Billett Paulina - Infertility and Intimacy in an Online Community

I am sure many people are curious as to what drove us to write this book. Aside from a strong academic interest in the lives of women, there is also a deep personal motivation for us to undertake this task. In truth, we come from two very different places; one of us is childless by choice, while the other has battled with infertility since her early 30 having undergone several in vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatments and two miscarriages . Usually these two sides do not find much common ground, often regarding each other from across the fertility trenches with suspicious eyes. Yet, in reality, these two positions as childless women, in a society that venerates motherhood , share more commonalities than could have been expected.

From comparing our own stories, we learned that fertility and motherhood are neither a certainty nor a natural desire but, instead, a deeply personal struggle . We both found that the experience of not having children deeply affects the ways we see ourselves and how others see us. We realised that often our childlessness comes as a bit of a shock to those who wrongly assume that well-educated women in their 40s and 50s would surely have had the good sense to reproduce . We have also come to realise that the stereotype of womans destiny equals motherhood is still a strong narrative of western society and that the normative force of this narrative has, to some extent, coloured much of our personal adult female lives. We have often doubted our decisions and second guessed ourselves; we have struggled with the labels placed on childless women and have at times been deeply shocked by what others feel is their right to comment about what is believed to be a very personal condition.

In my case, there were two main occurrences which triggered the desire to write this book. The first was a good friend, who sought to comfort me after my first devastating miscarriage by stating that I should not be worried as, after all, smart women tend to have less children in the first place; the second was a well-meaning older student of mine who, in no uncertain terms, told me that I should consider having kids now as you know dear you dont have forever to make these decisions.

Understandably both these assertions rocked me to the core. Suddenly I began to see myself as others saw me, as somehow unnatural, defective and perhaps a little selfish. This coupled with my own sense of disappointment and the inevitable insecurity, which unsuccessful IVF treatment and miscarriages seem to produce, got me thinking about how infertility affects women at a personal levelhow this disease profoundly changes our biographies and sense of self at the deepest of levels. I began paying closer attention to the experiences being described by my infertile sisters on our online support group, and soon a pattern began to emerge. Infertility is a life altering experience, one that changes us so deeply, that even the safe arrival of children can never hope to erase. Furthermore, I became deeply conscious that many of those dealing with infertility found little comfort or understanding in the real world and instead found solace with others also struggling in online support groups, forging deep friendships that have spanned both the real and virtual worlds.