Working through the stages...

Anger and sadness seem to inhabit me today. I woke up feeling good; the weather has been amazing these past few days and its incredible how much better I feel with fresh air blowing through the house. Then we went to church and as they sang How Great is Our God I couldn’t help but begin to cry, because I just don’t feel that way right now. I began to think back to that last day I had with Lily, holding my stomach in the back of an ambulance as contractions painfully rippled through my body and I prayed that somehow my baby would not be lost. My daughter is dead. The baby that we so desired, made so many sacrifices to have, and prayed countless prayers over is dead, and I absolutely do not feel that God is great right now. And on top of that we have infertility to contend with, all those well meaning people who say, oh you guys can try again…I just want to scream at them no, no we can’t, it’s not that simple. The injustice of infertility is maddening and the deep pain it inflicts is intense. To know the irresponsible teenager rubbing her perfect pregnant belly in the grocery store can so easily have what we have paid thousands and made so many sacrifices to have yet still eludes us is an incredibly heartbreaking reality to accept. And I would be lying if I said it doesn’t make me feel incredibly angry.

I’ve been trying to work through my grief not just about losing Lily, but also losing the chance to have a biological child with my husband. This is not an easy thing to accept, and unless you have been there you cannot begin to understand the pain of working through this. It is letting go of ever seeing your spouse’s eyes or nose or smile in the face of your child. It is so many other countless things I can’t even begin to explain properly.

I took at knitting class yesterday and for the most part really enjoyed myself, but as it always seems to do when you get a group of women together, the conversation flowed to their children and for one lady in the group her baby. I sat there trying hard to focus on my knitting, telling myself breath deeply, stay strong, do not break down, while also wondering how they’ll respond if they ask if I have children and I tell them the truth. Thankfully, someone in the group made a mistake on their pattern and the conversation diverted to other things. It’s not that I don’t love to talk about Lily, I do, but most people have a hard time listening to someone talk about the baby they lost. It is a reality of life that the general public would rather gloss over and pretend doesn’t exist.

As we drove through town yesterday, I saw that that the Halloween stores have opened for the season and I felt such sadness. This time of year looks so much different than what I had expected. Instead of preparing for my first child’s birth, I am left grieving her and trying to prepare for how to honor her on her expected due date. My heart and soul ache deeply today for the child that I will never hold again. And while I so desperately want to be pregnant again and am so thankful for the gift of embryo donation and the amazing donor family we have been blessed with, at the same time I feel terrified of losing another child. Ultimately, we want a child to love, a little person that we can raise and call our own no matter how that occurs. Is that really too much to ask? So I’m sorry God, but today I need to feel this anger. I need to feel it so that ultimately I can let go of it.