Reclaiming Joy

 

    Justin and I started our journey to become parents almost 3 years ago, but really the journey for me began much earlier than that. I cannot remember a time when I didn’t want to be a mother. Playing house was a big part of my childhood. I remember telling people when I was in high school and college that if I had to choose between my dream job and being a mom, I would be a mom. Motherhood to me was my number one dream job anyway.

When I graduated from college in 2007 at the age of 22, I felt like I was already behind in achieving this dream. My visions of the future included meeting my husband in college, so I started wondering if my life plan was doomed to fail. In reality, this was insane; at 22, I was nowhere near ready to be a mom and if I had married any of the clowns I dated in college, my life would have taken a much different path, probably a disastrous one. But that was the first time I can remember being fearful that I might not be able to have kids.

As I continued to date while starting my first career, these fears grew as the years ticked by and no one turned out to be “the one.” Again, I definitely did not need to marry any of those fools, but with each relationship that ended, I felt the clock ticking. Then, at the beginning of 2014, a few months shy of turning 29, I met Justin. It didn’t take long for me to feel like he was finally someone truly worth spending the rest of my life with, and in 2017 at the age of 32, we got married. Suddenly, my fears of not being able to have a baby jumped to the forefront of my mind.

If you can relate to this part of my story, you are not alone. Society today paints a very confusing picture about the timeline for women to have kids. You will hear, “You’re so young; you have plenty of time!” in one ear, and “You better hurry up and have a baby before you get too old!” in the other. I literally had one doctor tell me at 32 that I had lots of time to get pregnant and should not be concerned about being able to conceive, and now at 35, just 3 years later, my pregnancy is considered “advanced age.” The truth of the matter is, there’s no right age to become a parent, and there’s no guarantees of fertility even when you’re 22. It is possible that I would have struggled to get pregnant no matter when I started trying, so the best we can do is trust God’s timing for the entire plan- meeting your match, getting married, starting a family, or whatever it is you are trying to achieve. He’s the only one who knows when the timing is best.

Because I was already a few years into my 30s, I had told Justin I wanted to start trying for a baby right away. We did wait about 6 months, and then we launched into this crazy world of “trying to conceive.” Society romanticizes it big time: “Oh, I bet you guys are having a blast trying!” *Insert wink face* The reality is much less romantic. I was tracking every possible signal my body could give me to determine the best times to try. I was reading books, articles, and constantly talking with friends who were in the same stage as me. The fun of being on this journey with my husband did not last long, and the longer it took, the more my anxiety grew. It doesn’t really matter if you’ve struggled for months or years trying to conceive, that anxiety is the same. You can’t help but fear there is something broken inside of you.

A few months into this process, my mom mentioned to her doctor that her daughter, now almost 33, was trying to get pregnant and concerned about her fertility. Most doctors will not even start to talk about fertility testing until you’ve been trying for a year, but thankfully this doctor recognized that at 33, it might be worth investigating now. In the summer of 2018, Justin and I began testing for infertility. I had a huge panel of bloodwork done- everything was normal. I had an incredibly excruciating HSG procedure to determine if my uterus was shaped correctly and my tubes were open- everything looked good. Justin had an analysis of his sperm- his numbers came back great. I had my progesterone levels tested to make sure I was ovulating- that was great, too. On paper, everything seemed to be working fine. But as we continued to try that summer, nothing happened.

If you can relate to this part of my story, you can probably attest to the fact that having unexplained infertility is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, I was thinking, “Everything is in working order. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to get pregnant eventually!” On the other hand, I was wondering, “Then why isn’t this working? If I knew what the problem was, at least that would explain why.” All I had at that point was what God was doing or not doing; either He was allowing me to struggle with infertility, or He was purposely causing it. Neither of those scenarios matched up with the God I knew to be loving and forgiving and a provider of blessings. I didn’t know how to feel, and it only caused me to struggle even more with anxiety at never being a mom.

At the beginning of fall that year, my doctor referred me to a reproductive specialist. Justin and I had a meeting with him to discuss possible fertility treatments. He looked over all of our tests and expressed confidence that he would have me pregnant by the end of the calendar year. He told me that I was to completely stop tracking all of the fertility indicators I’d been obsessed with for months, and to call him at the start of my next cycle to begin the first level of protocol. With an action plan finally in place, I felt myself relax a bit. The control freak in me was relieved that we could finally do something about the problem we were facing.

