Part 2: adoption as one way off the Island of Infertility

Melissa Ford, author

Part 1 of this interview can be found here.  This is the second of four parts.

Many people who consider open adoption do so after enduring infertility. Below is an excerpt from an interview with Melissa Ford, author of Navigating the Land of IF: Understanding Infertility and Exploring Your Options. She likens infertility to an island, with neighborhoods such as fertility treatments, donor gametes, adoption, and living childfree.

Everyone gets off the island eventually, one way or another. What neighborhoods did you hang out in and what was your path off the island?
It's an interesting question because I had the neighbourhood I lived in (and most of us only own one home), but many neighbourhoods that I visited due to friends or family members living in other spaces. Many of my childhood friends ended up going through infertility with me, and, of course, I met people along the way through Resolve and now blogs.

In addition, I think the way off the island is really an emotional journey. You can have children and still not resolve your infertility or you can stop the family building process and still not resolve your infertility. There is a saying with Resolve that children resolve childlessness, not infertility. And I find that to be very true.

So my path off the island was a lot of self-searching and finding peace with the journey. But my neighbourhoods while on the island (and I'm still living over here because we're not finished with our family building) were primary infertility and early loss, with our apartment building being the Injectable IUI Cycle Towers.

When did it first strike you to write the Land of If? What was that a-ha moment where you thought, "This must be written?" -- was it a sudden or gradual realization?
It actually started out as a very different book -- a book for non-infertile men and women to read to understand the infertility experience. I came downstairs one morning and my husband, Josh, was angrily writing a response to an advice columnist. He had followed an intriguing sentence from the "front page" of the online newspaper to read a question about adoption. And her advice was crap. We were talking about it with my parents that night and they said, "well, you can do something about this. You could write something. You're both writers."

I started writing that book, but realized after a chapter or two that it wasn't a good fit. It wasn't flowing and it didn't feel comfortable. I switched it to being a book for me, for my community. And that's when it clicked.

Would this book have come about if not for your blog, Stirrup Queens?
I don't know. I don't think so. I guess one thing that makes this book very different from all other infertility books is that it has this living, breathing counterpart -- the blog -- and the author is completely accessible. I tell you to join a community and vent your frustrations, but then I also participate in said community and make sure you're welcomed inside by maintaining the blogroll and Lost and Found. I hope people who read the book then step through the fourth wall that sometimes exists between the author and the reader and communicate with me, either through the blog or by emailing or meeting me at a reading.

Part 3:  fertile readers, humor amid tears
Part 4: writing sm.ut versus writing about home inseminations.