A Barren Woman

Human oocyte with surrounding granulosa cells (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I used to think that faith could move mountains.  I thought that the hope in my heart could make my dreams come true, even lead to miracles.   I even had a knack, I suspect, for giving others hope as well.

I’ve learned I need to be a realistic person who sees the evidence in front of her. 

33 cycles.  2 years and three months time.  Months of timed intercourse, endless rounds of oral medications, 3 failed IUI’s (2 with injectables).  No pregnancy.  Not even close.

I honestly thought God was going to give me a child.  I believed.  I felt like he was leading me to where I needed to be all this time, but now reality has slapped me in the face. 

I have God’s answer.  He has already told me no 33 times.  Not once, not twice, not even 10.  33.  I am nothing but a fool for holding on all this time. 

When I took a pregnancy test last night and it came out negative, I knew it was all over.  We just completed our 3rd IUI.  Everything was perfect.  I had more follicles than I ever had before.  I could feel literally feel myself ovulating at the time of the procedure.  The sperm count was excellent and the cost of the procedure was less than I had spent on the previous two.  I spent the whole month knowing, just knowing, that everything was going to work.

I am not merely grieving over another failed cycle.  I am grieving because I realize that hope is nothing more than my own fabrication.  It only exists because I created it.  A flower does not bloom because I am about to create new life, a flower blooms because it simply does.  I see the word “hope” plastered on pages and picture frames not because God is trying to tell me that I am going to have a child but because those images exist in those locations.

So here I am, dried up and barren with no reason to believe I’ll ever hold my own baby in my arms.  It’s not going to happen naturally (burned that bridge a long time ago) and it’s not going to happen divinely (God says no 33 times for a reason; it just took me a very long time to realize this) and medically, we don’t have many realistic options left.  It will take me years to save up for an IVF and that offers no guarantee.  Adoption?  There is no money and there is no insurance that covers even a fraction of the cost.

I don’t mean to be pessimistic; I am only trying to see things for how they are: bleak.  The absolute worst part is that there is no biological reason I can’t have a child.  No, I lied. The worst part is that I failed my children and simply could not bring them into the world, that is if they even existed at all.

I can handle disappoints in life, but this?  This takes everything I am on the inside and rips it to shreds. 

So, the question is: how do you live in a world where you know that you will have no children but still will witness others have baby after baby?  I guess that is both a rhetorical and actual question.  Unfortunately, I have no answer.