Infertility Is a Silent Pain

I read a lot of books when we were going through our quest to conceive a child. This one by far was the most impactful to me. C.S. Lewis said, "We read to know we are not alone." I very much felt that in these pages. The cover photo used to make me sob. I know the deep deep pain of grieving a child that never existed. I would wake up in the middle of the night in a cold terror sweat with nightmares of miscarriages and lost babies. I would wake up peacefully in the morning after having had a beautiful dream that I was pregnant to the harsh reality that it was only a dream and that now I would have to face another horrible day of poking and prodding at the clinic.

A friends sonogram picture innocently sent over email to announce their greatest news ever...that only took 2 months to happen, mind you... would send me to bed in another wave of grief. I didn't think I could take it anymore.

Infertility in many ways is a silent epidemic. If you are barren and are at a party and someone says, "When are you going to have children?"...you don't answer, "Well. We can't." Nobody wants to invite that friend to their baby shower. 

Talk about a mood killer.

So we suffer in silence and we make excuses and we force a smile and say cute things like,

 "When God makes it happen!"

But what if He never does?

That is the fear that is ever present in the mind of an infertile woman.

I had to explore that very question in my life 9 years ago.

What if He never does?

Does that make Him any less Good?

Does that make me any less of his cherished daughter?

Why me?

What have I done to be forsaken like this?

And the answers I always received in my darkest hours were a simple thought,

"Wait." 

Not forever. Not for a pregnancy either.

Just wait.

So we did. 

And look what happened 5 times in just 6 years.

  He settles the barren woman in her home as the joyful mother of children. Praise the Lord!!

~ Psalm 113:9

My facebook status this morning says,

In the book, "Adopting After Infertility" the author says, "We railed and we fought. But in charging through the thickets to find our way, in deciding together which turns to take, we found something more wonderful than we could have imagined and we've arrived in the place we most want to be. Of this we are certain: without infertility the three children who light us with the joy of living would not have been ours to parent. Different children might have brightened our lives-children with his crooked teeth, children with my lazy eye, children who sounded or looked like us. But they would not have been OUR children...the children we were meant to parent." Without infertility, Billy and I would not have the children that light up our world every day and have changed us: Keishun, Isaac, Vivianna, Jayden, and Jasmine.

 Praise God for bringing beauty out of the ashes.