Relentless

Infertility is relentless.  It consumes your thoughts, your diets, your reaction to your own body, your timetable.  People often say to me how hard the disappointment must be each month, month after month, year after year.  And yes, that is the worst part emotionally.  But, in fact, the whole month is taken over: first by the period (grieving over the lack of pregnancy on top of the usual hormones and pains), then begins the wait for ovulation (which for someone like me with PCOS is a longer wait than 'normal', all the time thinking "am I eating right? are we having sex at the right time? have we missed this month's chance?"), then the dreaded '2 Week Wait' (all the time thinking "has it worked?" and trying desperately not to calculate dates or imagine being pregnant).  It's a relentless trial for emotions, thought-life and conversation.

We first told others about our troubles with getting pregnant after about 18 months.  We were met with sad looks and surprise (we both seem very healthy) but with assurances that it would happen soon.  After all, my cycles were even longer at that time, so 18 months probably only meant 15 cycles and thus 15 opportunities to conceive.  Now it's been over 4 1/2 years and I can't bring myself to count the number of opportunities lost; we must be verging on 50.  You'd think it gets easier to deal with the disappointment.  And in some ways it does, because I know that many times before I have got on with life, continued to work, eat, sing, laugh and enjoy life.  But somehow the surprise that this month hasn't been the miracle month doesn't go away.

Perhaps I'm just too darn hopeful.  I hope that, despite years of evidence to the contrary, we are physically capable of getting pregnant.  I hold out hope that one day I'll have that big belly and be able to complain about horrid pregnancy symptoms.  I hope that, since we started quite young, we still have time on our side.  I still hope that it might happen naturally and without too much intervention (naive, perhaps, but hope is stubborn and strong).  I hope that we won't just stop at one, that we might even have twins and that I'll be pregnant more than once in my life.

Those are the stubborn and, as I say, potentially naive hopes.
But there are other hopes that have grown over the past few years.

I hope that our experience of infertility will help us to counsel and support couples going through the same thing in the future.  I hope that my experience of miscarriage will give me the only line that is of use to a woman in that situation: "I know how you feel."  I hope that I have grown in faith and in worship, and that my life will reflect the spiritual learning that has gone along with our struggle.  I hope that this wait, this long wait when at times I feel I am hanging by a thread, this long relentless wait, will be something I look back on when life gets tough in future - and I'll be able to say, "I got through that with God.  With my friend Jesus and with the comfort that worshipping Him brought", so I can get through the next wait, the next struggle - without relenting.