A few thoughts on infertility

I wish to document some of the thoughts I have had these past couple years as we have struggled with infertility.  Now that we are expecting, it was just a little shocking to read over journal entries of the past year and see how much infertility dominated my thoughts, or at least my journal entries.

Alex and I went to the sweet corn festival tonight. This is me with the sheriff in front of the corn steam mobile, right before he fined me for indecent exposure. (Totally kidding, mom!!!)

A few points I wish to make:

1. To state the obvious: infertility is a challenge. Looking back, as it started to dawn on me that we were going to have more trouble than most people, it felt like a gradual descent into a ravine. At first I thought "oh this isn't that bad, it will get worked out soon." As time went on, though, my hope plummeted more and more. Eventually, instead of being an "easy" challenge, it actually was hard for me! There are a few times that stand out as being especially difficult, usually after we had tried some procedure that did not work. It was a roller coaster. No, I take that back. It was a tire swing. It never really felt like I was moving forward at all and it was down one minute (or day, or week, or month), up the next. Sometimes it felt like an uncontrollable downward spiral. Sometimes I just felt a general emptiness and pointlessness.

2. Infertility is not that bad! Alex and I constantly reminded ourselves that there are so many worse things that can happen to a couple than infertility. Like a bad relationship, or a devastating loss of a child, or countless other things. As far as challenges go, we actually sometimes felt blessed that it was ONLY infertility that we were dealing with! Infertility did not stop us from having a happy and full life.

3. I feel for anyone who has struggled with this challenge. I know it is hard to go for a long time wanting to start a family and seeing everyone around you having children and not being able to. There are the inevitable questions: why me? am I broken? does God not trust me with children? am I doing something wrong? if I just ate this or didn't eat that would I be able to get pregnant? and countless others that you can choose to pay attention to or not but in general are not that helpful. I know that it is easy to feel like there is something fundamentally wrong with you if you and your spouse cannot complete the most basic of life's needs to reproduce. (I just want to point out here that male infertility accounts for 40-50% of infertility problems according to Wikipedia.)

4. Infertility is an opportunity. I can't yet say that I am grateful for what I went through, and I don't know if I ever will be, but I can say that I am grateful for some of the things that happened as a result. To name two, I had to more fully put my trust and faith in God than I have ever had to before. This opened me up to feel peace and healing in spite of still not getting what I wanted for a long time. It also helped Alex and me have the opportunity to grow closer as a couple as we turned toward each other instead of away. This is not something that comes naturally to me, and not something I usually do perfectly, but it gave me many chances to practice :)

What better way to end the night than a BLT? Yum.