WHAT INFERTILITY ROBBED ME OF

image by: http://worldofwonder.net

Many of us who have suffered with infertility, especially those who have suffered for as long as I have, can, I believe , identify with this post.

Infertility can consume you and sadly to the detriment of positive things in your life. As my struggles progressed, I found out that I was never able to be as happy as I knew I could be. No matter how joyful a situation I was in, there was always this underlying heaviness, this sadness and yearning to become a mom, that robbed me of the opportunity to be truly happy.

Loneliness also crept in because I had pushed all my friends away. I thought some would never understand my pain because they were parents and for others, I was ashamed to open up the window of my soul to them, so that they would know what infertility was doing to me.

I would tell myself that whenever I had a child, I would be so blissfully happy that it would feel like Christmas every day, and so I would postpone being truly happy until then. 

I was happy, very happy when my son came, but blissfully? I am not quite sure, because for a while I just did not want to put my son down for fear that I would turn around and then he was not there. I remember when he just began to sleep through the night, I awoke one morning, and upon remembering that I did not have to get up that night to tend to him, I got up in panic, where is my son? I thought, his he still here, is he alive? I felt that finally overcoming infertility was a joke that someone was playing on me, it was not real, it was a dream from which I would soon awake.

Infertility has robbed me of the ability to be as happy as I know I could be, here on earth, as this for me is still very much a struggle. (I say here on earth, because Christ has promised us that our ultimate happiness and joy is with him in heaven). I still have to make great efforts to remain present in a joyful situation enough to really enjoy the moment, because many times I find myself over-processing and over-evaluating things, which robs me of this. After all, that was pretty much how the years that I struggled with infertility were. I would worry that my treatments would not work. I would worry if I would ever get pregnant and wonder if I was pregnant many months, to the point where I would over-process and over-evaluate my symptoms to total exhaustion.

I am happy to report though, that infertility did not only rob me, it gave me some things that has added to the whole person that I am today. It has given me the ability to show much more compassion to people who are hurting. It has given me the ability to hold my judgement and most importantly not try to fix their problems for them. The thing is, the situations we hurt from cannot be fixed and will not be fixed, until we allow them to be. In allowing them to be, this means that we have learnt all the lessons that were meant to be learned from these hurts and we are now in a position to move on with our lives, being better individuals on account of them. I am able to say this with such conviction, because I remember in my struggles, the privileged who were aware, often tried to help me by telling me not to hurt so much. When my mom found out the pain that infertility had me in, she quickly admonished me to, ‘live in the sunshine’ I was angry, how could I live in the sunshine when there was nothing but dark rainy clouds in my heart? I wanted help ofcourse, but not that kind of help. It is now, looking back, I am realising that I resisted this help, only because my process was not complete, I needed further refinement, there was simply more for me to gain from this pain.

It is my charge to all who read this post, to embrace your struggles, hurts and pain as difficult as they may be, because many of us who have gone through these things would not change what we have learnt from them and the people we have become because of them.

Be RENEWED as a result of your struggles.