Kimberly Schaye's essay on struggling to conceive, "Watching for Rhinos," is now live over at The Fertile Source. Here she talks a little more about infertility, heartbreak, and the ironies of conception.

1) For women who don't want children, or who have never had a problem conceiving, it can be difficult to understand the pain and heartbreak associated with infertility. Can you talk a little bit about it?

I think the heartbreak comes from the fact that you go into it with so much hope. At first it doesn’t even occur to you that something thousands of women do every day – give birth – might not be an option for you. When it starts to dawn on you that something might be wrong, it’s scary. When the cause of my problem couldn’t be pin-pointed right away, I felt scared, sad and confused -- and I had no idea how or when it would end.

2) How long did you struggle with infertility? What helped you cope with it and what would you have done if you hadn't been successful in conceiving a child?

My husband and I tried for a year without medical help and then a year going through all the treatments. It’s so important to find professionals whom you trust on a gut level. I was lucky to find people like that. Connecting with other women in the same situation is also crucial. And, you have to find a way not to live and breathe it every minute of every day, but that is so hard.

I’d like to believe that had I not been able to bear children, I would have eventually chosen to adopt and stayed the course with another long, emotional and uncertain process. But truthfully, there’s no way to know. I think I would have had a lot to work through before moving forward.

3) What led you to write about your experience?

In 2003 I wrote a memoir with my husband about leaving New York City to start a farm in a rural part of New York State. In an early draft, I mentioned that we wanted to have children but weren’t having any luck conceiving. My editor wanted me to go a little deeper into the subject. I was reluctant at first, I think because so much of the book is very funny and I didn’t want to introduce a topic that could bring down the mood. But she correctly saw that the book wasn’t just a humorous account of two urbanites trying to farm, but also an introspective account of making positive life changes. Viewed in that context, it made sense to describe our fertility quest. Also, during this time our daughter Samantha started to become a very verbal toddler and I would write down things she said that I found particularly amusing. One day I was re-reading that little notebook of baby witticisms and when I got to the rhinoceros comment, this piece just sort of poured out.

4) Have you found any literary works (novels, short stories, poems) that deal with infertility that you could recommend?

I am a memoir junkie, so the first book that pops into my head is Ruth Reichl’s Comfort Me with Apples. She really captures the hope, pain and even humiliation that can be part of being a fertility patient. At one point she describes sitting in a clinic full of women who are all being kept waiting past their crack-of-dawn appointment times. “By nine A.M. the air in the waiting room had become a thick cloud of rage,” she writes. And it’s true -- there are things that could make you just want to scream! Then there are things that make you laugh with disbelief. Like enduring all these drugs and procedures and then getting pregnant by accident. It happened to Reichl and it happened to me – when my first baby was only seven months old.