The Way to Now

There’s something I experienced first hand this winter that I did not realize was so scary and uncontrollable.

Depression.

I wouldn’t even want to talk about it, because now I can pretend it never happened, but I realize how un-talked about it is.  Probably more women in their 30s experience depression as a result of infertility than from any other cause.  This is only what my intuition tells me, but I have a feeling it’s true.  I have been dealing with what infertility does to a woman’s body, psyche, spirit, and lifestyle for over a year and a half.  I know that does not even touch on how long many women have dealt with it, but eighteen months can seem like an eternity when you want to start a family.

So, what’s the disappearing act?

Well, I don’t know where the depression goes, but it’s not a present reality in my daily life anymore.  I am not under any illusion that it will never return, but I think there are steps I took to create some places of sanctuary in my life.  First, I recognized last fall that something was not right.  I felt hopeless, I had no interest in my work, I did not want to see my friends.  To anyone who knows me, that does not sound like me.  I only sought out a therapist because I knew I should seek out a therapist.  But, talking it out really does help.  The steps I needed to take included finding a doctor who specialized in reproductive medicine (the closest one is four hours away), finding a local acupuncturist, and finding a way to take some time for me.

In the beginning years of my career, all I wanted to do was nurture it and grow it, and build something that meaningful.  Throughout high school and college, I guess you could say I was an overachiever.  I always had a goal of blowing away the expectations.  I don’t even know where that comes from – I haven’t gotten that far in therapy!  I was president of Future Community Leaders of America by the time I started my sophomore year of high school.  I was president of my youth group my senior year.  In college too, I was hired to lead the group that designed activities for the students living in the dorms.  I was editor of the English department’s undergraduate literary journal.  So, for my body to tell me that I couldn’t achieve motherhood at exactly the time I planned for it to happen was unacceptable.

There’s a show on TV right now called Life Unexpected and it takes a really honest look at life for several adults in their early 30s.  Two of the characters find out the kid they had in high school is now 16 and seeking emancipation.  Since they had given her up for adoption, they never expected to see her again.  In fact, after the mom found out she was pregnant, she never told the father.  He was the quarterback of the football team and never thought in a million years he fathered a child.  The 16-year-old kid, Lux, shows up seeking emancipation from the foster care system and they discover a life they never expected.  All the mom’s issues from her own father abandoning her, to her current distance from the rest of her family play out now in meeting her daughter.  Lux’s dad, the quarterback, can’t seem to get his life together – his father has never been emotionally unavailable to him, and he has a hard time making himself available to others … until Lux.  His daughter changes him.  They all have to confront their issues and it never comes out in a neat package tied with a bow, but they allow themselves to open up to each other.

We are all living unexpected lives in some way or another.  Think about your life for a moment … did you expect everything that has happened?  And, even the disappointing realities have taught you something, right?  Well, that’s where I’ve come … to a place of trusting the unfolding of my life, unexpected.  When I felt really hopeless and forgot that God had a future set out for me, I needed other people to remind me of the huge track record God has had in my life of giving me everything I’ve wanted.  Was now really the time to lose hope?  Since I wasn’t sharing any of this with most of the people I know, the circle of people to give me hope was pretty small.  But, for me, a few voices pulled me to a new place, a place of healing.  A couple of the voices were authors I read at that time.  Then there was my therapist, whom I only needed to see five or six times, and then a couple of minister friends, and of course, my family.  I chose not to be on any kind of medication for depression, and within a matter of three or four months, I began to feel better, more like myself.

With my medical doctors being four hours away, I set up some time away from work as well.  It was time to follow the protocol they set up for me, but even better, time to spend with my family on the Front Range.  I really needed some weeks of unscheduled, uninterrupted time to do what my spirit asked of me.  I truly rested.  I cooked with love and ate with family.  I just stopped putting so many expectations on my body.  At the end of my time off, after I followed the doctor’s plan, did everything work out perfectly?  No.  I am still waiting for my time of impending motherhood.  Maybe even better than being able to put my infertility behind me so quickly, I succeeded in listening to myself and renewing a right spirit within me.  I have not felt that awful, lifeless feeling of depression in a long time.  That was the real gift of giving myself some time.  Even more so, sharing with others the challenges and new understandings I’ve learned spread far beyond just what I’m going through.  It’s a matter of living and experiencing life.  We either choose to do it all by ourselves, or we share it, because that’s one of God’s gifts to us – community.  It is easier to carry something that 200 people are holding up, than to carry it all by yourself.

