First and foremost, remember that you are a real person.

It's so easy these days to think that we are owed certain things by life. If you play the Sims, if you watch movies, even if you just simply interact with other people, it is assumed, for some reason, that your life will be like the "norm." You WILL get married. You WILL have babies.

But what happens when this choice is taken away from you? For me, it made me feel like I was not a "real" human being. This was not something real people, regular people, had to deal with. They thought about babies and babies appeared, like magic.

The fact of the matter is that life is not "supposed" to do anything. I always thought that if I got married, both of my parents would be there, but I've known several people who have gotten married, sadly, and one or both of their parents had passed. I thought that part of getting pregnant would be going through it with my mom, but life is not obligated to you.

Ironically, it was a scene from a movie that helped crystallize this for me at first. There is a scene in A Beautiful Mind where Russell Crowe's character proposes in a very abstract way. Jennifer Connelly's character says pauses and says that she has to deal with the present and sort of scoot away from her childhood fantasies of what a proposal would be like. She was given a prism, not a ring. Did that make it any less worthwhile?

Having children is not necessarily something we dream about. Or at least I didn't. I just assumed. But a diagnosis of infertility does not make you less of a person, no more so than a person who is blind or deaf. Despite what I thought for many years, people who struggle with infertility are not among the most cursed either. It is just dealing with life as it is, not as we think it should be. There are people who assumed they would always have a home. There are people who assumed they'd always be able to put food on the table. Life keeps us guessing, and whether or not you have kids is just another example. Just because it's easy in the movies doesn't mean you're less of a person if it's not easy for you.