Out of Control: Part 2

My last post left off with me abandoned by a husband, left alone to raise a daughter, and praying for God to bring him back to us. Despite the pathetic "How to Win Him Back" book and countless tearful prayers, my husband did not, in fact, come back. In March 1992 our divorce was final and I set out to rebuild my life, a life that was vastly different than the one I had planned. From our wedding day forward, I had visions of what our life would be like as we grew old together, watched our kids graduate from high school and then college, married them off, and had grandbabies to spoil. All of that was gone, and much of the time I felt adrift at sea with no compass and no visible means of moving forward. I did what many people do, when things got tough, I returned to God. Funny how we forget He's there when everything is going well. I visited the church that most of my extended family attended, a small Baptist church where they were unfailingly kind to me when I spent much of the service in tears, as I did most every Sunday. In May of that year my aunt suggested I attend a Divorce Recovery Workshop at a nearby church, and I did, even though I felt really shy about walking through the doors. I figured I had a big scarlet "D" on my forehead that everyone could see. That would be "D" for divorced, but it could just as well have been "F" for failure, "R" for rejected, "U" for unwanted, because I felt like I was all of those things. The workshop was a turning point for me. I came out of it feeling like maybe God did have a plan for me after all, and I joined that church and got very involved in the singles ministry there.

Fast forward a few years with me. I was still very involved in my local church, and I had started attending a singles Bible study one night a week near the office where I worked. One day my friend and I met with our kids for dinner at Burger King before the Bible study. Jon was there (yes, I spotted him right away and thought he was cute), overhead some of our conversation and introduced himself. He had been attending the same Bible study but we'd never crossed paths before. We exchanged phone numbers and made some plans for the coming weekend. I found out later that he was "dating" no less than 4 other girls at the time, and was just enjoying getting to know different people. God gave me a real sense of peace about our whole relationship and I had fun with Jon without feeling like I needed to control things. My friends would ask me how I could stand that he was dating so many other girls too, and I would just say (with a serene smile - or was it a smirk?) that if it was God's plan for it to work out, it would, and if it wasn't meant to be, then I didn't want it anyway. A year later we were engaged, and 7 months after that, in July 1996, we were married. You would think that the experience of trusting God and giving Him the control of our relationship might mean that I learned my lesson. Not quite. In fact, a friend of mine gave me a beautiful framed piece of art that says,

As children bring their broken toys,

With tears for us to mend;

I brought my broken dreams to God

Because He was my friend.

But then instead of leaving Him in peace to work alone,

I hung around and tried to help, with ways that were my own.

At last I snatched them back and cried

"How could you be so slow?"

"My child," He said, "What could I do?

You never did let go..."

I hung it on my wall as a reminder to "let go and let God". Evidently that still wasn't enough to make the truth penetrate my brain and stick there.

By the time we were married, my first daughter was 8 years old and I was almost 32. During our courtship we had discussed children and agreed that we would have one biological child and adopt one child, for a total of three. Jon wanted to adopt two and forgo the biological route, but I insisted that he needed to have the pregnancy experience at least once. Before our wedding I started using the birth control shot, and by Christmas of 1997 we had decided to stop the shots and "let nature take its course" seeing as how I wasn't getting any younger, and we didn't want a huge gap between kids. Oh, the best laid plans! Not to mention that my family had started ribbing me about all my adamant refusals to have that big age gap. According to my doctor and all the literature I had read, it would take about 3 months for my normal cycles to return and after that we could start trying for a baby. Meanwhile, I started building my baby "hope chest" as a symbol of my certainty that the baby would come.

A full year later I was still waiting for my cycles to restart, and I was getting desperate. It wasn't pretty, people. I decided to consult a fertility specialist, who advised me to wait it out. The guy's name was Dr. Doody (I'll wait while you stop laughing). Um, do you know me? I don't do "wait" very well! My goal was to get pregnant by my 35th birthday, because everybody knows that's when your fertility starts to go downhill and your risk of birth defects starts to increase exponentially. Just ask all the so-called experts. ;-) I started doing my own internet research and joined a couple of online groups of people like me who were desperately trying to get pregnant. I knew every trick in the book! I even learned a whole new language, complete with cute acronyms: TTC, AF, HPT, IUI, IVF and many, many more. When we first started the "trying to get pregnant" journey, Jon was very enthusiastic but as time went on, the whole process started to lose its sparkle. It's hard to feel romantic when you're surrounded by thermometers and temperature charts and pressure, and once again I had failed to ask God's opinion of my big plans. In the summer of 1999 I somehow managed to get pregnant, right before my 35th birthday. I was ecstatic! I devised a "cute" way to tell Jon the news, and he was (almost) equally ecstatic! By this time I had a nice sized tub full of baby clothes and equipment, and if I'd had my way I would have already had a nursery set up. Like I said, I'm not good at "wait".

Because I was seeing a fertility specialist, I had to go in and have blood drawn to check my HcG (pregnancy hormone) levels. The first blood draw told me I was pregnant. The second one would be to make sure the level was increasing properly, meaning it was a normally progressing pregnancy. I happily skipped back into the doctor's office a couple of days later to have my second blood draw, expecting only good news. I had my first baby with no issues - why should anything go wrong this time? I had a plan, remember?

I got the phone call from the nurse that afternoon and I can still recall what she said, word for word: "I'm sorry. You're going to lose this one." It may be that because her news was bad that I interpreted the tone as harsh, but this lady was not winning points for her compassion. Sure enough, a couple of days later I started miscarrying. I don't care what the "pro-choice" people say - that was no collection of cells: that was my BABY. I grieved, I raged, I cried - name an emotion associated with loss and I felt it. It was like my divorce all over again in some ways. But most of all, I felt out of control and it was an uncomfortable place to be. Rarely had I ever encountered a situation that I couldn't somehow maneuver into what I wanted it to be. In fact, some of my friends used to tease me by telling me I should write a book called, "How to Win Friends and Manipulate People." Anyway, for a couple of weeks I didn't know which way was up because I was so grief-stricken. Reading all the statistics on pregnancy loss informed me that many women miscarry without even knowing they were pregnant. If we hadn't been trying I may have been one of those, but because I was so actively trying to get pregnant, I knew from my temperature charts that I was pregnant and I took a home pregnancy test before my period was even due. I used to think I was smart for knowing what was going on with my body from one day to the next but I can see now that a little ignorance can be a good thing. I'm sure my poor husband thought I had gone off the deep end. He was a little sad too, but he didn't have the hormones speed dialing his emotions on a regular basis like I did. I imagine he was starting to wonder just what he had gotten himself into.

After that loss, the fertility doctor called us in for a consultation and told us that my womb was just not ready to support a pregnancy yet and it would take more time to recover from the birth control shot I had taken for a mere 18 months, despite the fact that I had finally gotten my cycles back. It would be an understatement to tell you that is NOT exactly what I wanted to hear. So I did what anyone else would do: I found a new doctor.

Part 3: The Rollercoaster (or let me off this crazy thing!)