Today I surprised the crap out of myself.  I had a thought that was far from what my general line of thinking has been these days.  For the sake of what they call a “baseline,” here’s a sampling of my usual line of thinking these days: baby, career, writing, friends, doctors, visualization, ministry, questioning, waiting, pregnancy, infertility, frustration, distraction. I am starting to be over it – it’s depressing to even write it down.  I had this flash in my mind today as if there wasn’t even a baseline of on-going thoughts at all.  I thought, now’s the time to take a year to travel and volunteer all over the world.  I have to admit, I did just read Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert and I found it to be a journey we should all take at some point in our lives.  Of course, we all have our own demons and situations that have led us to question everything.  But, what we all share in common is the spiritual journey that is with us whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.  I highly recommend examining the journey because all the gems of wisdom we are able to infuse into our lives come straight from the struggle, the examination, and the honesty of feeling what you’re feeling.  For the last several months I have been practicing feeling my feelings and what I’ve come up with is that I have a lot of goals in my life along with having kids.  There is a certain pressure, however, in thinking of getting older and knowing there is a limited window on having a family, while there’s a wide open door for many other things.  Both of these angles cause me to question my on-going thoughts and my new thought.  For one thing, I do feel like it is time to start a family.  I want that next step in my life.  For another thing, I kind of want a big family and it will require a good portion of this decade for us to accomplish that goal.

From the other angle, doesn’t it sound like the coolest thing to travel and volunteer all over the world?

Yes, I know, I should do it while I have the passion and while I am child free.  I have had all kinds of creative thoughts about how to travel with kids at some point.  However, this long-term journey does not seem like the ideal situation for a squirmy, dirt-eating, vulnerable child (much less fertility-induced triplets).  Now, I do imagine after raising kids will be a really great time to retire early (hopefully), or at least in good health, and travel and volunteer.  But what if I don’t feel like doing it then?  Now might really be the time!  The point of this whole blog is to be in the present moment.  One of the hiccups with that plan is that sometimes being able to be in the present moment takes a little planning.  And that might only be true if you are ambitious and want to accomplish certain things at certain times.  Now, I married a man who loves serendipity.  He could never make a plan in his life and love being continually surprised by what happens.  What I don’t know if he’s figured out yet is that now I plant those serendipitous ideas!  In fact, I had to have a control-freak-check on myself because sometimes I can’t imagine how he got things accomplished before he knew me.  I think the question I am really wondering in all of this is, am I on a journey that will come to completion?

I am currently in a waiting period, a holding zone in the infertility world, where my body is not quite ready to begin another cycle of anything yet and so we wait another month.  This month has been really different than any other month in that I am on a break from my normal routine.  I can sit and ponder all day long!  What I’ve been finding most helpful and therapeutic is to ponder while swimming at our brand new college pool.  Not only is it a gigantic pool, but there are not that many people using it in the middle of the day.  So I can literally float around in a pool of my thoughts.  The other good thing about this is that I’m physically tired at night – a concept I think might be the missing link in our adult lives.  You see, our hearts and lungs get a much bigger emotional workout as we get older, but we often stop strengthening them with physical activity.  No wonder our broken hearts don’t heal as fast and it can feel like we can’t breathe in times of despair.  I think there’s a link between fatiguing our bodies in a good way, the way of physical exercise, and the endurance our hearts require as we encounter this life for ourselves, as adults.

This seems a bit rambly … in summation, new thoughts, different thoughts, and allowing the space to let those thoughts swim.

I was at a lunch today to plan a fundraiser to ship medical supplies to a hospital in Kenya I’ve had the privilege of visiting.  Together with Project C.U.R.E. and The Center for the Church and Global AIDS, United Methodists all over Colorado will be raising money – our part will be with a golf tournament in May.  While this would usually just be another project in the work I do, I had a different feeling about it today.  Today, I felt “there” in a way I haven’t felt in the past year.  I was present – fully present.

Why was today so different?

Months ago, I was feeling something many of us in our 30s do.  I was having a bout with depression and I felt at the end of what I could do for others.  I was not even caring for myself.  I needed rest.  I needed to be.  I needed my house and home cooking and time apart.  For most of 2009, I felt this set of needs come and go in waves.  I would push them aside or tell myself, yes, I will care for you later.  By September, I remember getting ready to celebrate my 31^st birthday.  That day, I cried.  I could not celebrate.  I felt so sad, so empty, so ready to fall apart.  I finally started talking about my pain and sharing my sadness with my husband.  It broke a cycle that I had let occur for months.  I would feel ok and work at my wonderful job and be thankful for all the gifts in my life.  Then, I would come back around to the reality that I really wanted to start a family.  With so much fullness, there was still emptiness.  It was a devastating feeling, knowing I lived four hours from any specialists or doctors that even offered fertility help.  I also revealed to my parents how empty and sad I felt.  While I think it scared them a little, they were quite supportive of my need to explore the ways to get help.  I had already started seeing an acupuncturist, a tall dancer who was raised in Grand Junction, and had just received her doctorate for acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine.  I really liked how acupuncture felt, but mostly, I liked that I could talk to my actual doctor every week.  Unlike my western medicine OB/GYN, whom I almost never spoke to in person, April was personable and knowledgeable.  I remember the moment clearly, when she asked, “How are you doing today?” and I replied, “You know, I think I realized that I’m putting on a brave face when anybody asks me that question.  Really, I’m not doing good.  I have never been so sad.”

