monkinetic weblog | redmonk.net

This coming Sunday, Jodi and I will celebrate our 6th anniversary. It’s been 6 awesome years with a woman I loved and appreciated, and have grown to respect and cherish. For most of those 6 years, Jodi and I have been trying to conceive, or TTC as it’s called in the circles we find ourselves in.

TTC can be a maddening experience - especially when no one can tell you why it fails time and again. we were told early on not to worry - we had gotten pregnant once before (miscarriage after succeeding on our second month trying) and we were therefore bound to succeed sooner or later. So we did not seek treatment then, not figuring that later would be some unknown point in the distant future.

Once we determined that something was not working, we began to seek help. We went through several doctors and Reproductive Endocronologists (REs). We ended up doing 3 cycles of assisted reproduction, each time hoping that some variation of medication, timing, or sheer force of will would make it happen. In between treatment cycles we watched temperatures, paid attention to timing, and did everything we knew to take charge of our fertility. They should have called it “Taking Charge of Your Futility”, because that’s how it felt.

Jodi and I are Christians — we believe that God is a person, the most loving, caring, and nurturing Person in the universe, and that we have a personal relationship with Him. And we found ourselves wondering at times if He cared. We cried, we poured our hearts out in prayer, we determined to "be better", we threw ourselves on his grace and mercy. In the end, we always came back to the fact that as God, he was perfect and unchanging, and was therefore still loving, caring, nurturing, kind, and good, even if He wasn’t giving us what it seemed we desired more than anything.

So each month, as the medication wore off and the inevitable became evident, we prayed that God would show us His will, show us how to continue, show us how to deal with the suffocating emptiness that accompanies the end of each cycle. Jodi had always felt that she was destined for motherhood; I had come to the point that I really wanted children myself - the joys of being a father were so evident in my family and friends’ lives. Why was our life taking this tortuous route?

I still don’t know why God had us walking this path - it seemed full of too much pain, loss, regret, and frustration. Yet I could only stand on what I know of His character and what I had seen in my own life as evidence that He had a plan for Jodi and I that, whether or not it involved children of our own, was the perfect plan for us.

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