I feel like I'm smooshed under a giant weight that I can't shake. I can't wiggle from beneath it. I can't even push it off my chest for a minute to gasp for air. I feel like a dog tethered to a pole...mere feet from the most delicious steak I've ever seen. I want it so badly. I can taste it. But I just can't get to it. Even if I got the world's best running start, that darn pole and the chain restraining me would whip me painfully back into reality the second I got too close.
I. Want. A. Baby. How many times can I write about it before you stop choosing to read my sobs? The want sucks the very life from me sometimes. There are hours that I lie in bed or sit in my chair and float off to dreamland where my sweet angel is in my arms. I am rocking my baby so sweetly and quietly just waiting for Daddy to get home. It's peaceful, serene, and I feel complete. It's more than a daydream. That picture gets more vivid every day! And I can't help but wonder if, instead of that picture being a truthful reality in my future, I'll just spiral into some psychotic fugue state where I don't know which end is up. Am I crazy? Will this want *make* me crazy?? It's not as though I want something completely ridiculous or inconceivable (well I guess so far it's been technically inconceivable...). I. Want. A. Child.
A dear friend of mine recently had a sweet baby boy. He's beautiful. And the day he was born my heart just soared for her! My first question: How does it feel to be a mommy? Her answer:
Oh my gosh it was the most overwhelming feeling I've ever had. As soon as I felt them lift him out and showed him to me over the curtain I just started crying from all the emotions I was having! It is amazing! It's such a blessing and confirmation of who I'm supposed to be as a person...
In one instant after reading that text I had two VERY intense feelings. First, an overwhelming excitement for my sweet friend. A blissful happiness for the beauty she is experiencing. I told her "It's what you were created for after all!", to which her response was, "You were too!".
And in that same instance, the breathe was sucked right from my body. I couldn't breathe. Not a single muscle in my face moved, but an avalanche of tears began streaming down my face. It wasn't because my dear friend acknowledged my want. She knows what Jonathan and I have been through trying to conceive and she knows me at my core. No, it wasn't because of the acknowledgement. It was terror. Overwhelming terror. Because even though I can say until I'm blue in the face that I'm "trusting the plan", my poor ignorant human heart is overwhelmingly influenced by the idea that maybe, even though I believe to the core of my being that I was indeed created for motherhood, I will never feel complete in this lifetime. Because lets be real. It's certainly a possibility. I can't see the future...can you?
I think I've been saying for the last 2 years that I think "our time is near". Every month I tell Jonathan with a sweet smile that "this could be our month". When the middle of my cycle comes, I think "Could this one be Maggie? Is this egg my Greysen?". And even though I'm grateful to be having a normal cycle for the first time maybe ever, and I'm actually ovulating thanks to 0.25mg of a "magic pill" once a week, when that fateful "Day 1" starts, I am crushed. Can you imagine? I have been crushed somewhere in the ballpark of 50 times in the last 4+ years. Back to back to back. Crushed. And I stupidly am at it for more immediately after. I brush myself off, Jonathan helps me dry my tears, and we start charting that BBT again. Nearly every morning for the last 4 years I wake up thinking about conceiving while taking my basal body temperature. I stumble to the bathroom and take my prenatal vitamin which makes me mildly queasy all day long. And I've spent hours on the internet calculating possible due dates, ovulation days, luteal phases, and doing more research on reproduction, pregnancy, and labor/delivery than I care to share. I could write the book by now...
If you've spoken with me personally about my struggle with infertility, chances are you got "Resilient Rachel". You probably got the rehearsed response of, "We know God has a plan and we are holding fast to that. It's going to happen in His perfect timing!" <---insert exclamation points and smiley emoticons. What you haven't heard is what I'm really thinking behind that porcelain resilient outer shell. When you say "I'm praying for you! I know you're going to be a mommy soon...I can feel it!", I'm really thinking this:
"Can you really feel it? Please tell me you have some sort of direct line and that you're getting something that I'm not getting. Because each month I swear I hear Him say 'Rachel, how much more will I bless you my child?', and yet each month it's a hard and fast no to my heart's most deep seated desire. So I'm beginning to think that the 'still small voice' I'm hearing is just my ridiculously intense desire to be a mommy manifesting itself into some sort of weird subterfuge. I could spend my life saying 'I think our time is near' and draw my last breath with empty arms. Then what? What does my life look like then? A mask of happiness and content worn over a defeated and empty me. A life not fulfilled. A soul incomplete for the entirety of my time on earth because I never got to feel what it feels like to wrap my arms around my baby. I never got to do what I was created for..."
And even though on the outside it looks like I'm doing a phenomenal job of keeping the faith, when that self talk starts, I lose it inside. That plastered on smile has become second nature to me. Because really what I want to do when you tell me that you know I'm supposed to be a mother...is break into an ugly cry and wither into a puddle on the floor. I want you to feel how much my heart and soul hurt when I think that maybe this will never happen for me. Adoption is a no, we have yet to be able to conceive, and fertility treatments are astronomical for a double income family...let alone a single income family living off of little more than student loans. All the doors are shut. It will take nothing short of a miracle if we are to become parents. I know, I know. Conception is a miracle in itself. But seriously. When you've been trying for 4+ years, when you've suffered an ectopic pregnancy and had to sign papers to snuff out the one life you managed to miraculously conceive, when you've been through countless prodding and invasive (yet unsuccessful) fertility treatments. When all of those things happen and you're still right where you were 4 years ago... You get the picture I'm sure...
Some days I feel like I'm becoming hardened to this. Like maybe what's really happening here is I'm morphing into this sad shell of myself. I sometimes feel like I'm in danger of losing who I am in the midst of this struggle. Because who I am right now is a longing mother. I am a mother without a child. A mommy without a baby. Is that who I'm fated to be forever? The unfulfilled dreamer? The sad shell of Rachel Womack whose dream never came true for real? Oh that hurts my insides. Surely that can't be true...
And yet...
Even if it makes me a masochist, I go right on hoping with every fiber of my being that one day my eyes will see those two pink lines again. I go on clinging to this dream I have for me and Jonathan. And there are days that I drift off into that dreamland of my ghosted future and I think, "Well...if God grants me this, happy just doesn't cut it as a describing word. I seriously might just explode." And I might. I might just explode. I'm not sure my heart could contain the joy. There would be nothing fake or inauthentic about the plastered on smile you would see on my face. Deliriously happy. Deliriously. Ecstatic. You might just see that glimmer of the old Rachel Womack coming back into clarity...
Wait With Me,
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