Then a miracle happened. Because I had stopped all my tracking, I woke up one morning and realized I didn’t know when my next cycle was supposed to start. I opened my tracking app on my phone and saw that it should’ve started the day before. My cycle was not incredibly regular, so I just figured it would start at some point that day. When I got home from the gym and there was still no sign, I decided to take a pregnancy test to just end my own speculation. I was certain it would be negative, so when that little window said, “YES,” I dropped to the floor of my bathroom in tears. I ran out to the living room to show Justin the test and then fell on his chest and wept. We had finally done it.

I spent one blissful week imagining finally being a mom. My doctor brought me in for an ultrasound and bloodwork to make sure everything was good, since I’d been working so hard for my fertility all summer. The first round looked great, so she scheduled me for follow-up bloodwork to make sure my hormone levels were doubling. I just couldn’t believe that right as we were about to start fertility treatments, this miracle happened. Justin chalked it up to my reduced anxiety because I had stopped obsessing over all the tracking. It didn’t matter either way: we were going to be parents!

Then I woke up Sunday morning, six days after that positive pregnancy test, with spotting. I immediately panicked. I tried to remind myself that the doctor said it was totally normal. Justin reminded me of the same when I told him. But I couldn’t help drowning in my fears that something was very, very wrong.

The spotting hadn’t stopped when, the next day, my doctor called with the follow-up bloodwork results: my hormone levels were dropping. She said this didn’t necessarily mean anything and asked if I had any other pregnancy loss symptoms. I told her about the spotting. She scheduled me for another round of bloodwork. I couldn’t finish my day at work with my mind preoccupied with this, so I had Justin meet me at the lab for the blood draw and then went straight home. I didn’t have to wait for the results to come back; that evening, I started bleeding in earnest. I was up all night with terrible cramping, and then next day, the doctor called to confirm that my hormone levels were still dropping. I was miscarrying.

If you can relate to this part of my story, I am so sorry you are a member of this club. It is large and secret, and no one wants to be a member yet so many women are. It carries a shame with it that it shouldn’t, and I have always wished people would normalize it because it’s so common. For me, I struggled a lot with feeling grief over a pregnancy that lasted one week. I knew women who had miscarried after several weeks, after hearing a heartbeat, after months of preparing for a child. That one week didn’t really give me much time to become attached. The tiny white speck I saw in that ultrasound wasn’t even big enough to have a heartbeat yet. Why should I feel so shattered over something so small?

Here’s the thing about pregnancy loss, at least for me. The moment that pregnancy test said, “YES,” I was a mom. I was attached. I was IN LOVE. My pregnancy didn’t need to last weeks or months for it to be the loss of my child. I didn’t need to see that little peanut on an ultrasound or hear that heartbeat to know that was a life inside me. Whether your loss happens days, or weeks, or months in, it is still a loss. It was very real and you deserve the chance to grieve and mourn. You don’t have to push it down because of some perceived reason that your loss is not as bad as someone else’s. Loss is loss, and it’s okay to feel it and be real about it. It took me too long to figure that out.

I spent two days in bed and then I decided I needed to get on with my life. My doctor recommended that Justin and I not try to get pregnant for two months after the miscarriage, and then try on our own for a few months before pursuing fertility treatments again. We had gotten pregnant on our own once, so there was a good chance it would happen again. But I mostly spent the next few months in a fog, not really grieving my loss because I felt I didn’t deserve to, and not really understanding the point of what had happened. We were about to start treatments; why would God allow something only to have it taken away? I started shutting God out, going through the motions of my faith: attending church, doing Bible study homework, going to Women’s Ministry events, but not letting anything sink into heart level. I still couldn’t shake the idea that God was either too weak to stop what was happening, or cruel for causing my pain.

After our two month break, I insisted we start trying again. I was months away from turning 34- there was no time to lose. But inside, I was petrified. All I could see was a lose-lose situation: if we didn’t get pregnant, it would be deeper disappointment; if we did, then I would just be terrified of another miscarriage. But I still wanted to be a mom, so I powered through- until that first cycle didn’t end in a pregnancy.

Up to that point, I had experienced a pretty normal emotional rollercoaster each month we tried: building hope as my fertility window approached, disappointment when I didn’t end up pregnant, then a recovery and hope again as we approached another chance to try. But after that first failure following my miscarriage, I did not rebound into hope. I stayed in that downtrodden place where nothing was going to work out, and the fog that had set in after the miscarriage became a simmering anger. I was mad at EVERYTHING. I could not seem to recover and feel like myself again, but thankfully I recognized my struggle and almost immediately started talking to my husband about the need for help. I ended up setting an appointment with my doctor and she prescribed me a low-dose antidepressant.

