Monthly Archives: December 2011

Timing is Key (But Not Yours)

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Some tell me to just not to think about it.

I’m ‘traumatizing’ myself by talking and crying about my infertility.

What if I close my eyes and count to ten? Will I forget about it then?

What if I pretend all pregnant ladies with cute baby bumps are just fat? Will I be able to not think about it then?

What if I don’t stare at my nieces picture every time I go near the fridge? Will I just feel better that I didn’t get pregnant these last 2 years (or I might just lose weight)?

What if I pray more and ask God to help me not think about it? I can only hope that works.

There’s some days that I simply struggle to remain positive. Some days, like today, I am invincible; nothing can bring me down. Other days… Not so much. I have faith but some times my faith only lasts me till 10:30 am.

Trust me- I want to get over this. I don’t want to feel bad about myself any longer. I don’t want to feel less of a woman. I don’t want to feel bad every time I hear of another ‘unplanned’ or ‘surprise’ pregnancy. I want to move on and be happy.

Like many say, “I don’t want to survive, I want to thrive” through my days, weeks, months. I want to be able to smell the roses and fall in love with life.

I want just that and I’m going to get it.

Taking medicine in hopes to get pregnant does alter plans such as these. Letting things happen vs. getting things done (cause’ then the meds were for granted), is a battle. How to just let it go and not expect it to happen when every day of the month has been premeditated by your meds and your doctor?

So now I am at the point where I simply need His guidance and complete sanity. I cannot do this alone. This is overwhelming, this is tiring, this is a lonely, scary road, and I just need Papa.

I’ve realized that letting go (for me) means letting go of the medication for now. We’ve decided we’d give the meds three cycles and call it quits (this is our second cycle). I can finally rest in knowing that if it’s Gods will to let us conceive, then it will happen when it happens.

Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand.

Proverbs 19:21

I do sound very convincing and mature about it, but trust me, I will probably need to re-read this post daily to remind myself just that.

Sometimes just not thinking about something won’t make it go away. God has placed a unique desire in each and every one of us to follow. We simply need to wait in His perfect timing to follow that very unique desire.

May he grant you your heart’s desire and fulfill all your plans!

Psalm 20:4

I pray that whatever you’re going through, whether it’s infertility, a desire to be married, a job promotion, or anything you are personally going through, that you find peace in knowing that He will grant the desires of your heart… In His perfect timing.

- Betty

Plan A, Plan B, and Faith

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If Plan A fails resort to Plan B.

Let me just start off by saying that our adoption wasn’t a If-Pregnancy-Fails-Adoption-Is-Our-Plan-B Plan. I tell my friends that it was more like a Plan A, Step 2. We intended on getting pregnant first then pursue an adoption ‘once we were settled in’. God clearly had different plans and so we skipped a step in our plan and we couldn’t be happier.

There’s a reason why I’m sharing this.

A few months ago, I briefly wrote that we were having some issues with a certain family member who was rude about us adopting. He was certainly not very understanding. When we finally had a chance to talk about it face to face  he said that to him adoption would probably be the last thing to consider to form a family.

His answer wasn’t shocking. As a matter of fact I know that adoption is probably the last thing to consider for many people- and that is okay. This post isn’t to make you feel guilty because you’re not adopting those needy children of the world who desperately need a parent (okay, the last part was ;]).

In our case, adoption wasn’t the last thing we’d consider. Adoption was going to happen for our family- I knew that at 17 years of age when I made sure my boyfriend (husband now) felt the same way before I continued a relationship with him. Many people think the terms ‘infertility’ and ‘adoption’ go hand in hand but is that the only reason they should? I hope not.

I don’t want to get into why adoption should or shouldn’t be your Plan A or Plan B because everyone is different on how we feel about starting a family. As you have read, I’m right in the middle- my heart is equally for adoption like it is to conceive.

The reason I chose to write about this was because I’m tired of getting the automatic reaction when told we’re adopting- the “oh, you can’t get pregnant?” words spill out of their mouths and a deep sigh of concern flutters over their faces.

