Sometimes I forget that I started this blog as my own personal journal, a way to document mine and Eric's life and all the lovely little adventures along the way. I start writing to "captivate my audience" or "appease the masses" forgetting that the masses are a minimal 71 followers, many of whom are friends and family. Not that it's a bad thing to write this way, I rather enjoy it. It gives me focus.
Today I am not writing for my 71 loyal followers (even though I do love you guys) or the other family and friends that read posts via facebook or just have me bookmarked. Today I am writing for me. Today I have things that I need to say, that I need to get off my mind, and I am not going to censor my writing to be more blogger-friendly.
I guess you can consider that a warning for the things you are about to read. It was hard for me to write. It was harder knowing my husband needed to read it first. Pushing "publish post" was the hardest, though, knowing how many people it just might reach.
For the last three years the book of my life has been colored with many adjectives. The most dominant one being
infertile. I have been careful not to let this word define me, although I admit sometimes it has. But after this long, the word infertility and I have come to an understanding...an agreement of sorts. We have a set of rules that we play by now: I can not get pregnant, and that's ok. God brought me to a place where I was honestly and truly comfortable with being the girl who can not get pregnant.
"'For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,' declares the LORD. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." - Isaiah 55:8-9
That meant I was able to rejoice with friends who announced their blessings.
I could go to the hospital and visit my friends who had just stepped into their new roles as Mom.
I could participate in and even throw baby showers, all the while quoting
"rejoice with those who rejoice..." (Romans 12:15)
I could do life with minimal interruption from my adjective and adversary.
Then infertility threw me a curve ball, and broke the rules. You see, the definition of infertility is multi-faceted. According to
Resolve:
"Infertility is defined as the inability to conceive or carry a pregnancy to term after 12 months of trying to conceive."
On March 16, 2011 I woke up and took my temperature as I did every morning (to track my cycles). It was unusually high. I knew I must be getting sick and I wanted to be able to take some medicine in order to function at work that day. Thanks to my lovely PCOS diagnosis, I never really knew where I was in my cycle so I had to bite the bullet and take a pregnancy test. The first one in over a year. I had long since discovered that a pregnancy test wasn't like school tests, I always passed those with flying colors. I got up, dug out an expired dollar store test, took it, and promptly went back to bed confident of the
one line that would be showing up in a few minutes.
Except two lines showed up.
I started shaking and decided I needed to bring out the big guns - a digital test. So I took it and no sooner had I gone to the kitchen to pour my coffee did I see the word we had been longing to see for three years.
"pregnant."
I was pregnant. Me, the girl who had become completely complacent with never seeing that word. I fell on my face and cried out to God, thanking him over and over again for his grace and his mercy.
"Your love, O LORD, reaches to the heavens, your faithfulness to the skies." - Psalm 26:5
You don't realize how much you want something until that thing becomes tangible again. I finally pulled myself together, called my doctors office and told them the news. The precious nurse cried on the phone with me and offered me an appointment that day. I went, it was confirmed, it wasn't all a dream.
That evening I told my husband. My precious husband who had waited in heartache just as long as I had to become a father, it was the sweetest moment of my life to tell him he was one.
We told a few very close family members and friends, confident they would be praying for us and our baby. We decided to tell the world after the heartbeat was seen, which would be at 8 weeks. We lived two blissful weeks with the knowledge that God had blessed us with a pregnancy. We allowed ourselves to dream, a little.
Life as we knew it changed the day I called my doctor with the news that I had had some cramping a just a tiny bit of spotting. They wanted me to come in immediately. I was 6 weeks and 3 days. I was whisked into the ultrasound room, completely alone and unaware that anything but my baby would be on that screen.
After the longest two minutes of my life, I knew. I could tell by the nurse's expression and my doctor's resistance to saying anything that our baby was gone. On the screen was a beautifully formed gestational sac in exactly the right place...but it was empty.
Words were finally coming out of my doctors mouth about "...blighted ovum..." and "...beta doubling..." and "...could be too early..." but I knew. I had blood work done that day. And two days later it was repeated. And the day after that my doctor called to inform me that my beta had indeed doubled. In layman's terms - my hormones indicated everything was fine. The ultrasound was scheduled on Monday, exactly one week from the last one.
Monday comes, Eric is there this time, the ultrasound begins, our world collapses.
On the screen is an even larger, perfectly formed gestational sac, still void of our baby.
It's official. And now I have to learn how to live the multi-faceted definition of infertility. I am no longer the girl who couldn't get pregnant. I am the girl who couldn't get pregnant, miraculously did, and is now the mother of a heaven-born baby.
I don't know how to be that girl.
"The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away. Blessed be the name of the LORD."- Job 1:21b
(to be continued...)
