Two years now and I wish I had had these types of blogs at the start of my process. There's tons out there for figuring out if you want fertility treatment options or figuring out adoption options but I couldn't find much of a community to help me naviagate my feelings about all of this - and I was having a hard time.
Month after month of getting your hopes up and seeing your period show up again and again brings countless tears. Who ever thought it would be this hard?
Not me.
This January marks 2 years of trying for us. And I can't help but feel that if we had gotten pregnant right away (without miscarriages) our child would have been 17 months old by now. My best friend's child is 13 months old. My nephew is a little over 2 years.
I can't help but compare what our little one would be like with those two...
I also know of a couple of people who are 16 weeks pregnant right now. I would have been too.
We were pregnant for a whole 5 weeks this fall after our second IUI (artificial insemination) and then came an ectopic pregnancy. So much for getting your hopes up. But I still want my hopes up.
So, now I've come to a place of some sort of weird peaceful-ness... though I know it's not quite right. You see, I did a lot of reading during a vacation away in the mountains over Christmas & New Year's. Books like Waiting for Daisy & A Little Pregnant. Though admittedly, I was happy for them to have started building their families but for those who still haven't, it still left me empty.
I liked Hannah's Hope to get a Christian take on it - and the difficulties sometimes of showing up at church when all you want to do is crawl into bed and not have to deal with others announcing their pregnancies. Or knowing I'll feel closer to God in worship, therefore vulnerable and I just don't want to cry that day.
Navigating the Land of IF (IF stands for Infertility) was great in understanding why sometimes what people say, trying to be well-meaning, can be the most difficult & frustrating things to hear. It's humorous and also helped me understand that they're not trying to be annoying! :)
But perhaps The Empty Picture Frame (my husband said it was a pretty depressing title...) was the most helpful to me because Jenna didn't have a solution at the end of her book. For her personally, she may now or I wish she did. But it was weirdly reassuring that she wrote from the perspective of 'still being in it'.
The trend in them all for me was - many women spend most of their late 30s (or a signficant # of years) being OBSESSED with all things fertility - and let life pass them by. I didn't want that for us or for me.
...And now I'm a bit more peaceful having read these books but also know I'm struggling hard with keeping the balance - of wanting so badly to be a mother yesterday/last year/two years ago with wanting to live life fully right now.
I hope you'll journey with me & that I hear from some of you on how to best handle these woes.
7 years ago
