Tag: October

The In-Between

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wtua8kmThe following reflection was written by Cherry Blossom. 

Once you finally have a child after years of struggling with infertility, you find yourself in a very strange place. It’s hard to describe because it’s a place that doesn’t really have a definition. And despite being on the other side of the struggle of infertility, it’s still a difficult and uncertain place to be.

Before you get pregnant and you’re stuck in the painful mire of frustration and anger and sadness that is infertility, you can connect to a community of people that are going through the same thing. You can lean on them, vent to them, gain advice and encouragement. Despite how badly I didn’t want to be dealing with an unexplainable inability to have a child, I found comfort and strength in the community of people who were struggling with me. It was a sort of an underground group as infertility is somehow still a social faux pas today, and that only served to knit the community closer together and it was my place to grieve openly and share the struggle of trying to find joy in the sorrow. Then it happened. I got what they all wanted, and suddenly that was no longer a community where I belonged.

I was lucky enough to have a successful round of IVF and my daughter was born about three and a half years after my infertility struggle began. It was so easy to think that once she was born all the little and big things I mourned for along the way would just disappear. I mean, I would finally be a mom and I would feel whole again and I would be just like every other woman with a baby, right? On the outside, that’s exactly how it looked. That’s what made the place I found myself in even stranger and much more uncertain and painful.

I struggled a lot with anxiety the first few months of being a mother and I did my best to hide it. How dare I complain about this truly amazing gift? No, I was not tired. No, I had it all under control. Yeah, right. I wasn’t completely alone as I had friends that were there for me in their own way. They were still struggling with infertility, so it was difficult for them. I longed for and badly needed a community.

I tried out some mom groups. I sat there with my baby and listened to them talk about being stay-at-home moms and discussing their plans for other children. I felt like a fraud. I didn’t belong with these women. I had such a different relationship with how I became a mother that I felt like I couldn’t join in with their carefree chatter or even confide in them on how hard parenting was. I felt like it wasn’t allowed to be hard for me. I had put so much more pain, tears, and money into getting my little one. How could I ever find my place with these moms? And it surely wouldn’t have been fair of me to go back to the group of women I found such comfort in during my infertility journey as they were still grieving.

So there I was. Stuck in between.

Family was also quick to forget the agonizing journey I went through to have a child. It’s not something they want to discuss or relive because the baby is here and everybody should be happy. That fact only served to reinforce my belief that I had to put on a brave face and just be happy and completely in love with motherhood and my baby. I felt like all the grief and loss meant nothing because I finally had what I always wanted. I wanted that to be true.

My daughter does mean everything to me. She has completely changed me and shown me a type of joy I didn’t even know existed. I am so incredibly thankful for her every day. The waves of anxiety and sadness for the loss still hit me, though. I observe this beautiful little creation I have been wonderfully blessed to watch over, while still bearing the scars of past and future struggles. Holding joy and sadness at once is an odd feeling.

I still struggle with connecting completely in community because there isn’t a clear and easily defined one to fit in. Maybe that’s okay. It isn’t easy feeling like I am stuck in between communities, but I am lucky to be reminded by the women that have entered my life during these difficult days and even before them, that I am not alone. While the pain isn’t as ever present right now, the bolder of anxiety is starting to creep up again as my husband and I approach discussions of trying to grow our family. The place I am in gets even stranger and scarier when I think about working through infertility in the shadow of my active little toddler.

Infertility hits on so many different levels. The anxiety that follows it can throw you into the past or the future. We cannot change things in these places. When I am able to look up and take a step back and see the women who are in my life, and who care for me and listen to me, I am able to realize what I have here and now. I still worry and wonder if I will be able to grieve any future loss with my old community of struggling women that once gave me strength and comfort. I don’t know that I’ll ever fit there again in the traditional sense. I also don’t know if I’ll ever feel like I belong to the normal mom club, whatever that means.

Through all of this I have found that community is never perfect. It doesn’t need to be. It’s in that imperfection that real connection is found. I realized that feeling caught in between was often made better by me simply reaching out and asking for help and letting my friends respond. The chapter I am in is scary and uncertain but also joyful, silly, and even graciously mundane. Such is life with a toddler and such is life living with infertility issues.

 

Forever Changed

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poppy-flower-images-and-wallpapers-34 (1)The following reflection was written by Poppy.

Infertility has forever changed me . It has changed who I am as a woman, wife, sister, friend, and now, a mother. I hate to admit this, but I let it become my whole identity at times. I feel that I will always identify with a woman going through infertility because I was her for such a long time.