I do have to admit that going into 2011 this year, adoption wasn’t the first thing on our mind. We were excited about getting pregnant. Once we realized that it wasn’t happening my husband and I started doing more research about adoption. We were intimated and scared. The information on the internet led us to believe that adoption was expensive and somewhat scary.  Thankfully we received advice by our friends (since they had adopted) and finally got started.

Never in a million years did my husband and I think we’d be adopting this early on in our marriage! We are just two early twenty year old newlyweds who wanted to start a family and now we are here!

So even though my heart aches at the fact that I am infertile and that sometimes hope in pregnancy is lost, I couldn’t be any happier that God led us to this part of our journey. My heart has expanded in ways I never imagined. My husband and I are simply grateful for this journey, even when the going gets tough, because at the end we’ll have our children and we hope that one day they learn that our plan in life will never compare to the one God has for them and if they could understand that, then we have done something right.

I often say that I don’t necessarily like God’s plan simply because I don’t know what it is. Faith tends to work that way, doesn’t it? If I had a choice on how my year turned out, it would have been differently but I’m sure not as brilliant as this upcoming year. I simply have to have faith that God is brewing up just the right thing for the right time and I simply just have to hang on for the ride.

So have faith and when things don’t go your way, just remember that God has something better than your Plan A, B, or even C!

P.S.- I sometimes throw temper tantrums when things don’t go my way, and sometimes that’s okay. ;-)

Dinosaurs, Owls, and Toys For Our Kids

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I am aware that the title for this post makes me sound like a crazy, infertile, insane, wanna be mom but I can’t help it.

I am in fact thinking of our children.

My heart breaks this Christmas Eve night.

My husband and I spent the day looking at websites with sweet faces of orphaned children.

Us, warm in our cozy little apartment with our 7 foot tall Christmas tree, simply waiting with open arms to welcome our child home.

The nostalgia that my son or daughter is not home, here with us, hits me. I’m hoping he or she feels loved in their foster home and simply praying that God provides their every single need.

The mystery behind this whole adoption process on who will be our children, their age, their sex, their personalities, makes this all the more harder to hold the excitement and the anticipation.

Every time I pass through the kids section at a store, I can’t help but wonder what their room will be decorated as- will he like dinosaurs? will she like owls? I wonder if he’ll like this toy? My guest bedroom feels like an empty canvas and all we need is our children to be the artistes.

All I think of lately is my children- the one’s that will call me mom, the ones I’ll care for and love, and the very same ones that are thought of so dearly before I get to meet them.

It’s such a love I simply can’t describe but one that reminds me so clearly of the love Abba Father has for us.

So this Christmas, in the very same spirit of the birth of our Savior be reminded of the very same reason we are saved- through adoption.

May you be blessed and Merry Christmas to you and yours.

Chasing Pink Lines

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I took pregnancy test on Friday. I could have waited an extra day to see if my period would show, but I didn’t.

I wanted to see if it would come out positive so I could somehow gift that to my husband on Christmas day. Wrapping little baby socks in wrapping paper and placing it under the Christmas tree in a nice little bow; it was all planned out. I couldn’t wait to know.

I now know I am not pregnant this month.
I’m not surprised.
I am not disappointed.
I am not sad.
I am not let down (by the medicine or God).
I am fine.
I went straight from the bathroom to my room and went back to cuddle in bed. I grabbed my phone and went on the adoption websites looking for waiting children. There is where I found disappointment, sadness, and even surprised that some of these children are still waiting to be adopted.

Surprisingly my heart hurt more there than with yet another negative pregnancy test.

The more we read about these children and the closer we are to adopting, the more I re-think my need to be pregnant. Since we decided to be open on children with special needs my plate would be full the first year or so. Adding a pregnancy and eventually a new born baby to the mix will definitely be overload.

