A Family and Infertility

Men. Women. Are we really all that different? If we are, or aren't, why does it even matter? We have all heard the sayings that male and female brains are wired differently. This is in fact true. Men have more gray matter in their brains and women have more white matter. Gray matter helps the men to be able to hyper focus on one task at a time and the white matter helps women to move between many tasks very quickly at a time. This can cause complications in a marriage. Men's mind are storages for boxes, and everything has a box and they can only open and look at one box at a time. Women are often compared to a ball of wire where everything is connected to everything, and they can go back and forth between everything without putting something else away. This difference in thinking can cause a husband and a wife to argue and become frustrated with one another. This can make it difficult to communicate about how you are feeling and knowing that you are being understood. When a cou...

Money, money, money.  Its quite an important thing but can cause such heartache at the same time. Money in a family can really change the way a family functions and interacts within itself. We often assume that families who do not have a lot of money struggle more than families who do have a lot of money. This is true in many cases.  Typically families who have a low SES, or socioeconomic status, are more at risk for certain things than others. Low income families typically do not have access to same opportunities than high income families. This can mean better opportunity for schooling and education or maybe even more connections to people to help you climb up that ladder of success.  Money truly does dictate many things in our lives and can almost make or break us.  When wanting to start a family a lot of people will consider their financial state and they will make a decision on whether they think they can afford to have a child so that they can insure that the ch...

Boundaries. What are they and why do they matter? Salvador Minuchin developed a way of communicating what he was observing about families. He created symbols and a way of drawing out the relationships between families. He observed mainly three types of boundaries. The first one was rigid boundaries where little was shared between systems. The next type that he observed was Permeable or clear. This is where a healthy amount of information sharing is going on between the systems. And the last one is poor or unclear boundaries where too much information is shared between systems.  This can be explained by this picture of houses.  The house with the blue walls up around it represents the rigid boundaries. Not much can get in or out of those boundaries. The house in the middle represents the unclear boundaries where information can freely leave and there is really no containing it. The house with the green boundaries represents the clear boundaries and this is where some informatio...

There is more science involved in families than I think we care to admit. Recently I have been learning a lot about family science. I have discovered trends, data, biases, theories... and the list continues. Family is such a personal and emotional word and unit that it can be difficult to look at the science behind it. When a couple is struggling with infertility, science is really the only thing they can think about. They might ask themselves things like, Am I taking enough vitamins? How do I calculate ovulation? When does implantation happen? What diet should I be on to increase chances of pregnancy? And many other questions will always be running through their brains. Science surrounds us in our every day lives and most of the time we don't even realize it.  When taking about family science specifically it is important to make sure that it is good science. It is so easy to find an article or study that is falsified or reported incorrectly. It is difficult to sift through all the...

  Hi, my name is Makayla Andrus. For couples struggling with infertility it can be hard to define or determine what a family is or what it means to them. For the last 18 months my husband I have personally felt this pain and struggle. I write to bring answers and comfort to those facing these same or similar challenges.