Tag: Hawthorne

One Who Understands

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pic_windswept_hawthorn1The following reflection was written by Hawthorne. 

We couldn’t have children. That’s what the doctor said. Technically, we couldn’t have children without major medical intervention. We had done that for years already, and I was so, so tired. We had done everything–fertility drugs, multiple I.U.I.’s, two rounds of IVF. My emotions were worn raw and my relationship to them, and to my body, so tenuous. I hadn’t been able to trust my emotions in years: The hormones coursing through my body from the injections I took in an attempt to regulate my body’s broken reproductive signals made me doubt everything I felt and thought. I was done. Three years of trying was enough for me. My heart couldn’t take it anymore.

We quit trying to have kids in November of 2016. It was one of the hardest moments of my life, and for a long time I could do nothing each day but wake up and remember that I was not alone and God was with me. I had no hope in a future that held joy, and everything, even breathing, took effort. Then, slowly, my husband and I started to heal. We had sweet time together. We had great conversations about why we had wanted kids in the first place. We decided to adopt. My heart for adoption grew even bigger as we learned more about the process, although there was definitely fear in that as well. We went through the process and were put on the waitlist for a baby.

And then I got pregnant.

Out of the blue, without intention, without warning. And I couldn’t believe it. My initial reaction was disbelief, followed by anger and grief. I couldn’t talk to hardly anyone about how I felt because my emotions didn’t make sense to anyone I knew–including my husband, although he tried to understand. I didn’t know how to explain to him that I had moved on. My heart had closed to this desire, and to get pregnant after all that just made me feel like the whole infertility experience was a total, meaningless waste. It reminded me again of all the pain of constant disappointment, the constant fighting to not feel rejected by God, and the grief of my early miscarriage.

I think somewhere in my mind I had become a new person after infertility. A person who couldn’t have babies…a person who had been shaped and built by grief. A person who could understood people’s pain and could empathize with others. Honestly, pregnancy made me feel like God had hit the restart button on my life. It felt like he was saying “Oops, my bad, that’s not how it was supposed to go for you! Hang on a sec!” It felt like all the truth and beauty I had found after healing from infertility was a lie. It felt like God had just played with my emotions for four years. It felt like my pregnancy meant my infertility was a giant mistake, honestly, as opposed to some harrowing and horrible journey I had gone on that had ended somewhere good. In my mind, it negated the whole experience.

It took me a long long time to be able to verbalize any of this. No one I knew could help me figure out what I was feeling, and honestly, most people in my life were just super confused about my attitude toward being pregnant. They were overjoyed for us, and so was my husband, but for me it took almost my entire pregnancy before I could believe and feel pregnant. Even then, I dreaded anything stereotypical, from baby showers, to people touching my belly, to getting attention from people. It all made me feel so, so sad and I didn’t know how to communicate to anyone how I was feeling. I felt guilty about the whole thing. Honestly, it was perhaps the loneliest part of my journey toward becoming a parent.

My son was born recently, and parenthood has been so sweet. I am so in love with this tiny person. His birth and being his mom has validated how sweet and real and normal a desire it is to be a parent and has validated how real a loss infertility is for people.

I wish that I could put my experiences in a neat package and give them a purpose. I wish I could say why God made us go through all of that pain if it was going to end the way it did. It was, honestly, meaningless in many ways. But pain often is. Not all darkness leads to discovery and not all tragedy is part of some beautiful story. I wish it were, but I think to do so would be a disservice not only to myself but to everyone who has gone through infertility.

God is not necessarily teaching you something, building you into a better person, or going to give you something “better,” although that may end up being a result of your experiences. He is not preparing you to be a better parent or teaching you a lesson for some past sin. If you do get pregnant, it is not because you did something to earn it or because he has decided after all to “bless” you. This may rub people the wrong way, but listen to what I do believe:

God is with us through it all. He is not toying with us; he is grieving with us. He is our constant companion in a broken, sin-riddled, and painful world. He is showing up and holding our hearts when everything is just too hard. No matter how our stories end, He has promised to be there with us and to hold us as we heal. He is not the grand manipulator teaching us lessons as he jerks our puppet strings. He is our friend, our suffering Savior, and he is the only one who can truly understand our hearts.

 

The Pervasiveness of Loss

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pic_windswept_hawthorn1The following reflection was written by Hawthorne. 

