What is infertility, you ask?
The dictionary would tell you that it is simply being unable to conceive within a year of actively trying or being able to carry a baby to full term. But it’s far more than that. And it’s far more than just an inconvenience. It’s a disease of the reproductive system that affects 1 in 8 couples. And like any other disease, it is frustrating. It is gut-wrenching. And it is depressing. It’s like a grave that keeps following you around day after day as it swallows your hope and buries more and more of your dreams with the tears you just shed.
It is desperately longing to be pregnant. Wanting to know what it feels like to have a life growing inside of you. A life that has your eyes and his smile. A life that you created in love.
It is walking down the baby aisles and touching the onsies, picking up the booties, and wondering when. And asking why.
It’s loving a child you have never met. And missing them fiercely every day.
It’s emptiness as you walk by the bedroom that should be a nursery. It’s loneliness as your house is absent from the pitter patters of tiny feet in the morning or giggles from bath time at night.
It’s frustration that leads to desperation as you try every vitamin recommended, test suggested, treatment procedure offered, medicine given, and diet instructed.
It is feeling unworthy. Because maybe your faith is too weak. Your prayers are not enough. Or your past too damning.
It is trying to understand why prostitutes, drug addicts and those who abuse their children are given such blessings. But you? You seem to have to fight and work and struggle beyond your strength and exhaust all of your resources to receive.
It’s a constant war between your body and your soul. A war that you must fight to win daily and a war that is exhausting, yet you battle on.
It is trying to remain hopeful, yet realistic. And failing to find the balance.
It’s hearing the words, “I’m sorry, but there is no heartbeat.”
Or expecting to walk out of the hospital with a birth certificate, but instead it’s a death certificate.
THAT IS INFERTILITY.
It’s more than just an inconvenience.
It’s more than just the inability to conceive.
It’s dream shattering. Soul crushing. And heartbreaking.
And that is what 1 in 8 couples deal with on a daily basis. Couples that could be your friends, neighbors, or family members. So please keep them in your prayers because the prayer you pray for them today, could be the one that makes a difference in their lives tomorrow.
A Spoonful of Parenting 