With time, the hurt started to fade. It helped that the Christmas season was nearing close. There are few things I love more than Christmas trees and Christmas shopping and Christmas carols and Christmas cookies. I did my best to power through it. The hurt and pain would resurface at times I wouldn’t expect it, like when I went shopping for my mother-in-laws Christmas gift. I knew what I had wanted to get her, and it was going to be our way of announcing the pregnancy, but no, I had to change my plans now. I found myself crying every time I would hear Away in a Manger, Christmas always makes me emotional, thinking about God becoming flesh for us, but this year, the emotions were mixed with so much more. Then my birthday was approaching. Honestly, I love my birthday, I always have, but this year, I was dreading it. It was the due date of the baby I lost. I was hoping so badly to be pregnant again by the time this day rolled around, that hopefully it would help to absorb some of the sting, but no, that wasn’t in the cards for me. On top of that, a friend of mine was having her 20 week ultrasound on my birthday to find out the gender of her baby. She was great though, so sensitive, and offered to tell me the results on a different day if I thought it would be too much for me. I really do have great friends. Much to my surprise, my birthday came, and it was a great day. Tessa makes everything better. My family was wonderful, we had a great dinner out and cheesecake for dessert. A day I was dreading turned into a lovely memory. I was sad at times, yes, but it was outweighed by the way my family was such a blessing to me.
I knew I needed a break from the cycles. My body had flipped out on me. I was having anxiety attacks and feeling very down and depressed. I needed to step away from it for a while. I’m not sure if it was the medication or just my body’s protective reaction to all the pain it had experienced, I don’t know. I just know I couldn’t continue on without some healing time. We have two embryos left. Since he’ll transfer two at a time, this is the last of our FET cycles. If this next cycle doesn’t work, then we have some decisions to make. I’m sure my doctor gets annoyed with me, after every cycle, I question why it didn’t work and if there is something different that we can try. I question where there is something else wrong that we have missed. I question it all. His response is always the same, there’s about a 50/50 chance of it working every time. He gives me the coin analogy. If you flipped a coin four times and it came up heads every time, would you think there was something wrong with the coin? No, it’s just how it happens. So on one hand I feel like the odds are stacking up against me, four failed cycles, it’s not looking good for the last one. On the other hand, I think four failed cycles, with a supposed 50/50 chance, this next one has got to work. I have continued to deal with a lot of anger and frustration from this last cycle and all that we’ve gone through.
My mom told me something that has helped me so much. She heard this from a lady she works with who teaches a Bible study to young adult women. I’m paraphrasing a bit here and sharing what I got out of it most, but the idea was that you need to take your biggest hurts and frustrations and visualize wrapping it up in a beautiful gift box. Then, picture yourself walking up the stairs to God’s throne with your gift, reaching the top and handing it to Him. Now, it’s not polite to take a gift back after you’ve given away, and certainly you wouldn’t take back a gift you give to God, your Heavenly Father. Once you give it, you no longer have it and it’s not yours to worry about it. I have taken that to heart. Unfortunately, I haven’t mastered the not taking it back part, but I’m working on it. Almost daily, in my prayer time, I do that, I give that box back to the Lord. I give Him my hurt, pain, frustration, anger, worry, and fear about our situation. It’s a pretty big box, but I know nothing is too big for my God to handle. It helps me so much. Then, another day comes and those things start sneaking back into my life, and I have to do it all over again. Someday I want to be able to give it away and never take it back. I’m not there yet, but I’m working on it. I know that God has good and big plans for me.
During one of my harder times, David and I were talking and he shared with me a song that had been so inspiring for him. I had heard this song many times before, as it is on the same cd as my Faithful God song, but sometimes I get in a bit of a rut and can’t see outside of my box. I gave the song a listen and felt so uplifted by it. I’m so thankful David opened my eyes to it. It’s called You Are For Me and it’s by Gateway Worship:
So faithful
So constant
So loving and so true
So powerful in all you do
You fill me
You see me
You know my every move
You love for me to sing to you
I know that You are for me
I know that You are for me
I know that You will never
Forsake me in my weakness
I know that You have come now
Even if to write upon my heart
To remind me of who You are
So patient
So graceful
So merciful and true
So wonderful in all you do
You fill me
You see me
You know my every move
You love for me to sing to you
I love that part that says, “I know that you are for me, I know that you will never forsake me in my weakness.” So many times I need to be reminded that He is for me. He is on my side. There have been so many times that my flesh has battled in thinking that I am fighting against Him, like this is something I am fighting for, but He doesn’t want for me, so He’s fighting against me, but I have it all wrong. He is FOR me. He’s on my side. He’s fighting for me. Referring back to Desert Song, He is refining me through this flame, through this fire I’m walking through right now.
This is an ongoing struggle. There are issues that I battle with every day. I think I’m now currently up to 11 friends and family, all who are expecting babies anywhere from April to September. Each one is a little harder to hear about than the previous one. It’s not that I’m not happy for them and excited for them, I certainly am, I realize I may have a funny way of showing, but I really am. It is just another reminder of something I desperately want but can’t seem to attain.
I struggle with the battle of feeling like I am a bad mother because I keep going through this time after time. A little voice inside of me makes me feel so guilty telling me, isn’t Tessa enough? Why aren’t you happy with just her? I know it’s the devil trying to psyche me out. Tessa is my whole world and if she is my only child, then she is more than enough, (she certainly keeps me busy enough). I want another child for her as much as I do for myself. I know I’ve said it before, but I feel so blessed to have grown up with two sisters and I know how much better my life is because of them, and I want her to have that chance too.
