Jeeze, Cary's column certainly is a lightning rod for the spiteful nasty self involved people of this world.

as an infertile woman, i feel many of the same jealousies that this writer mentions - how unfair it can feel to see people having children who don't want them, don't love them, or don't care that not being able to have kids can feel corrosive to the soul. i once started bawling crying when watching the parent trap with my niece, crying because there were two lindsey lohans on the screen as though it were a metaphor for the children i didn't have: i want only one! is that too much to ask?

but at some point, after the negotiations with all supernatural elements, confrontations with medical gatekeepers and experimentations with my own body's chemistry, i'd like to say that a clarity came. but it doesn't. it isn't fair. but what has helped - at least for me - is to begin to see that having children is not a reward, it's not a morality play produced for your pleasure. it's just trying to reinterpret what it means to be a parent. it's opening your life and love to things you'd never thought you would. (and this comes after my body feels like it's been "opened" by far more doctors than i thought it ever would). it's seeing that someone else having a kid is just that: their kid.

and, for me, i got tired of the crying and the sadness and the envy and thought, well, maybe my kid is already here, already born or on the way. it's been hard trying to redefine what a parent is, but we did it. whether through adoption, surrogates or fostering, being a parent comes in many different forms. i don't know if there's a such thing as fate or wishing that people get exactly what they want (sounds like the curse: may you live in interesting times). but we'll be parents, just not like we thought. and that's not so bad.

As the author of the letter notes herself, she is far too familiar with the problem of too many children on this planet that are unwanted. I'm unclear why she cannot adopt one of these and help just a bit to remove the burden from an already overly populated place. Any animal can give birth. That doesn't make it a parent. The parenting comes in caring about the person and bring him or her up. Why is this not a viable option here?

Jeeze, Cary's column certainly is a lightning rod for the spiteful nasty self involved people of this world.

...and it's so unfair, when you clearly have such a giving, generous heart.

I'm under the impression that the author thinks the sister-in-law is pregnant, but there's been no formal announcement. Maybe it's not the blessing she thinks it is for this person. The author does want a child, and is in a happy, stable, committed relationship. But if the other couple's relationship is as unstable and unhappy as it sounds, this might be the very worst time for the sister-in-law to become pregnant. What are her choices? Get divorced and raise the baby alone; stay in an unhappy relationship for the sake of a child who hasn't even arrived yet; maybe she'll even feel she should get an abortion, which, no matter how pro-choice you are, I understand is a physically and emotionally difficult experience. It's a shame that the author is unable to have children, but that doesn't mean that every woman who gets knocked up is happy about it.

Oh yes, god forbid that she should be WHITE BREAD! and military! and have "bad politics" (which I imagine means simply that she disagrees with the letter writer, who is oh-so-enlightened).

"They have in the not-too-distant past fought so bitterly in front of me and my husband that they left our company saying they were about to get divorced. So how come she gets to have it so easy?"

So her biggest complaint is that this woman's life is miserable with her unhappy marriage, and now she has it "so easy"? Where is she getting the idea that bringing a child into a 'nasty' marriage is 'easy'?

Reading between the lines, Green Eyes' bitterness seems to derive less from the fact that she cannot get pregnant and more from the reality that her "white bread" sister-in-law beat her to it. Is she jealous that "White Bread" will be producing the first grandchild, with all the attendant excitement and importance of such an event in a family, and that her eventual offspring will always be second? Is it just competitiveness? Describing her sister-in-law as "white bread" gives me pause: What kind of loaf is Green Eyes? Is her background so different ethnically or culturally that that alone could inspire a rivalry with her sister-in-law because she feels less valued in the the extended family? Or does she always dislike people because they are different from her?

But for whatever reason she feels this way about "White Bread," she should try to get over it. Green Eyes wants to bring a child into the world, and "White Bread" will be that child's aunt, "White Bread's" child that child's cousin. Family is priceless.

Also, a hospital emergency room is not necessarily the best site to judge who is an unfit parent or who has too many children-- neither, as I should remind myself later today while Christmas shopping, is a department store.

Wow. Has nobody else felt that they deserved something far more than somebody else did? God knows I have - and for far less heartbreaking reasons than having trouble getting pregnant. Green Eyes - I believe you when you say your sister-in-law is tedious and horrible. It's okay to be jealous and outraged that you're having trouble getting pregnant when you want to so badly when it seems to come easily to other women, *especially* a woman you have trouble being around to begin with. Don't beat up on yourself about it and just try to keep your eye on the ball and seek comfort in friends you relate to and in your husband. Just see it for what it is - an extension of the painful feeling of wanting something really, really, really badly and not getting it or having to wait for it.

I would feel exactly the same way.