It was a moment of pure honesty.

Where was I to go from here?  Next, I found a therapist/counselor, whom my insurance covered.  The first session I had with her, I just cried through my story.  I couldn’t believe how heart-broken I felt over not being able to conceive.  After that first session, I took the rest of the afternoon off from work, and that night, I told my husband how shocked I was to realize the state of my heart.  He listened, looked me in the eye, and said, “What should we do?”  We talked about waiting for nature to take its course, waiting for acupuncture and herbs to revive my body, looking up fertility specialists, or trying to work with the limited options my OB/GYN was offering here.  While still talking, and sniffling (mostly me), he Googled the specialists my brother and sister-in-law started seeing on the Front Range.  They are rated as the best, not only in the state, but one of the best in the country.  As he read this, I felt my heart perk up and heed the good news.  Suddenly, Eric was saying to me, “I just filled out two forms, and should definitely have someone contacting me.”  Two days later, he told me our phone consultation would be in a month!  The husband got extra points for taking the lead on getting something in the hopper.

That is the medical side of how I started to breathe again, feeling the solid hope in my heart that we would, indeed, be parents.  But, still in the midst of feeling completely disconnected, and very distracted at work, I knew I needed to take a break.  We were just going into the program year at the church, and the busy time of Advent and Christmas would be right around the corner.  This was definitely not the time to take a break, but it was also not the time to have a break down.  I came clean to the people I had been acting my butt off around for months and said I needed to take some time off for me, but I didn’t have a clue what that might look like.  Over the next months we worked out a plan that would begin around the 1^st of the New Year.  I combined a renewal leave for the purpose of writing with a medical leave and was able to work out an eight-week leave from work.

As Advent and Christmas rolled around, I was counting down the days until I could have seemingly endless hours of doing exactly what I wanted, what I needed.  My husband and I worked with our new fertility specialists and devised a plan.  We actually did one round of fertility drugs in December.  I was almost giddy thinking the large and looming task of getting pregnant might be taken care of by the time I was on my break!  One of my friends said only a person having fertility issues would call getting pregnant “work” or a “task” – touché.  The result was not the one I was looking for – a period instead of a positive, but the good thing is, I ovulated (not a usual occurrence for me).  The beginning of January came and I began my time off and I felt almost immediately a weight lifted.  I pinpointed it on that same day – finally I wasn’t caring for anyone else but me.  I took a brilliantly selfish deep breath, and have every day since!

It’s the New Year.  New thoughts.  New attitude.  Same emotional nightmare.  I literally heard myself saying this to my husband on the phone the other day.  He was saying, in a round about way, “I thought we’d be having more sex while we’re trying to make a baby.”  And, my response was, “I’m in an emotional nightmare.”  I think I meant, nothing is how I thought it would be.  I never thought it would take this much time or require so many trips to so many different people who poke and prod at you with various types of invasive machines.  I never thought so many of my friends would get pregnant, then have their babies, then have 1^st birthday parties for their babies.  During each day, I can take it in stride.  But when I add it all up, it is like living in an emotional nightmare.  I couldn’t tell you from one minute to the next what I am going to feel like or what’s going to set me off crying.  It’s embarrassing.  I guess the real surprise of it all is that not even my optimistic and out-going attitude have been able to get me through these months unscathed.  I feel scathed.  ewww, I don’t like even thinking about it.  I just wish everything was happening according to plan, and I was happily buying maternity clothes and thinking about how to design the perfect gender-neutral, but still stylish, nursery.  I am doing those things, but without the bulging tummy to necessitate them.

This fall I’d say was the hardest.  From September, when I turned 31, and had the realization that I was not celebrating another birthday, but was, in fact, mourning that a whole year had passed of trying to get pregnant.  Everyone around me, including my husband, was oblivious to the emotional implications of this fact.  I experienced them on a level that I didn’t even know I felt.  Suddenly my bright outlook and my optimistic attitude went down the drain.  I wanted to crawl into bed and emerge in the spring with a big swollen belly.  Not only did I have to deal with this crazy new emotional reality, I still had to work.  My work is not just any work – it’s a performance, but not as a character, as myself.  So, I have to be my best and brightest self in order for everyone to assume everything is all right with me.  The last thing I wanted was to be explaining this ridiculous hellhole to my congregation on Sunday morning.