For me, infertility loss cannot be neatly summarized or packaged. It’s a messy ball of loose nerve endings and raw edges that leaves you simultaneously emotionally overflowing and emotionally empty. There is no single thing for me that hurt the most, just many, many “small” things.

(Note that the following is a list from one perspective at one point in time and obviously oversimplifies some very complicated issues.)

 Losses and Griefs:

-Being on the outside, excluded from the “happy, normal people” whose lives go just as planned and have no complicated feelings about babies or pregnancy.

-Feeling out of control of my body.

-Feeling physically, emotionally, and mentally weak, especially during infertility treatments.

-Feeling empty and barren in a way I think is pretty impossible to understand without experiencing it.

-Feeling the loss of privacy in having to go through medical treatments that felt humiliating and degrading to me.

-Losing the hope that there would ever be a little one who was the result of my husband and me: of our marriage and our lives together.

-Feeling utterly alone.

-Losing the dream of being a mom the “simple” way, with a child that undeniably “belonged” to us and owed no ties to anyone else (ie: his or her birth family).

-Feeling so much anguish over being the reason my husband would never get to see his own birth child when that was such a deep desire for him, and knowing that my past choices and pain were taking this from him.

-Losing the dream that sex would ever just be fun, simple, or easy, instead of the complex and emotion-ridden thing it is during infertility.

-Fearing the loss of joy around kids and babies when they have always been some of my favorite humans. (I am grateful for friends who encouraged me to push and fight through my hurt in order to stay with them, rightly telling me I would lose a big part of myself if I stepped away from kids and babies.)

-Knowing that no matter what happened, there would be no “neat ending” to my story.

Never Forget

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photograph credit: Guthrie Whitby’s Website

The following reflection was written by Hawthorne.

 

For those of us who have experienced infertility, Mother’s Day is a loaded and weighty phrase. I believe that infertility changes everything about us as human beings, and how we view such a simple holiday doesn’t escape that change.

Growing up, Mother’s Day had little to do with me, really. It was the day we got flowers for our mom, wrote her cards, and my dad would take us out to eat so mom didn’t have to cook. As a young adult, Mother’s Day became a day that also celebrated my sweet sister who had become a mother too.

Then my husband and I started trying to have kids and month after month, nothing happened. By the time the first Mother’s Day rolled around, we had been trying for exactly a full year. I remember trying not to think about it, trying not to relate myself to the day in anyway, but I got a card from someone who said she was thinking of me on this “hard day,” and suddenly it became that.

I dreaded going to church, specifically, because most church services do something celebratory of moms on that day, like having them all stand up and people clap, or doing a sermon dedicated to motherhood. I am beyond grateful that that has not been the case at the church I attend, at least since I’ve been infertile. My brother-in-law is the worship pastor and usually says something about the complicated nature of the day: How it is sweet for some who are moms and some who have moms, but painful for moms whose kids are in trouble or who have passed, and so heavy for those whose moms may have passed or those whose moms have been unkind, harmful, or abusive. He also acknowledged the heaviness of those who would love to be mothers but can’t. Hearing him say that made me realize that Mother’s Day could function essentially as a day to mark my grief, my pain of not being able to have a baby after a lifetime of assuming I could and would be able to.

For three years, that’s what Mother’s Day has been to me: A day to remember and process a little of that grief that I carry. To find a corner and cry, and realize that I am not alone in my grief. There are so many women in my life who fall into one of the categories my brother-in-law listed, and for all of us, Mother’s Day can be a day to remember our grief. Infertility is such an intangible, hard thing to explain to people. It is grieving for the non-existence of someone you desperately love and want to know, and in that very real way, it is grieving a death. Unlike grieving someone who has died though, there is no death date or birth date to mark the loss. For me, that is what Mother’s Day became.

This year will be different as after three years of trying—with many I.U.I.’s, an IVF, an embryo transfer, and another year of having given up the idea of having biological kids–I am pregnant. I’ve been thinking about Mother’s Day coming up with incredible confusion and complicated emotions. I still feel the need to grieve the lost years, the pain I experienced, the babies I miscarried early through IVF, and the permanent change that infertility caused in me. But I also want to be able to celebrate the life growing in me. I don’t know that I’ll ever figure it out or that it will ever be easy for me to know how to handle this day, but I never want to forget the road I have traveled or the countless friends I have who are still there.