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(This post is tough for me to write. I've written and deleted it several times now, honestly. So here it goes. Please be gentle. )
I am not a patient person. I am not patient, and I do not like to surrender control. I'm the type of person who sees an issue, sees something that needs to be done, and I want to tackle it right. now.
I've shared some of the story of my journey to FAM and my fascination with how my body works, but I'll be honest. It hasn't been smooth sailing.
The first couple of months went great. I began to trust my body, and everything looked great. We were avoiding pregnancy for the first few months.
And then, after discussing and praying and calculating, we decided to stop preventing pregnancy, and try to conceive our first little one.
And my "normal" cycles stopped. My charts have been all over the place, and I'm not ovulating.
Honestly? I'm frustrated. Frustrated and disheartened. Why isn't my body doing what it's supposed to do? Granted, it's only been four months. I know so many people have struggled for much, much longer. My heart goes out to them. As I said, I'm impatient.
I want babies at my breast, I want little feet, I want horribly disgusting diapers, I want challenges and emotions and hard decisions, I want sweet baby smell, I want waking up at three in the morning.
I am open to life. Very open. I am willing to carry, bear, and raise as many children as the Lord blesses us with. I believe all children are a blessing. All of them.
But what do you do when life just doesn't seem to come? What do I do when my body is fighting against my ideals and my dreams?
I've been, in the words of my darling husband, "grumpy." He's much less tightly wound then I am. Perhaps he has a deeper faith. He keeps reminding me that I need to trust in God, that He knows best. The other day, after a sobbing breakdown, Zeke set me down with a Bible, and told me to find some truth.
The Bible is pretty great for attitude adjustments, too, but Hunky Husband was too sweet (or too afraid of what my reaction would be) to suggest that I needed one of those.
"Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will exalt my God who is my Savior. The Sovereign LORD is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, he enables me to tread on the heights."
Habakkuk 3:17-19 (emphasis mine)Another cycle just ended, and my womb is still empty. Fruitless. There are no cattle in my stall.
I'm holding on to these verses. "Yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will exalt my God."
Of course, I don't have all the answers. I don't even know all the questions, for that matter. And I know that I will have a hard time rejoicing and exalting. A very hard time.
Pray for me, will you?
I will pray for you. I understand something of what you feel, as I lost the only child I am likely ever to have, through a stillbirth. I do not know why the Lord gives the crosses He does, and only He knows if he will call you to to put yours down. But you are right that He calls us to rejoice in Him, even--perhaps especially--when it is hard and we do not understand. By saying "rejoice in the Lord," you answered your own question.
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, I very much needed to read that verse from Habakkuk just now. In a different sense for me "there are no grapes on the vine," and I've been grumpy about it myself. I needed to read the reminder that verse gives us.
Thank you, Scott! I am so sorry to hear of the loss of your child. Thank you for the encouragement and kind words- I'm glad that you were filled by the verse as I was!
DeleteHave you been tested for PCOS? My wife has that condition and as a result we only had two children, as it hindered fertility. There are now ways to treat it that were unavailable at the time.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comment! I haven't yet been tested... not for anything. If my body is still not doing its thing for a year, we'll go and get tested then. It's so common to have wacky cycles after being on hormonal birth control (yet another thing I wish would have been made more clear to me... grr....) that I really think I need to just give my poor worn out body time to re-adjust. Even though I'd rather just let my impatience win. This waiting time... I tell ya. Full of suffering my way towards holiness.
DeleteI'm just starting out on the fun that is testing and doctor consultations. Like you, things got all wacky right when we were really thinking this was the month. I used fertilitycare.org to find a doctor that was used to working with FAM. So surprising how many regular docs have no idea about charting. God bless you!
ReplyDeleteI feel for you, girl. I got the basic blood tests done so far... and you're definitely right about doctors not really knowing about charting. I live in a pretty rural area, so I doubt that we'll have FAM-friendly docs in the area... but thank you for the link! Blessings to you, as well!
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