Photo credit: Alan Johnston, Flickr
The following reflection was written by Linden.
I entered the teaching profession at age 27 with no formal training or certification. But I loved it, and still do after recently finishing my second year! I get to teach high schoolers Spanish, and that involves a lot of Enrique Iglesias and Shakira. My husband works as a campus minister. He has a calling to mentor and encourage college students. (He also has a calling to rub my feet every once in awhile).
Four years into marriage, we felt ready to start trying to have kids. After the first few months, I began to wonder why it wasn’t working. It seemed so easy for everyone else. I had always been healthy. And on some level, I thought: “I’m a good person. I’m an upstanding citizen. Doesn’t God think I deserve to be a mom?”
Before we knew it, we had reached the year mark without success and made an appointment to talk with a doctor. I remember walking into the office on a bright but chilly January day. Gripping my husband’s hand, I said to him through tears, “I can’t believe we are this couple. I can’t believe we are having to do this.”
A year into working with this doctor, we made some discoveries about our situation. I was attending the weekly worship service at the college ministry where my husband works, and during that time, I felt God reveal something new to me. It wasn’t audible, but it was a fresh thought about infertility that I knew hadn’t come from myself. I had prayed, journaled, discussed with my counselor, and talked openly with friends and strangers alike about our journey through infertility, but that night, I was given a new perspective. One that gave me hope.
It wasn’t an idea that was easy to swallow. It didn’t make everything magically better. But it was hope in the most difficult season of my life. My husband and I had both taken the long route to finally getting jobs we loved. These jobs were personally fulfilling and making a difference in the world. We’d been placed in positions to influence and care for young people. For the first time ever, I was able to see that if we never had a child, we would always have these “children” in our lives. For me, my high school students. For my husband, his college students.
I had never thought about it in this way before. In the moment of realization, I felt simultaneously the pain of infertility and the comfort of knowing that we would be O.K. if we only ever had these children in our lives. That thought provided me with a hope I hadn’t felt yet about our infertility and renewed energy to press forward as we sought to grow our family.