Seven Years and Seven Months
I am barren. I've wanted to be a mother my whole life- or at least since my sister was born when I was 20 months old. I had deeply spiritual experiences calling me to motherhood, including one about when to start trying to conceive. I wanted six children, which I tempered down to three or four once I married my spouse who only wanted two. We do have five children! Except four of them are dead.
We have been trying to have living children since October of 2014. If I had gotten pregnant right away, that child would be almost seven years old. If any of my dead children were alive, they would be five-and-a-half years old, almost five (the first two due dates are a day shy of exactly nine months apart), almost three-and-a-half, and three weeks old. Our living child is two-and-a-half. We are so grateful for him, but so angry over the years lost grieving the dead instead of loving the living.
Plenty of people have miscarriages and aren't barren, of course. But I am barren. I have only had one unmedicated pregnancy. I have had two intrauterine inseminations before we found out that because at the time I didn't get pregnant easily, our only option for pregnancy was in vitro fertilization with genetic testing of our embryos. As part of IVF, I have had three egg retrievals, which are surgeries to harvest eggs that have been artificially matured in the ovaries. I have plenty of eggs, but because of my genetic abnormality only 10 percent of what we got turned out to be viable. For the retrievals and later transfers, I gave myself hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of shots in my belly and butt. I've had so many endometrial biopsies and vaginal sonograms that most of the time I send work emails on my phone while getting them now. I've had seven frozen embryo transfers. I've had surgery for endometriosis in hopes that, even if it would mean risking more miscarriages, I might get pregnant more easily. I didn't. Now I have had infections post miscarriages that have thoroughly destroyed any possibility of unmedicated pregnancy.
We've filled out applications we never turned in for foster care in two different counties. I would still like to be a foster mom one day, but only when I could be a better community parent and not now when I just want to steal babies. We have looked into adoption, and talked to adoptive parent friends ad nauseam, but it never felt right for us. I wish it did.
I have prayed to stop wanting to have more children. I have cursed God for giving me this desire to have children with this body that is incapable of having children. Infertility has not made me more patient or thankful, faithful or trusting. It has made me bitter.
And still I keep persisting like the story in the Gospel of Luke 18 that Jesus tells of a widow and an unjust judge: she wears him down until he does what she wants. If we hadn't persisted in spite of loss after loss after failure after failure, we wouldn't have our living child. But as much as I love him, as much as I think he is worth it, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend such persistence. I am currently begging God for an end to fertility treatments followed quickly by early menopause, so I can try to live without this horrible hope hanging over me.
This week is #InfertilityAwarenessWeek, so I wanted to share the litany of barrenness of these last 7 years and 7 months of my life. There is joy and thanksgiving in my story, too, and certainly resilience and love- none of which I've been writing as much about since Autumn's death. One of my current great gifts is my church family and their constant prayers, care, and willingness to minister with me even though I'm a mess. Aaron is an amazing dad and a real partner with me in all of this. Our living child brings us so much joy.
Of course, I know none of us are living the life we wanted, and sometimes that is good because life is better than we could imagine, sometimes that is bad because we don't know with what to replace old dreams, and sometimes we are making do with that difference just fine. Such navigation is part of being human. I know we all have struggles and loss: grief and love go together, so it is impossible to have a good life without heartbreak. I know this. I hope you know this.
But for National Infertility Awareness Week, I mainly just wanted to communicate how much being barren sucks. Every part of my life feels poisoned by infertility and loss- my relationships, my faith, my joy, my hopes for the future. There isn't any silver lining, and I'm not a better person because of any of it. But all I can do, all any of us can do, is keep persisting. So I will.
