Noah's Rainbow

            This week is Infertility Awareness Week. It’s also my birthday week. I’m officially 38 years old. My birthday is typically a time of reflection for me, not only on the last year of my life, but on where my life has led me to so far. In my 38 years, I have grown into the person I am right now; all the heartbreaks, failures, achievements, and successes has brought me to this point. For the most part, this is truly something to celebrate. But I have also become slightly jaded about my birthday since starting my journey with infertility and loss. Each birthday was a marker of what I didn’t yet have, and another tick on the clock to a time when I would never be able to achieve that thing again. In these years of desperately longing for a baby, each birthday that passed was inching me closer to a time when my body literally would not be able to give me that child. There were times where I genuinely thought I had already reached that place...

       Idolatry may seem like it is a problem of biblical times, where people were worshiping actual idols made of wood or gold, expecting them to provide or save them in some capacity, even though they were objects created by human hands. But I assure you, it is very much a problem of today. A few weeks ago, my pastor spoke about idolatry and defined a god (little g) as “that which gives our life meaning, the thing we put our trust in.” If that thing is not God (big G), then we’re ensnared in the sin of idolatry. This means that modern day objects, titles, people, and achievements can all become idols for us, if we do not keep them in their rightful place beneath God when it comes to the thing we are trusting in the most. If we are trusting in our job to provide for us more than God, that’s idolatry. If we are looking to earning a higher degree as what will give our life meaning over God, that’s idolatry. If we are trusting in our spouse to care for us more than God...

       Last week, we talked about our need, as loss and infertility mamas, to grieve. To avoid our desire to stuff our emotions down and push past what we’re feeling about our journeys to motherhood. To truly lament our losses, whether it is our babies or our expectations or both, and process our grief with God. God wants us to be honest with Him about those feelings of grief and work through them with Him in a healthy way. One risk that we run, however, is getting stuck in the grieving process, allowing it to become wallowing and turn into something that is unhealthy. In the season following my miscarriage, I found myself lingering in my grief in unhealthy manners. When I first experienced the loss of my baby, I was sad, frustrated, angry, scared. I cried, I wailed, I yelled at God. All totally normal feelings following a miscarriage. All necessary actions for processing my grief. I was lamenting the way God wanted me to. But as time passed, there was a shift i...

            I struggled with grieving after my miscarriage. I had only known I was pregnant for one week. I was only five weeks along when it happened. I had friends who had lost pregnancies at further along than I was, and I knew people who had experienced late term losses, stillbirth, and infant loss. So when I started spotting, when I knew that this pregnancy wasn’t going to stick, I already began a dialogue in my head that was contrary to grieving. It’s so early. It’s not even far enough along for there to be a heartbeat yet. If you hadn’t taken an early test, you wouldn’t have even known you were pregnant. So many people have had losses much worse than this. Chemical pregnancies and miscarriage are so common. It shouldn’t be that big of a deal. But it was. We had been trying for almost a year. We had been through infertility testing for months already. We had a consult with a fertility specialist. We had been about to...