Along with what I said before, I struggle so much with jealousy. One of my sisters and I run a business and one of the most popular things that we do is appliqued shirts, and of those, the most popular thing we sell is the Big Sis and Little Sis shirts. A little part of me hurts every time I have to make one, especially when the Big Sis shirt is a tiny size. It’s so hard for me, knowing that some people can have babies at the drop of a hat and often when they aren’t even trying for them. It’s often the little things that are a constant reminder to me.
I struggle often with the fear of what might happen if this next cycle doesn’t work. Am I going to be able to accept that? Even throughout all the failure and disappointment we have had in the last year, there has always been a glimmer of hope, because there is always the next cycle. What is the next one doesn’t work? How am I going to come to terms with it? I don’t know if we will physically, emotionally and financially be able to afford starting another cycle, so this very well could be my last shot at having another biological child of my own.
I also struggle so much with the feelings of failure. Not being able to conceive a child on our own often makes me feel like a failure as a wife, as a mother and as a woman. During every month that I wasn’t getting pregnant on my own (before Tessa) and after every failed cycle, I feel as though I have let David down. This is what I am supposed to be able to do as his wife, and I can’t. I hate letting him down. Then it puts into question my abilities as a mother. Why won’t these babies attach and stay in my body? I am their mother, why can’t I get them to stay with me? The question is always in my mind that maybe I have done something wrong in how I have raised Tessa and the way that I mother her, and that’s why I’m not being allowed to have another child. And it all falls back on my feelings of failure as a woman. God designed my body for this purpose, but I can’t fulfill it. With all of the pressures of society are me, when my body doesn’t do what it was made to do, it makes me feel like failure as a woman. Just as if when I had been teaching, if I had been unable to effectively teach my class so that they could learn what was necessary, I would have felt like a failure as teacher, because it is such a struggle to get pregnant, when it’s something I have been created to do, it makes me feel like a failure as a woman, a mother and a wife. However, like many of the other struggles I deal with on a daily basis, I know that these feelings are a spiritual attack on me, trying to get me to doubt God and the way that He made me. I have to fight back against the devil’s attacks and trust that God created David and I this way because He has a plan for us, a bigger one than what I can see with my limited human vision. God doesn’t make mistakes, and if He chose for David and I to fight this battle, there is a reason.
Lately we have more seriously been considering the idea of adoption. David has always wanted to adopt, long before we ever thought we would have to undergo fertility treatments of any kind, but it was never something I felt as strongly about. Over the last 6 months or so, my heart has really turned toward it. If this last cycle doesn’t work, we may start looking into adoption, or even if it does, maybe adopting a few years down the road. Not that adoption is an easy road by any means, I don’t know much about it except that it’s expensive and it can take a long time. There’s the decision of whether to adopt domestically or internationally, both have their own list of challenges. Then after all this is said and done, I go back to my feelings of frustration that I have to deal with all these issues in the first place. When it feels like everyone around me (with the exception of a couple of my infertility friends) can fill up their house with little ones the good old fashioned way and have them anytime they want. Why couldn’t that have been me? Then there’s the cost of it all. Having and raising children costs enough, why does it have to cost me so much just in an attempt to get one? It just seems so unjust.
But just when I think I can’t take it anymore and fill myself with pity and sorrow that I have to go through all this garbage, I look at my Tessa. I look at her and I am thankful for the pain and the stress and hurt that we went through, because without it, we wouldn’t have her. I wouldn’t trade it all in for anything. This time around it’s a little harder, because as of yet, I don’t have that sweet face to look at and say it was all worth it. If I had a guarantee in the end that no matter what we went through, someday, I will carry another baby, I would keep at no matter what. The scary part is that there is no guarantee. I could keep doing IVF for the next ten years and never get a baby, or I could stop after this next cycle and who knows, maybe the one after that would have worked.
It’s when I start to drift there that I have to go back to my Candyland board game. I may not know what direction my life is going to take, but God does, and I have to trust that He will lead me step and by step and whatever direction He takes me in, will be the right one, even if it’s different than what I thought was the right path. Trust me, that’s a lot easier to say than to do, and some days I believe it a lot more than I do others, but if I can’t believe that He loves me enough to take care of me and do what’s best for me, than what do I have to believe in. I’ve said it many times before, but I have been so blessed through music in all that we’ve been through. I just heard a song for the first time last week, David got the new Cari Jobe album and there was a song that just moved me, it’s called Steady my Heart:
Wish it could be easy
Why is life so messy
Why is pain a part of us
There are days I feel like
Nothing ever goes right
Sometimes it just hurts so much
But You’re here
You’re real
I know I can trust You
Even when it hurts
Even when its hard
Even when it all just falls apart
I will run to You
Cause I know that You are
Lover of my soul
Healer of my scars
You steady my heart
You steady my heart
I’m not gonna worry
I know that You got me
Right inside the palm of your hand
Each and every moment
What’s good and what get broken
Happens just the way that You plan
And I will run to You
You’re my refuge in Your arms
And I will sing to You
Cause of everything You are
You steady my heart
You steady my heart
Sometimes I feel like it’s all falling apart around me, but God is there to hold me in His hands. I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. Phil 4:13. There is no way I could have made it through this past year still standing on two feet if He weren’t holding me up throughout it all. He is my strength
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