The part of my job I love most is that I get to work with young adults, with people my own age!  But, at this point in my unraveling, it was almost the last thing I wanted to do.  Many of these people are my good friends, but it got really hard to be around girl-who-accidentally-got-pregnant-twice-and-then-had-a-longed-for-son-like-clockwork.  Her husband got a vasectomy, by the way, before he turned 30.  Then there’s my friend who doesn’t work and decided to start trying at 31, a couple months before getting married, and got pregnant immediately.  Not only is she married to an olive-skinned, dark-haired guy, but the baby somehow looks exactly like her (strawberry-blonde with blue eyes)!  And my favorite, our young youth director who got married in August, and in September, went in for strep throat, and came out with a positive pregnancy test!  Who are these people?

Here’s the real kicker for me: anything I’ve wanted in my life, I’ve attained.  Not this, though.  This is either God’s ultimate lesson in patience for me, or I forgot how to get what I want.  Actually, what I think it is, is that I forgot how long some of those things took for me to get them.  I wanted to go to Ireland with three of my friends – we started planning when we were 15 – and they have all gone (separately) but I still haven’t made it there yet … so that’s 16 years and counting.  But, then there was college — I wanted to finish so that I could get a Masters of Divinity and be a minister.  I did finish my undergrad, although it took an extra semester … so there’s 4.5 years.  I began my Master’s the next fall (9 month wait), and finished 3 years later.  I needed to wait an extra year before I was commissioned as a minister.  And then, I had to work for 3 years before being officially ordained as a minister.   And that’s just getting my career on track.  I also knew I wanted to get married.  I wanted to get married at age 22.  It was a couple years after my first serious boyfriend was ready to talk marriage.  I jumped ship on that one at 19, after 6 months of dating, and freaking out about what an actual marriage meant.  Then, when I was thinking about it, at 22, there was no one in sight!  I wasn’t really serious about it then, but I knew it was something I wanted.  As grad school rolled on, I realized I was getting closer and closer to BEING a minister, and who would want to marry a minister?!  I remember my favorite, “What do you do?” answer being, “I’m a nanny.”  Oh brother, was that ever going to change!

A full year after I had been sent to Grand Junction, a small-ish town, 4 hours from everything I knew, I settled on being single for the rest of my time here.  Who was I going to find in this small town?  Wouldn’t you know it – I found someone I had known as a teenager!  Yep, I had my “husband” list and he matched every criteria on it.  We dated for a year, were engaged for four months, and then got married, in a perfect ceremony, in my tiny town of Grand Junction.  I do feel a bit sheepish, after looking back over my life, thus far, and realizing, I have gotten everything I have wanted.  So, the real question here is, “where is my faith?!”

To put personal thoughts out for the world to see seems just crazy, and perhaps, a little narcissistic.  But, there’s a more profound reason for sharing our stories and deciding to talk about life and the sometimes painful journeys we take, especially in our 30s.  The greater reason for sharing is that one person will read something that resembles them and will feel supported along their own journey of faith and life.  This is what I have been seeking in the past year.  I am only 31 and yet I have felt a tidal wave of new emotions and life situation since turning 30.  I don’t know if it is the age, or simply a coincidence, but I’m pretty sure other women will agree, things change in our 30s!  My primary word for life in my 20s was probably, adventure.  Now, in my 30s, it is, complicated.  How did things go from adventure to complication in only a few years?  For me, as for probably many women my age, I got married at 29 and already knew I wanted to have a family.  After 6 months of blissfully happy marriage, I was thrilled to throw away my birth control pills and see if conception would occur immediately, or shortly thereafter.  I did have in the back of my mind, what if this doesn’t work for me as easily as it should?  What if my irregular periods and previous hunches from doctors about Poly-Cystic Ovarian Syndrome are right?  What if I am the one in six women (or whatever the statistic) who has to deal with infertility?

And so, it’s been a year and a half of complicated, emotional, and very private feelings about how this all might unfold.  I have been faux-blogging in a little Word doc on my computer for the past couple months, just to get my thoughts and feelings out.  So, I’ll put up some of those postings, just to give you a play-by-play of the actual complicated journey.  By the way, I’m expecting this probably only to be interesting to women also dealing with infertility, mostly based on the comments I get from people not dealing with it.  Well-meaning friends and acquaintances say things to me like, “do you really think about it that much?”  and “it’ll happen,” and “you’re young – it hasn’t been that long.”  These are the comments that made me want to start this project.  I know there’s a community of women out there who long to hear about someone’s similar journey and shared emotions, but it’s certainly not my extra-fertile friends, who already have 3 kids and a vasectomy!

There is power in the present moment, if only to say, I will be here now and be grateful for my life.