When I look at photos of the Obama family, my heart aches. It’s not about Barack and Michelle, as lovely as they are. And it has nothing to do with politics, or the history that could be made if a black man is elected president of the U.S.

It’s the kids. Malia and Sasha.

Little black girls, who look like and plainly adore their mother and father. I want them. I really, really want them. But my chance of having a little girl diminishes by the day. I’m one of the thousands of black women in America who are, for all practical purposes, infertile.

You know, barren. Unproductive.

Dried up. Useless. Or whatever term you prefer to use.

It is again National Infertility Awareness Week, and like most women in this position, I’m still a little shocked that I actually, you know, care. When my husband, Eric, and I married in 2002, I was still in my late 20s and not terribly excited about the prospect of becoming a parent. Eric and I had a hazy idea that we wanted two, or maybe even three, kids, but since neither of us had really wrapped our minds around what it would mean to be somebody’s parents, we realized we weren’t quite ready. We agreed to put off trying to conceive for a year.


When the year was up, we tried to get pregnant. It was fun trying, but it didn’t work. After seven or eight months, I started to worry. When a year had passed, I spoke to my doctor. Her advice: Relax. So I did, for another year. When nothing happened, I went to another doctor, who put me on the course I’ve been off and on for the past four years and through several other doctors: medicine, repeated appointments and needles. Oh, the needles.

I’ve been tested and poked and prodded in ways I didn’t know it was possible to be tested. My gracious and amazing husband, too (he’s fine, by the way; I’m the one with the medical issues).

These days, I marvel at how the ambivalence I had about motherhood in my 20s has transformed into very nearly an all-consuming desire now that I’m in my 30s. It has taken not being able to have a child for me to realize how much I value motherhood and want to be a mom.

For a long time, as I simultaneously wallowed in sadness about my inability to have kids and refused to talk about it with anyone who wasn’t my husband, parents or doctor, I thought I was very nearly the only infertile black woman on Earth.

Then I realized that black women suffering with infertility — not the childless-by-choice crew, but those of us who genuinely want children and can’t have them — are hiding in plain sight.

No, I mean it. Look closely. You know us.

We’re aunts, cousins, godmothers, nieces, sisters, daughters and good friends. We’re even there for the kids in our lives.

On the other hand, we’re also the ones who really don’t want to discuss our own reproductive plans with the world. Sometimes it seems that we’re eager to talk about your kids, but at other times we seem cold because we change the subject (it’s not you, it’s just that it’s too painful to think about). We’re likely to roll our eyes when someone tells us to relax and we’ll get pregnant, or dig our fingernails into our palms hard enough to nearly draw blood when someone asks whether we’ve heard of this herb or that sexual position.

No matter what, we’re unlikely to mention what’s on our minds.

I guess that’s really it, isn’t it? We don’t talk about it.

Look, I’m well aware that I’m luckier than a lot of women. I’ve been blessed with both health insurance and the financial wherewithal to afford fertility treatments that seem straight out of science fiction.

But on my countless trips to the reproductive endocrinologist, I’ve noticed that my husband and I stand out because we are usually the only black couple in the waiting room. Oddly, it feels as though that very conspicuousness in the infertile community often makes me invisible. White women who are infertile sometimes seem insensitive, as I’ve mentioned before, when they joke about crack-addict welfare moms (this reads to me as dangerously close to a slam on poor black moms) who, it is implied, don’t “deserve” to have children. At least they’re willing to talk to me, though.

On the rare occasions when there are other black women in or near the office, they don’t meet my eyes or respond to my conversational gambits — as though it would hurt to acknowledge our common “shame.” That makes me uncomfortable, because it seems representative of the lack of conversation about infertility and what it means to black women.

That’s why it’s very important to me that books describing black women who want children take infertility seriously. Tayari Jones did it right. So did Bettye Griffin. Gwynne Forster did it wrong, as do a lot of authors who use magically arriving babies as plot devices.

It’s also important to me that black women suffering with infertility stop hiding and actually talk about their experiences and feelings.

And it’s especially important to me that women are aware of their own bodies. If you know a woman who wants children one day and doesn’t own Taking Charge of Your Fertility, buy it for her.

We should have the language to talk about adult black women — who are stereotypically hypersexual and hyperfertile — who want kids. We should be able to acknowledge the pain of infertility. It is, after all, just another piece of the puzzle of who we are.

We also should do some of the tough work Rebecca Walker did in her excellent book, Baby Love, in exploring her relationship with her own mother and trying to determine how it would affect her as a mother.

We should be able to talk about why we want children.

Yes, I know that adoption is an option. There are thousands of children in this country and across the globe who need good homes. I’ve given that angle some consideration. Some adoption agencies nearly foam at the mouth with excitement when I mention that my husband and I are a black couple who may be interested in adopting a black child.

We still haven’t been able to pull the trigger on that.

But we’re getting there.

One way or another, I’ll have a Malia and Sasha (or Malik and Samuel) of my own.

More reading on infertility:
Resolve: The National Infertility Association
Stirrup Queens and Sperm Palace Jesters
Life from Here
Life After Infertility and Loss
Divine Secrets of the Infertility Secrethood

*Photo of the Obama family from the Obama campaign, NIAW logo from Resolve