I spent the first three weeks between learning of our diagnosis and our next doctor’s visit reading everything I could about infertility and feeling alternately hopeful and sick to my stomach.
Obviously, that is not a productive way to live a life.
We are new to our community, and I really didn’t have anything I had to do at the time, so it was easy to wallow.
Our situation is terrible and I hate what we’re going through. But today I am glad that I have accumulated a million and ten other things on my to do list for this week. All the time I will spend doing those things is time I can’t spend hyper-focused on the fact that our chances of having our own baby without miracle and ART are zero.
I generally hate being busy to the point of feeling overwhelmed, but this week I welcome it. It’s good to have something useful to do.
There’s a song I’ve sung along with countless times on the Christian station and in church. It’s “Praise You in This Storm,” by Casting Crowns. As you might have guessed, a major theme of the song is praising God even when everything in life seems to be going wrong. Before we were officially infertile, I sang this song and I believed I meant it. I thought, you know, I haven’t had many storms in this life, but I would absolutely praise God through any difficulty and hardship. No question.
Well, turns out theory isn’t always carried out in practice.
When we first found out what our issue was, we were (of course) devastated. But we thought surely it was fixable. When we found out it wasn’t fixable, I got angry. And I was angry with God. I’ve been faithful, haven’t I? I mean, intellectually, I know I don’t deserve anything, I’m not owed anything, but why would God do this to us?
Did God not say, “Be fruitful and multiply”? Did he not create man and woman in such a way as to be able to bear children? And did not God give me the desire to be a mother–give us the desire to be parents? Infertility feels like such a cruel punishment because it is like we are less than. We have been deprived of something that naturally belongs to each person. It is a dysfunction in the body that by all accounts should not happen.
And so when we pray for this miracle, for the healing we need to conceive naturally, I have a tendency to think: we are standing on firm ground here. We don’t deserve special treatment, but surely we do deserve to be whole in body, right? Like I am making my case to God. (There is a precedent for this: Job 13:15, “Though he slay me, I will hope in him; yet I will argue my ways to his face.”)
But here I find I have no ground to stand on at all. I can’t argue that I deserve anything from a God who already has given me something I absolutely did not deserve and never could earn. And if he has decided that we should deal with infertility, than I hope we will survive it in a way that glorifies him. That’s intellectual, though. I’m not sure I’ve internalized it.
I teach a Bible study to home-schooled elementary students, and I have the blessing of working with several other godly women in that venture. One of them, Ann, lost her husband four years ago. We were talking (I don’t remember the context) and she said, “I never asked God for the gift of widowhood. In fact, I didn’t want it. But it is a gift from God.” I can’t really wrap my mind around it, but I know it applies here. I know that infertility is, in some way yet unknown to me, a gift from God. I don’t want it. I’d like him to take it back today.
I do hope for a miracle. DH and I pray every night for complete healing–supernaturally or by the scientific advancements with which God has blessed us. We pray that we would be able to conceive naturally. But I also pray for contentment. I pray that infertility is something that came into our lives for a reason. I pray our infertility will glorify God.
I pray for the strength to praise him in this storm.
We moved into our house in June, and we’re just now starting to get to know people in our community. We joined a great church and found a small group of young married couples. Since we’re in Texas, it seems like everyone has kids pretty early. Most of the couples in our group have been married right around a year and the next closest couple has been married three years. One couple got married in February and is already expecting their first child. Needless to say, DH and I feel a bit old to be young and married with no kids, and we’ll have been married five years this December. Of course, we’re not old; I’m 28 and he’s 27, but I guess we’re behind schedule by Texas standards.
I feel I get asked all the time why we don’t have kids yet or when we’ll have children. I find such questions infuriating. It’s so personal anyway, and, frankly, you never know if the person you’re asking has been trying–as we have–for some time. DH jokes that next time someone asks we should point out how personal the question is by responding with something like, “I don’t know when we’ll have children, but do you want to be in the room when we conceive?” I’m not at all sure I could pull that one off, but it at least makes me smile when I think of it.
Of course, when it comes down to it, we do want to have children. We’re over a year into TTC and I thought I’d be a mom by now. The hard part is knowing when to share that and when to keep it in. When we first started TTC, we told my mom and three of my good friends. Now that we know we won’t be able to conceive without medical assistance or a miracle, I kind of wish no one knew we had been trying in the first place.
Today I had my first friend-date since we moved; I met up with a woman from our small group and we had coffee together at Starbucks. We sat outside and chatted for a couple of hours, and it was lovely to have someone to talk to. She didn’t ask the dreaded question, but we’re at that stage in life where having children seems the next logical step. I know in the past, many of the things I said today would have been peppered with “when we have kids.” Now they’re “if we have kids.” And I guess I kind of made it sound like I was indifferent either way, like, maybe we’ll decide to, maybe we won’t. I didn’t mean to do that, but I have trouble knowing how to have a normal, honest conversation about life and plans without throwing our infertility out there. And I’m not ready to let just anyone know about our infertility. Maybe someday, but not yet.
I hope my new friend didn’t find my comments too out of place or odd. She probably didn’t. I’m probably just overly conscious of this giant part of my life that is undisclosed. I’m not good at having secrets, but I’m also not ready to share.
The past two months have been depressing. I mean the can hardly get dressed in the morning, don’t mind if I miss a meal or three, overwhelming fear kind of depressing. After our initial diagnosis, we had to wait three weeks for our appointment with the RE because of DH’s work schedule. Those first three weeks were brutal. I spent most of each day researching everything I could about our diagnosis, its causes, and our options. I hoped and prayed for something fixable. I looked into all the treatment options and adoption and the ins and outs of everything. I wanted to know, right then, what plan A, B, and C were for starting our family. I had three weeks to wait. Of course, DH was processing things differently, but that’s a subject for another post.
Our first consult was so comforting. We were very optimistic. But after some further blood work and other opinions, our expectations were a bit far off the mark.
Oddly, though, today I feel peaceful. DH says the same. We were both hoping to find out something different yesterday, but we didn’t. We are still hoping that I will get pregnant in my first cycle of treatment. Of course, it’s equally likely (perhaps more likely) that things won’t go perfectly starting when we get to treatments any more than they’ve gone perfectly since we started TTC last September. But we are hopeful and we feel peaceful nonetheless. I can’t explain the peace, but I think it’s a gift from God. I hope it will stay with us through the months of waiting. I’m a bit more functional with the peace.
That’s not to say there won’t be more hard days, more teary mornings, more difficult moments when I see moms with their flocks of children at the grocery store. It probably won’t change the way I feel when people ask me, “When are you going to have children?” or “Married five years? No kids yet? Don’t you think it’s about time?” and so forth. But that’s for a different day and a different post. Today I’ll keep my peace.
After TTC since September 2011, we started testing in July 2012 to try to figure out what was wrong. To our shock, we were told that it would be impossible to have children without medical assistance.
It took a few weeks for that to sink in, and really we’re still in denial to a certain extent. I’m 28, and he just turned 27, so we never expected to hit a brick wall like this.
Ultimately, finding out that it is likely we will never conceive a child naturally (that is, in our bedroom) is devastating. And we have always planned to have a big family. We’re still hoping to find out that there is some way this can be fixed, but that is looking less and less likely.
We’re praying for two things: 1. A miracle (whether supernatural or doctor-orchestrated) that will enable us to conceive naturally and 2. guidance for the doctors we are seeing, that they will accurately diagnose the problem, have reasonable solutions, and listen to us.
Dwell in Me 