But even though I started feeling like myself again soon after starting the medication, there was a part of me that struggled to accept my need for them. I felt like a failure in my faith. Why couldn’t I just lean into God to get me out of this funk? I carried shame around about it for several weeks, not telling my mom that I had taken this step. I didn’t want her to see me as a weak Christian.

If you can relate to this part of my story, I have something very important to say to you: God is not ashamed of you if you need medication to handle depression and anxiety. They do not make you a bad Christian. They do not mean your faith is weak. God is the Creator of all things, and that includes the science and medicine that people all over the world rely on to fight disease- both of the body and of the mind. My problem wasn’t my faith. My problem was that my brain’s chemistry had been so altered by my experience that I couldn’t dig out of the fog that was in there to even access my faith and work things out with God. Once I had tackled that first problem, I was able to return to my faith in a way that didn’t go through the motions, but that allowed me to take my emotions- all of them, even my anger- to God and work out all that I had been through with Him. I will never regret my decision to seek medical help for my depression, because I know that is part of God’s provision for me and I would never be where I am right now without it.

I took this same mentality as we approached starting fertility treatments again. At my appointment to discuss my anxiety with my doctor, she encouraged me to reach out to our reproductive specialist again when I started feeling like myself. I was ready to do that in the winter of 2019, and we began our first round of treatment in March. I had struggled with starting treatment for a similar reason to starting antidepressants: Was this playing God? Was this taking our situation into my own hands and trying to force something to happen? I realized it wasn’t. Again, God is the Creator of everything, so He has provided these medical treatments for us to solve the problem of infertility. At the end of the day, so many things need to go right for those treatments to work, that God is 100% in the mix even when doctors and medicine are involved.

We spent much of 2019 working our way up the treatment ladder. We tried a protocol for a few months, my body would respond well to the hormones, but at the end of each cycle I was still not pregnant, so after a couple of tries we would go to the next level of treatment. We did this through three different protocols, without any success. In the fall, our specialist recommended that our next step be IVF. I knew I wanted to go all in, but the holidays were coming, so we decided to wait until the beginning of 2020 to start. We got all our paperwork in order and then we waited.

If you have been on the infertility journey for a while, if you have tried every protocol out there without success, I know the struggle you are in of waiting and trying and waiting and still nothing changes. I tangled with God for months over that process. We wrestled. We fought. But I never walked away from Him, no matter how frustrated or angry or confused I felt. The further into the process we went, the more I knew that nothing and no one was going to get me through it except Him. I had no idea how things would turn out. I knew that it could end in a baby, but I also knew it could end without one. I kept wondering how that could possibly be good. But here’s the thing: God is good. He doesn’t know how to be anything else. He can only give good things to His children. In our human capacity, we can’t see it. We can’t imagine how any good could come out of the mess we are surrounded by. But God is able to take all those broken pieces and turn them into something spectacular that we couldn’t possibly imagine. All I had to do was look in my rearview mirror to see that it was true. Every busted relationship and shattered piece of my heart that I never thought would heal was put together in a beautiful story that brought Justin and me together- that story stretches back into the 70s when our parents were in college, that’s how detail-oriented our God is. We simply cannot see how everything will fit together, but God sees the whole thing, start to finish, and He will make sure it exceeds everything we could think to ask for.

We have almost reached the climax of this story. But first the final leg of the journey: IVF. It is no joke, people. When that box of hormones and injection supplies arrived, I was overwhelmed. It was HUGE. I organized everything, laid out the schedule provided by our specialist, and in February, I began my hormones. This woman who started this journey as a GIANT needle phob finished it as a woman who could give herself injections and go to blood work appointments alone. IVF is a two month process, so I had my egg retrieval on March 13th. It was extremely successful- 23 eggs retrieved and the next day the lab called to tell us that 20 of them had fertilized. I was amazing and baffled: grateful we had some many embryos developing, but seriously confused about why we were having such trouble conceiving this whole time.

