Patience has never really been “my thing”. When I want something, I want it now. I obsess over it. I live and breathe for it – I talk about it night and day, pace in the night plotting how I will get it. That “thing” I have been obsessing about is bringing a child into this world and this, is the story of my life, as I’ve fought to become a Mom for the past four years.
After two years of marriage, I decided it was time for us to go from a family of two to a family of three. Just like that, as if I could magically make it happen. Like everything else in my life, I planned it down to a tee – we would begin January first, we would track everything on an app and boom, the pregnancy test would show positive a few short weeks later. “We’ll be pregnant at the same time!”, I naively exclaimed to my best friend who was pregnant at the time. When my period came shortly after, I cried on the couch questioning, “What did we do wrong?”. When my husband told me this process could take years, I thought angrily, “Years?! Not us”.
In September of 2018, I knew in my heart that something was not right. While others may have felt defeated or worried about having to go see a specialist, I was oddly excited. He was the “best of the best” and he would fix me. This was our answer. And from that day on and still to this day, I continue to follow his words with blind faith, trust and most importantly, hope that somehow, someway he was brought into our life to lead us on a path to our baby.
When I started IVF, I was relieved – relieved to finally find an answer to my sleepless nights. It became my religion – everyday that I wasn’t going through it, was another day without our baby. I had developed a sense of comfort in that if I was doing IVF, then I was doing everything I could to have our baby. In two years, I had undergone eight rounds of IVF, a major surgery, two egg retrievals, two implants, an ERA biopsy, many a cancelled cycles, a miscarriage followed by a D&C and three hysteroscopies. I would find myself teetering between wondering when is enough enough followed by a lingering sense of guilt that I could not “quit” on our baby. Each round came with higher doses, longer needles, more medications and each time I showed up, more eager than the last ready to fight another round.
I lived with blinders on during those two years – each cycle a blur. Just trying to make it to the next step. But the one thing I do remember with complete clarity is the shifting response from my closest loved ones. Round after round the words of encouragement slowly turned to words of concern, words of worry – “I hate seeing you like this” and “We miss your smile”. I had no idea that my unwavering faith and focus in this process was causing such heartbreak to my closest loved ones.
I say this not to discourage anyone from stepping away from the process. God knows I had to come to this on my own terms and there are still times I wish I could be injecting myself daily just to have that sense of comfort back in my heart. I say this because after many a rounds of therapy and tears, I can now reflect that this unhealthily took over my world and at times, to the detriment of my physical and mental health.
Today, I am gradually finding peace in stepping away from IVF– understanding now that the words of concern from my loved ones were what I needed to hear and that maybe IVF is not the way I am meant to bring a baby into this world. Walking away from IVF does not mean that I have walked away from my fight. If anything, it has made that fight in me blaze even stronger, revealing a resilience within me that I never knew existed. So, here I am – unsure of what the future holds, unsure of how or when we are going to bring a baby into our home. But after the two years of everything we’ve been through, I walk away knowing that I’m a fighter who won’t leave this world without knowing what it is like to become a Mama.
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