We’ve gone to specialits.
We’ve been poked and prodded.
My husband had surgery.
We’ve fasted and prayed.
We’ve shed tears (mostly me).
And we’ve still not been able to have children.
I feel so alone in this. I have felt alone since we moved to PG. I don’t feel like I fit in because I don’t belong to the “mom club”. I really don’t know how to handle other people’s children because I don’t have any of my own.
At the start of the new year it seemed like every week at church someone was having a baby blessed. And for one reason or another we ended right up front in full view. I silently cried through the whole thing. Not because I wasn’t happy for them, but because of the loneliness and the absence of the blessing I’ve prayed for.
So I began to close my heart to the pain I was feeling. I wouldn’t listen when other babies were being blessed and instead went elsewhere in my mind. I just wanted to shut it all out. When I would see a kid acting out or hear one crying I’d tell myself how happy I was to not have to deal with that. I began to tell myself how lucky I was to not have kids because we could travel, spend our money the way we wanted, spend our time the way we wanted, etc.
And little by little my heart closed.
We decided to go back to a fertility doctor to start IVF (IUI won’t likely be successful in our situation) and it doesn’t seem real. It doesn’t feel like we could have a child of our own.
Logically, if we go through the steps and all goes well, we’ll bring home a baby.
But emotionally I am closed off and unable to feel the connection. I don’t want to feel the pain.
I need to allow myself to hope. To open up. To allow myself to be vulnerable to the pain of loss that may come. Pain is not bad, it’s uncomfortable to be sure, but it can also make the success so much sweeter.