Here Comes the Sun

I have been preparing my heart to accept the idea that we may never have living biological children. To be clear, there is no actual reason to believe that we won't; I am 30 and healthy and all of the tests that the doctor was willing to do before the one-year-of-trying mark came back normal. For me to be sane and enjoy life, I need to be able to accept the possibility that I may never conceive again. It is pretty hard for me to believe in happy endings when our daughter has been in the ground for 18 months and our second chance baby, our Grace, was gone before we got to know him or her. This is our seventh cycle trying to conceive and we weren't exactly careful for the three cycles before that. Why would we easily conceive twice, then struggle, unless something was off?

Lately, I have a love-hate relationship with the baby loss community. On the one hand, I think it is important to have connections to people who know how you are feeling, but on the other, it seems that most of those communities have only half the story in common with me now. As much as I celebrate each new "rainbow" pregnancy or healthy newborn "rainbow," I am not anywhere near knowing what it feels like to find comfort in the warmth of a new life. I used to feel so encouraged and hopeful when I read those stories, but now I feel bitterness and loneliness as I think again and again, "why not us?" I try not to be resentful when the well-meaning rainbow mommies reassure me that my time will come. Though no one likes to talk about it, for many parents the rainbow baby never does come. I have met some absolutely wonderful friends and acquaintances online over the past 18 months, but I find myself withdrawing from that world to try and protect my heart.

I accidentally came across a wonderful blog today called Losing Lucy and Finding Hope (click the text to visit). The author, Bethany, and her husband have been through stillbirth, two miscarriages, and adoption loss and just welcomed their "rainbow baby" in July at long last. I wept as I read post after post; her story and all of the scripture verses she shared along the way touched something in me that I have been trying to squelch. Hope. Though I am a long way from being able to believe in a happy ending for us, it helped to read her stories because I realized that she must have felt how I am feeling at so many points along their journey.

What is hope, anyway? These days, I'm trying not to be so specific with my hope. My heart believes that, one day, we will have a chance to parent children, however it is God chooses to bring them to us. When Haven died, I thought that my redemption as a mother, a wife, and a woman would only come through successfully bringing home another baby, but I don't know now if that is where our lives are headed. I surely do hope so, but I am trying to keep my heart open for the other possibilities that God may have in mind for us.

Soon after Haven died last February, we treated ourselves to iPhones. I immediately downloaded the Beatles song "Here Comes the Sun" as my ringtone, because it spoke to me of hope after such a heartbreaking winter. I feel now that we are coming out of a figurative winter and into the sun. I'm looking forward to what this "summer" will bring.

"Here comes the sun. Here comes the sun, and I say 'it's all right.'"

You know, I really think it will be all right.

Strong

I read this quote when I was in university and loved it. I was no stranger to difficult circumstances, but even with all I had gone through, I could never have dreamed at the time that my world would so spectacularly shatter in just a few years. That all of the pain, disappointment, and anxiety I had felt would pale in comparison to the events that would befall me.

When your life does crumble, people will tell you how strong you are, how courageous you are. It made me terribly angry to hear that. I thought, "I had no choice in this; I am only surviving. That isn't the same thing as being strong!"

But dammit, I look back to February and March when I was a shell of a person and I think, "I have come a heck of a long way!" I think of the mental and emotional fog I lived in for months when I was out of my mind with grief. When I was afraid to leave my house, when I wished that fate would intervene and I would cease to exist, when I was a wraith among the living.

I look back and I can see that I never gave up. I didn't get bitter. I didn't stop there. So I am claiming now what I couldn't see then. I am strong. I am surviving the impossible every day.  I am choosing hope, choosing joy, choosing life. I'm not there yet. I don't even know where "there" is, but I am going to keep moving forward until I arrive.