Infertility

I was standing in Rajalakshmi’s home in Visakhapatnam, India. She had just finished showing us each of the three rooms in her house and we had ended in the kitchen. In a moment of unrestrained curiosity I asked her, “How many children do you have?” In her broken English and in the accent that I love and miss she replied simply, 

“For me no children.” 

For some reason her words struck me deeply. “For me no children,” continued to run through my mind. A Westerner laden with modern family attitudes could have easily interpreted her answer to mean, “As for myself, I didn’t want children.” But I can tell you with certainty that that was not what she was saying. She meant, “For me, there were no children. For me, there are no children. No children came, for me.” From the look in her eyes I could feel that this was not something that was planned. I felt certain that she and her husband must have dealt with infertility. It would not have been proper in her culture to explain these things to me in detail. 

From the moment she said, “For me no children,” I felt sad for her and all women who experience infertility. Rajalakshmi is an educated Brahmin woman. Her husband is a priest and you can usually find him napping in front of the TV most afternoons. I wondered what “no children,” would be like in her life. A life that is particularly full of the expectation to have children. She is a brave woman. Almost every time she saw me she would gesture to my belly with her silly/mischievous grin and say, “How is your baby?” 

I don’t have anything profound to say about this experience. But for some reason, the phrase, “for me no children,” is something I have reflected on again and again. It continues to run through my mind as the symbol of what all women with infertility must go through. There are emotions and experiences behind that phrase that I know nothing about. But I have sympathy.