Living in a pit with a heavenly view

One year ago yesterday John and I met our embryo donors. I remember because it's Vacation Bible School week at our church and last year I taught VBS the morning before we met them.

We were blessed by our donors who gave us four embryos to transfer. Their gift filled us with hope and expectation. I felt as though our next child was so close. Like I could almost reach out and touch her, my fingers just barely grazing her skin.

Nine months- how ironic- after that warm June day all four embryos were gone. Dead. All four beat the odds to survive the IVF thawing process, at least one implanted in my womb.... but none survived. We never got to meet our baby.

It's been three months now since I miscarried that one who implanted inside me. When people ask me how I'm doing I like to use an analogy. Maybe it will help someone else name something they're going through so I'll share it here. (If I've learned one thing through infertility it's that none of my experiences are unique. They are shared. They are common. They're so common they'd be boring if they weren't so painful.)

Living with infertility feels like living in a pit.

source.

Every cycle is like the sun rising and setting over the pit and with it my hopes. When it's daylight I think, "Maybe I can climb out of here!" or "Maybe someone will walk by and throw me a rope!" or "Maybe if I cry upwards loud enough, someone will hear me and rescue me!"

But every month, the sun sets on my pit. I have not found a way out. I am left in darkness. I sit down in the pit to weep and gather my strength to try again.

When I finally, FINALLY! found out I was pregnant last winter I climbed out of the pit into the glorious sun! I felt the warmth on my face, I lifted my hands to the heavens, I cried in victory and sheer relief!

Even as I stood in the sun, though, I knew I was just one small step away from the gaping mouth of the pit. Even in my joy, I could feel the greedy darkness lurking behind me. My biggest fear was that I would fall back inside.

The moment I lay on the ultrasound table as my doctor searched for a baby and then said, "I don't see anything" it was like someone pushed me, hard, right back into the pit.

I fell with a tremendous THUD. Initially it was all I could do to breathe. The wind was knocked right out of me. I lay gasping on the floor.  Then the shock wore off and the pain of my broken body set in. I writhed. I agonized.

It's been three months now and the agony has faded to a dull and constant ache. I broke a few bones in that fall; they're healing, but I don't think they all set exactly right. And... I'm still in the pit.

I've gone through all the stages of grief in this pit (and am still going through them). I've been angry, weepy, denial-y...

Something I've learned in the pit is how little there is to say about something like this and how good it is to be still before the LORD. At first I didn't really have anything to say because I was just so crushed. There were no words to express it. Then I didn't want to say anything because it would have just been a long string of angry expletives. I thought about bargaining with God to somehow coerce him into giving me a child, but I've been a Christian long enough to know that I'll never hold up any end of any deal I could ever make with him. Plus, what could I ever offer that he doesn't already have? And also: God doesn't work that way.

There is really so little to say about loss. It's not fair but what's fair? It's not right but it's happening. Let's just all say, "This is a nightmare. I hate everything. I'm going to go hide in the garage." (Anne Lamott, Stitches.)

Realizing how little there is to say about loss is quite difficult when you're a blogger and a talker and a general word-er. I kind of felt like I was shushed by God.

Thank God my faith starts with love. I know that shushing wasn't a sharp, "SHHH!" like a librarian scolding noisy kids between the book aisles. It was more like the way a mother scoops up and "shhhhhh"s her little child after a big tumble on the sidewalk and a skinned knee.

I'm still in the pit. I don't know when or how I'll ever climb out of it. But what I am learning is how to live here better than I have been. How to not be so angry about being here, how to accept sadness, how to embrace the idea that somehow living in the pit for however long is preparing me for something I can't see yet.

Truly, what can a person see from a pit? The sun. Clouds. Sometimes a patch of blue. Tiny stars in the night sky. The heavens. All you can see in the pit are the heavens.

Here I am. In the pit. All I can see are the heavens. All I can do is trust that my heavenly view is enough to sustain me for now.

"Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens;
Who created these?
He brings out the starry host one by one,
and calls them each by name.
Because of his great power and mighty strength,
not one of them is missing.

Why do you complain, Jacob?
Why do you say, Israel,
"My way is hidden from the LORD;
my cause is disregarded by my God"?

Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
The LORD is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He will not grow tired or weary,
and his understanding no one can fathom.

He gives strength to the weary
and increases the power of the weak.
Even youths grow tired and weary
and young men stumble and fall;
but those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
they will run and not grow weary,
they will walk and not be faint."
- Isaiah 40:26-31

xo