Last night my husband and I cuddled in bed and talked about names for baby D. We saw her on the website a few weeks ago and heard through the grapevine of her additional information. Hoping she’d be in our home soon, I am eager to be her mama. To help her heal, to help her grow, and to love her through every step of the process. Baby D needs a mama and a papa to recover.

———————-

I feel sick though.

I’ve overwhelmed myself with chasing pink lines on pregnancy tests.

It’s as if for these last two years that’s all I’ve wanted to see- double pink lines on a urine stick.

I’m sure that’s not what God called me to hope on.

The more I realize that there might just be a chance that I will never get pregnant, the more I realize that I am finally letting go of my own agenda.

This month I do admit, I expected to be pregnant. I did everything right (or so I thought). It also certainly doesn’t help that pregnancy symptoms are almost the same as menstrual symptoms. I am unsure on what the next step is.

I am not myself. The medicine has imbalanced my hormones in ways I never expected and that’s says a lot considering I am a crazy hormonal woman. My emotions are all out of whack, my feelings, thoughts, and even body is foreign and I’m wondering just how much of this I am willing to take all for the sake of hopefully getting pregnant.

The more I ask God to help me not think of being pregnant or wanting it, the more God repeats Himself to me “I’m going to blow your mind away”.

I’m holding on to that promise.

Ever have those moments when all you have to do I remember His promises to you and gather strength from that?

This Long, Long Journey

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I feel less of a woman.

My inability to conceive a child naturally has brought me to underestimating depths of cycling thoughts.

I know I am not less of a woman though as I remind myself who I am in Christ. Nonetheless I somehow find myself wallowing in those words.

A few weeks ago I let my mother in law know about my situation. The pregnancy of my sister in law (married to my husbands brother) left my husbands side of the family jumping for joy in the beginning of the year as I struggled to find answers on why we weren’t conceiving. Now, with the adoption process underway, our niece born and our obvious unsuccessful attempt at trying to conceive, the pressure to explain furthermore to his family was on.

I told my mother in law about my tumor that caused me to be infertile. I told her about my infertility and made sure the pressure to conceive a child of our own was gone. She was shocked. She seemed sadden and certainly my snarky way to break the bad news didn’t help. My mother in law didn’t seem too happy in the beginning about adoption so naturally I took offense to it. Surely being pressured to try conceiving naturally after my sister in law got pregnant so easily wasn’t so nice to live up to either.

I now find myself here. The point where modern medicine takes over this infertility taboo and puts it to the test. I’m where I never thought I’d be. I find myself now taking drugs that make me have hot flashes and vomit all for the sake to have a shot at pregnancy. I find myself knowing that if this medication works the chances of having twins is real because that’s what others have experienced. I find myself counting the days of my cycle and taking ovulation tests to see if today marks the day. I find myself here- looking into ‘fertility’ treatments to cure my infertility and that makes me feel less of a woman.

There I stood a few months ago, on the other side of the road thinking of how desperate some woman seemed to become pregnant. I saw how some invasive treatments seemed too overwhelming to consider just for the chance to conceive. I thought just how far fetched IVF, IUI, Clomid, Provera, etc etc were… And now I stand here considering some, taking some, and wondering just how far I will go.

I’m now understand those “desperate” woman. I feel like one of them but the more my heart and spirit understand adoption the less (slowly) my heart needs to be pregnant to feel like a woman. It’s all a process. A hard, long, exhausting but all so rewarding process. I’ve had to humble myself through this journey especially through writing it and sharing it.

I pray for the hearts of those women who are walking a similar journey as I am. I understand the hardships, the heartbreaks and the disappointments that come with infertility. I know I haven’t been infertile as long as others but I’m beginning to see it a whole lot like other women have. I pray that we find peace in knowing that God already planned this journey for us. I pray we find truth and wisdom and strength. I pray we find our identity not in our inability to conceive but instead in something greater.

I ask you to join me in prayer for other woman and even men, marriages, and families. Infertility doesn’t define us but it somehow finds a way to affect our way of thinking.