If you didn't already know, this week is National Infertility Awareness Week. Although I am now (15 weeks!!) pregnant with our sweet baby, getting here was one of the hardest processes my husband and I have ever gone through, and staying here is proving to be a little bit of a challenge as well. So I thought in honor of National Infertility Week, I would share my story. Maybe it can help someone else, or maybe it will just help me to get all my thoughts on paper, and if that's all that this does then that's okay too.
I married my high school love this past July in the beautiful beach wedding of my dreams, and I had only the highest hopes of how wonderful our life would be together. We had dated for six wonderful years before we married. He was and is my best friend and the only true love of my life.
He and I planned to wait a few years before trying for children, but we were lax on birth control and surprise in October, I was pregnant. It wasn't planned, but we were happy and thankful and we had a sweet discussion on how this would all be wonderful. I kept to myself about my pregnancy, quietly celebrating, as we weren't very far along, and a few weeks later I started bleeding.
In that instant, my life changed; I changed. I don't really know how to explain it, but I was so sad about the loss of the this little being. I bled large, painful clots and then collapsed in exhaustion. I knew what had happened, but I couldn't even say it out loud. I told my husband, and we didn't really talk about it. He didn't really know what to say, and I guess he didn't realize the impact it had on me. My husband is an engineer; a scientific man, and to him there was never any "proof" of a baby. So his simple response was, let's have another one.
And he moved on.
And I could not.
I was angry at him. Angry at my friends. Angry at my family. That no one noticed that I wasn't me anymore, that no one asked me what was going on. I felt the most alone I have ever felt in my life, and the months following my miscarriage were the worst months of my life. I withdrew from my husband, friends and family and isolated myself. I know now that I was depressed, but at that point I was too far in to realize.
Somehow, another miscarriage later, my husband and I picked up all the broken pieces and put them back together. I didn't think it would ever happen again, but that man loves me more than he should, and he saw through all my angry mess and fixed me. That isn't always the case. I have read many stories about couples who fall apart after failed pregnancies and the disarray that follows miscarriages, and I am thankful to have the husband that I do.
I lost friends because of my miscarriages or maybe more because of the person I became after my first miscarriage. I wasn't the happy, chipper, spunky, party-throwing friend that I once was. I was blue; I was down, and I needed a helping hand and shoulder to cry on. It's a sad lesson to learn that not all your friends are in it for more than the party, but that's okay too. It's another lesson I learned from all of this. That I do have a great family, a great best friend, and an amazing husband who are here for me no matter what. And now we have a sweet baby on the way who we can share all of our joy and triumph over adversity with.
"God blessed the broken road that led me straight to you."
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