Last week was Infertility Awareness Week. I wanted to write something, but the pain of infertility made me a bit too paralyzed to do it. Sounds very strange, doesn’t it?
Back in October I had a miscarriage and what would have been my due date is approaching. With every night that May 22nd gets closer, my throat closes up more with fear and pain.
People think they know what infertility is, but in all reality if you haven’t dealt with it then you don’t know what it is. It is nighttime panic attacks and it is crying when you see someone giving birth to a child on tv. Infertility is anger when having to buy another box of tampons. If you have a child then people tell you that you should be grateful and we are, but that doesn’t make an infertile woman’s emotions any less real or raw. Infertility is wanting to punch people when they say “just stop trying and it will happen”.
We have been trying to get pregnant for a year and every month has been heartbreaking. We want a sibling for our son and it feels like it is getting further and further out of reach as we get older. My husband often times is not awake when I lay awake at night and cry to God about the pain that is still in my heart. In the Bible it says His Peace shall pass all understanding…I pray and wait for that peace. I pray to be filled with something that replaces my pain with contentment with one child.
When the pain gets becomes too much, I give it to My Father in Heaven. He is a Good, Good Father.
Years ago, I used this platform to blog about my journey through infertility. It was a very hard journey that was done alone outside of the help of a few friends. Not long after that journey started, I met my now husband. He was a bachelor sworn to never remarry and have kids. I was the girl who said everything that could ever scare a guy like him off. I wanted to get married and have kids….somehow.
To those of you who didn’t know me back then, when I was 36 I was told I had an undetectable egg count (AMH level). Three different fertility specialist at the time told me it was a one in a million chance of ever getting pregnant, let alone carry to term. My heart was broken as motherhood was in my DNA since my childhood. What that time became was a special time of romance between God and myself. I would often lay in bed late at night crying my heart out and He would show me verses and dreams that spoke to answering my desires. One night I had a dream that I was in a room with dingy white walls and I felt vulnerable and heartbroken, I got up off the bed that I was laying on in my dream and walked into another room. I found a baby book with pictures and the date 9/11 all over the book. I didn’t know what this dream meant, but somehow I knew it was God talking to me. That was 2011.
On September 8, 2016, I gave birth my our son. He is so beautiful and conceived on the very first night my husband and I tried. He was the promise given to me 5 years before in a dream. He is so much more that my heart could ever desire.
Becoming parents changed both of us. God brought out the best in each of us and continues to. It doesn’t mean our desire to expand our family has stopped.
On October 3 of this year, I suffered a miscarriage at 5am. We had been trying for 8 very long and very emotionally exhausting months. As I write it has been less than 24 hours and my heart is broken and my body exhausted. I don’t know what the future of growing our family looks like from here. After my son, I know in my heart that God can do anything He wants to as He gave me a one in a million gift. Knowing that gave us such hope and also created an anxiety as I have seen that He can make my body capable of childbearing.
When I was blogging years ago, I referred to God as My Abba. Abba means Father. He is still the Abba completely in love with me. What has surprised me through this is that I feel so at peace while at the same time mourning the loss of our unborn child. I don’t know if adoption, science assisted child birth, natural or staying where we are as a family is what is in our future. I do know that right now our son is asleep in his room and that is so much more than we could ever imagine. I have a husband who I have fallen deeper in love with spends every day searching for ways to teach and love our son. The man who was sworn to not take on a family is so desperately in love with the two of us. That is more than I dreamed of. God gave us both a family.
Abba, I do not know what you have in store for us, but we trust you. It doesn’t mean our hearts aren’t broken.