word that’s worth a thousand pictures.”
I knew right away what that word is.
Baby.
Maybe it was sifting through hundreds of pictures of my little grandma’s 104 year life, or how quickly my uncles noticed photos of themselves as infants during the slideshows we watched for most of Saturday night.
Just the word ‘baby’ fills my head with pictures.
As the parent of an IVF baby, not all of those pictures are happy.
In fact, six years worth of them were on many occasions awful.
Baby was a word that meant pictures of other people’s kids on a fridge that longed for a picture of our child.
Or a word that brought memories of video screens filled with embryos that never made it to a positive beta.
After we lost Dublin to miscarriage, ‘baby’ was a word synonymous with grief and loss and things that weren’t meant to be.
Baby was what our furry Pomeranian Sandy was when we started bringing him to family events and celebrations to kiss his furry little head when everyone around us was having a human baby before us.
I wish there was a way to record the visions that infertile couples have in their heads–the pictures they see whenever they hear the word baby.
I have pictures in my head of so many ‘baby’ stories from so many support group meetings.
They represent some of the most touching, heartfelt, tragic and euphoric moments in the ongoing infertility saga, yet they rarely are done justice when portrayed on the big screens of Hollywood.
Maybe that’s because the pictures are so deeply personal to each couple.
The pictures look like a horror story one day, turn into a mystery the next day, and become comedy in a heartbeat.
When the pictures actually come of the couples that get to meet their babies, you have to have a box of Kleenex nearby because you know it’s gonna be a tearjerker.
Maybe that’s what needs to be conveyed to the political powers that be, who are always so eager for a ‘photo op’.
Helping the infertile community by easing some of the burden of infertility treatments would be well worth their efforts.
Because for every infertile couple, ‘baby’ is one word that’s worth a thousand pictures.