Betrayal
It took me a few years to be open about my struggle with infertility. I was one of those annoying people who got good grades without even trying, jumped from college to grad school straight into a job. I married my high school sweet heart. Yes, I had setbacks and disappointments, but I overcame them, figured out a new path forward. I got stuck with infertility. I am still stuck because of infertility. Many losses in life might feel that way; I don’t think this stuckness is unique to infertility. I got stuck because infertility is a betrayal, a huge betrayal by my body. And a betrayal by God.
I do not believe in the traditional, anthropomorphized being that we usually refer to as God. When I talk about God, I am talking about a force of life and love that permeates creation; I am talking about a story that is bigger than all of us, a story that works with us to make meaning. This God is not a puppet master in the sky, not the Santa Claus of the prosperity Gospel who gives you your heart’s desire if you pray the right words or work hard enough. This is not a God who can betray us because this God is always luring the good alongside us, weeping with us, loving through us. And yet. There is no sin of injustice that causes infertility, not mine anyway. My infertility was written into my very genetic code. An evolutionary accident. So when I sit with five pregnancy tests in my hand willing one of them to have a whisper of a second line, I feel lost and alone and I rage and God is the only presence there to take it.
I am angry, and I am tired. That first day of the month when I realize I am not pregnant--- that first day I spend crying on the couch as much as I can, raging at the unfairness of it all. But sometimes the next day, the day after the crying and the raging, I get up, take a breath, and remember a God who does not open and close wombs based on some kind of a reward system, who does not work on my schedule or anyone else's for that matter, who does not require my pain to teach me a lesson either. Instead, I reach out to a God who was crying and raging with me just the day before on that couch. I lean on a God who is lending me the strength now to try to find the abundance even in the emptiness. I turn to a God who is showing me how to create family in a different way.
Even after a living child, I still feel stuck. I had a glorious few moments of love for my body when I was pregnant and nursing that faded quickly as it became apparently my body hadn’t fixed itself through this pregnancy. I had a few glorious moments of possibility as I drank in the beauty of the image of the embryo they implanted in my most recent failed frozen embryo transfer. The betrayal is in how fleeting those moments seem to be. So I am trying to focus on other moments. Moments where I can drive and spend time with my nephews, or send my godchild a gift, or read stories to children in my church. I am trying to breathe past the empty moments to cling to the moments where the fierceness of life and love still pulse. I might not always be successful, but then I will just try again tomorrow.