IVF requires that fertilized eggs develop for five days before transfer, and as each day went by, the updates from the lab started to tell a story of what might have been our issue all along: each day, we had less and less viable embryos. After five days, we had one ready for transfer, after the maximum seven, we only had two more. Out of 20 fertilized eggs, only three made it to a viable stage for transfer. Was this why we’d been struggling for almost three years? Truthfully, we’ll never have a definite answer to that question. It would require a bunch of testing that probably isn’t worth the money or emotional turmoil it would cause. But having only three chances to make this work suddenly felt daunting.

If you were paying attention to the date of my egg retrieval, you may know what’s coming next. During that week that our embryos were developing, the entire country went into shut down mode due to COVID-19. The day before I was supposed to have my transfer, the office called to tell me that they were not doing any transfers at this time, and that my embryos would be frozen until the situation was safer for the office to resume treatment. So yet again, I was asked to just wait. It was excruciating, after every obstacle we’d tackled to get to this point. It was so hard for me, knowing those little snowflake babies were just sitting there waiting while my womb remained empty. But I settled myself on the fact that it was probably for the best that I not start a pregnancy that we had sunk so much time, emotion, and money into during a dangerous pandemic. I leaned into God even more to sustain me for another extension to our wait.

We finally got the go-ahead in May, and began preparation for a frozen embryo transfer scheduled for June 10th. Looking back now, the time has gone so fast, but in the moment, it felt like an eternity as we awaited each step. After the transfer, I had labs to test for pregnancy hormones on June 19th- they were positive. I had repeat draws on the 21st and 23rd- my hormones were more than doubling each time. Then I had to wait until July 13th for an OB scan with my reproductive specialist- that is the day we saw our baby for the first time and heard the heartbeat pounding strong! I was finally ready to transition to a traditional OB.

I felt cautious joy at each step of the journey. I didn’t want my past to steal our excitement and celebration, but I also knew all too well the realities of pregnancy loss. I didn’t want to blind myself to that truth either. So I focused on taking things one step at a time, processed my emotions with God, and soaked in His truth to cut through the lies that my thought spirals tried to suck me into. The more I did this, the more secure I felt in God. Because here’s the thing, I knew I wouldn’t feel secure in this pregnancy until I felt secure in Him.

If you relate to this part of my story, we have reached the main reason for this (super long) tale and also the reason I’m launching this blog. If you have ever journeyed through pregnancy to meet your own Rainbow Baby, or if you are on this journey right now, then you know how hard it is to reclaim the joy of being pregnant that anxiety has stolen from you. You may have spent your entire pregnancy suffering from the anxiety that you might experience another loss; you may be feeling that anxiety right now. I understand. I will never try to convince anyone that I don’t have anxiety over losing this pregnancy, because I do, all too often. But I don’t want that to be my whole story, and I don’t want that for you either. The devil has allowed us to think that our pregnancy loss is something shameful to be hidden for far too long. He’s convinced us that we can never fully be free of the fear of going through that again, because it’s an unfortunate reality of the pregnancy journey. But we can’t let him win like this anymore. We have to bring all of this into the light- the loss, the anxiety, and all of our questions. We have to let the light of God shine on them and reveal the truth to us: that there’s nothing about us, past or present, that means we don’t deserve to be moms; that there’s nothing shameful about the loss we experienced because it’s not our fault; that there’s nothing so broken, within and outside of us, that God can’t fix into something beautiful. It’s time to reclaim our joy, ladies.

Last week, I had my first appointment with my OB doctor and got to hear my Rainbow Baby’s heartbeat for the second time. I’m a few days past 14 weeks, into my second trimester at last. My husband and I have shared our miraculous news with extended friends and family, and have started having some real conversations to prepare for parenthood. After almost three years, it feels like it’s taken forever to get here, and yet it also feels like we got here so fast. I’m a jumble of emotions everyday, and I’m always struggling to keep joy at the forefront.

I hope you will join me on this journey. I have been writing letters to our Rainbow Baby since the day that embryo was transferred to my womb. I have shared the first 13 here for you to see what this journey has been like for me so far. Spoiler alert: it’s been complicated. I will continue to share them as we move deeper into the preparations for our miracle to arrive. I will also be sharing lessons I’m learning with God along the way on how I can continue striving to replace my anxiety with joy. Spoiler alert: it’s going to be complicated. I by no means have it down yet, and I’m pretty sure I won’t have it down in 6 months when this baby arrives. But if you want to let go of your anxieties and reclaim the joy God has for you, then I would be glad for the company as we walk this journey together. I’m confident God has a beautiful rainbow in store for us along the way.