I want to be open from the beginning: I’m currently pregnant and will deliver this precious baby very soon. Even this far along, I still have a hard time letting it sink in that my husband and I are going to be parents. That is because of the struggle it took to get here. Infertility has forced me to leave naivety about pregnancy, delivery, and motherhood by the wayside and know that anything can happen at any time. The farther along I am in my pregnancy, the more I find myself worrying about the health of our baby, knowing what a miracle it is to have a healthy child. In many ways, infertility has left a dark place in the back of my mind. A dark place of worry that our dream of parenthood will still not come true. I have battled this every day since my nurse called to tell me I was pregnant. The things that my friends and I have gone through will haunt me for the rest of my life. I don’t want to have this knowledge of all the terrible things that can happen! But not knowing would mean that I hadn’t discussed my infertility with others; wouldn’t have heard others’ stories or been part of the network of incredibly strong ladies that surrounds and supports me; would mean that my husband and I had made this difficult journey alone.

We had nothing but “failure” over 9 years and 1 month of trying to conceive. Only negative home pregnancy tests, no fertilization with IVF, “bad eggs,” and BETAs of 0 following IUIs. Adding to the stress and heartache of it all were a handful of doctors with conflicting messages—either I was “fine,” or my body was not working properly and we should not attempt assisted reproductive technology (ART) again. We did not know who to listen to or believe. It was heartbreaking and at times, unbearable. Over all those years, my hope of becoming a mother via pregnancy constantly waxed and waned. For a while–maybe the first 5 years of our journey–my plans revolved around becoming pregnant any minute. Vacations, vehicle purchases, long-term plans, even the clothes I bought! When I finally let this way of thinking go, it was difficult, but felt ultimately freeing to not plan around something we couldn’t anticipate or predict.

Trying for that long does something to your psyche. Particularly the feelings of uncertainty and inadequacy have never left me, even after being pregnant for almost 9 months. I never expect those feelings to leave, no matter how many of our dreams come true.

The more noticeable my pregnancy has become over the past few months, the more self-conscious I am. I’ve been very judicious with Facebook posts regarding this pregnancy because I know I have Facebook friends that are still trying. When I’m in public, I wonder about what other women are thinking when they look at me. Do I make them feel angry? Jealous? Despairing? In no way do I want to evoke in others the feelings that I used to get when I saw an expectant mother in public. I hate that infertility has done this to me. I would love to enjoy this time to the fullest, but it’s difficult when I know there are so many women out there who would love to be where I am.

Despite the joy of my pregnancy, I still have a hard time being happy for my “fertile” friends when I see a pregnancy announcement. It’s such a terrible thing to begrudge someone else’s path in life, and I realize that. I try my very best to think of them what I hope people think about me: ”I don’t know what she’s been through for this child.” Just because I consider them fertile doesn’t mean they haven’t had their own struggles related to getting pregnant or otherwise. Happiness and excitement should be my first reactions, and I beat myself up over my envy and frustration that this happens so easily for some.

If you struggle with infertility, it can change you and the way you see the world—whether you tried for almost a decade, or for a year before achieving a successful pregnancy, infertility is heartbreaking. It takes something natural and makes it clinical. It takes a private exchange between lovers and puts it under scrutiny. It dismantles dreams and replaces them with the uncertain and unknowable. It breaks down identity and expectation, all while being physically, emotionally, and financially taxing. In a way, your perception of the world is re-wired, and I have found that not even pregnancy can put things back where they were.

If you are struggling with infertility, it will very likely impact you the rest of your life. No matter where your journey takes you, a piece of you will always identify with your struggling brothers and sisters. Even as I sit here feeling my precious baby move around in my belly, it’s easy for me to go back to those dark times when I thought this would never happen, or let that darkness bring worry into the vision for our future. Please know that it is perfectly normal for the traumatic moments, heartbreak, and despair of infertility to stick with you. For better or worse, these things are part of your story.

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.

 

October Focus: Infertility’s Legacy

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Although from the outside, having a child, adopting, choosing to adopt or choosing not to have children might seem logical ends to infertility, there are many ways in which infertility has long-lasting, sometimes life-long, implications for a person. This can be seen in the challenges of the adoption life, the on-going grief of infertility losses, or the continual uncertainty and strain (physical, emotional, financial) of assisted reproduction. Often, people who find themselves in this new arena—not technically in the infertile community, but not strictly belonging anywhere else—experience deep confusion and loneliness.

 Over the month of October, our stories will explore some of the many ways in which infertility can very much be a part of a person’s life even when they have entered parenthood or have made the choice to follow a different life path. We hope to give a picture of what this looks like in the personal life, to resonate with those going through it, and to give a sense of direction for those wanting to cultivate understanding and sensitivity towards a loved one in this emotional place.