Out of Control: Part 3

I found my new doctor through some friends in my small group, who had consulted her for their own fertility issues. They were very happy with her AND she enabled them to get pregnant, so I figured she could help me too. It was all about what I wanted, remember? It took a couple of months to get in to see the new doctor, and I kept hoping for a miracle pregnancy so that I wouldn't even have to see her. Our health insurance would pay only a fraction of what infertility (ugly word!) treatment could end up costing, especially when you got into the high-tech world of IVF and beyond. Jon and I talked about just how far we would go before giving up, and although "give up" is not really in my vocabulary, even I had to realize that financially there would have to be an end to the trying.

When Jon and I were dating we had discussed how many children we wanted to add to our family and how they would get there, and we had decided one biological and one adopted. Since we were having so much trouble with the bio child, during this period we started working on the adoption angle as well. I had no trouble with the concept of loving a child who didn't come from my body and neither did he. After all, I had a stepfather who loved me dearly and Jon had Dana, who he couldn't love more if she shared his genes, so we felt like we had some experience in that area. We knew we didn't want a domestic adoption in the US. Even though most families who go that route do so with no lingering problems, we personally knew a family who had adopted a baby, had him home with them for a week, then had the birth mother reclaim him. We weren't willing to take ANY chance of that happening. Our other option was international adoption. My first choice was China, and to explain why I'll have to tell you a story from high school.

It was the second half of my senior year and I was in my first period Economics class with Mr. Nelson, who was in his first year of teaching after college. Poor guy - he really wasn't that much older than we were and we gave him a hard time. He was trying to make a point about supply and demand and he used China as an illustration. In China they don't have Social Security - sons are expected to take care of their parents as they age, and in most cases they all move in together. Daughters become part of their husband's family when they get married, so if you have a daughter you are basically raising her only to give her away to her husband's family later on. At that time in China there was a strict one-child policy. Violators could be fined the equivalent of a year's wages if they defied the policy whether accidentally or purposefully. Because they needed a son to take care of them in their old age, it was not uncommon for a couple who gave birth to a daughter to abandon her in order to try again for a son. Mr. Nelson used the term, "leaving a baby girl on the trash heap" (which just goes to show you that he didn't know exactly what he was talking about because most abandoned babies in China are not left to die, they are left in such a way that they will be found and rescued, but I digress). I had never heard of such a thing and I was horrified! People were leaving babies to die just because they were girls? I kept raising my hand to ask questions about this, and my best friend playfully teased me about "saving the Chinese babies" for the rest of the school year (and beyond!).

So China would have been my first choice for international adoption, but at that time the law in China would not allow couples to adopt if they already had a child. We did have one and there's not putting that genie back in the bottle, so we had to look at other programs. There are so many factors to consider when you decide where/how to adopt, and lots of them have to do with your own feelings about adoption. There was a part of me that wanted to adopt a child with similar features to Jon and me, just so it wouldn't be obvious that he or she was not "ours" biologically. I guess I was thinking it would be less complicated for all of us somehow. You have to consider whether or not there is travel to the home country required and for how long - can you take time off work to go? And then there's the cost. There's a laundry list of fees associated with international adoption, and some countries cost more than others. China happened to be one of the less expensive options, but we didn't qualify. We did some research and came up with a Russian program that seemed like it would work for us, and in May 2000 we sent the paperwork in to begin our homestudy.

Meanwhile, back at Infertility Ranch, I saw my new doctor in February and loved her! In our very first meeting she assured me that "we're going to get you pregnant". By this time I was beginning to feel like a colossal failure as a woman. I mean, why couldn't my body do what it was supposed to do? Teenagers could get pregnant by accident in the back seat of a car, and I was a stable (mostly), mature (mostly) woman with a loving husband who could provide a loving home. Why not me? I was taking ovulation tests several days a month and spending lots of money on home pregnancy tests because I couldn't stand to wait and see if my cycle showed up. I even considered ordering the HPTs in bulk to save a little money. I didn't - but I considered it. Jon and I were involved in our church and a loving small group and although they knew we were trying to get pregnant and having issues, I don't think they fully realized the desperation I felt or just how consumed I was with getting pregnant. I wasn't getting any younger, and it seemed like people were getting pregnant all around me, just NOT ME. I was praying like crazy for God to fulfill my wishes and to be honest, I couldn't figure out any reason why He wouldn't. It wasn't like I was asking for something bad, was I? There literally was not a waking hour in the day that I wasn't thinking about/planning for/praying about/imagining that baby I wanted. Jon didn't share my desperation because he would have been happy enough to adopt two children and skip the biological trials, but he went along because he wanted to make me happy and that was what I wanted.

So my new doctor started me on a low-level fertility drug, which I had taken before with Dr. Doody, along with a series of ultrasounds and bloodwork to see how things were progressing. I was actually working at this time, and trying to get in all the appointments AND put in the right amount of time at work required a juggling act that I hope I never have to repeat, but at least I felt like I was doing something.

By the way, if you've never been in the waiting room at an infertility clinic, let me describe the atmosphere for you. First of all, anyone who comes there is there because 1) they want to have a baby; and 2) it's not happening naturally; so 3) they have all kinds of emotional stuff going on, none of it good. So you have people (mostly women) sitting in the waiting room reading magazines (no American Baby or Parents in this waiting room!) and studiously avoiding eye contact. No one speaks to or smiles at anyone else. It's like we all pretend to be somewhere else - we're mentally putting our fingers in our collective ears and singing, "la, la, la". Also, the intensely intimate nature of some of the procedures that go on there (do I need to mention the kind of samples that prospective fathers might need to submit?) add another level of embarrassment beyond the whole "epic body failure" kind. At one of my (zillions? hundreds?) of visits, the unthinkable happened: I actually ran into a woman I knew from a previous job. We both knew we spotted each other, debated the possibility of pretending not to recognize the other person (too late - we'd already made eye contact), acknowledged that we must be going through similar circumstances, and enjoyed (not!) a short and lame, "Hi, how are you?" type conversation. Then we went back to ignoring one another. Crazy, I know - if we were as "fine" as we said we were, we wouldn't be here, now would we?

I've always been musically inclined and there seems to be a song to fit any and every emotion I have, but during this chaos I found a lot of comfort in music. One particular song I grabbed onto was "One Thing I Know" by Selah, who was very new on the scene at that time (yes, this was over 10 years ago). I actually had their cassette tape! The chorus of the song went:

And if there's one thing I know
It's that you were never left alone
'Cause you can always call on Jesus' name
And if there's one thing I pray
It's that Jesus helps you find a way
To make a change and listen to your heart
God will take away your pain if you choose to let it go
if there's one thing I know

And to my surprise, I found myself beginning to want to "let it go". I was so overwhelmed by the pressure I was putting on myself to get pregnant that it was becoming an incredible burden. I had built up walls around my heart to keep the pain at bay, and it was working (somewhat) as long as I felt like I was doing something. Sitting around waiting for God didn't count as "doing" something, in my book. I tried very hard to be upbeat and positive with everyone else, and inside I was a churning mass of anxiety. Those who knew me then may tell me that I wasn't fooling anyone, but I wanted to appear strong and independent, and certainly not as pathetic as I was feeling. I would have settled for something in between tough and pathetic, whatever that is. A turning point was coming.

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!)

Out of Control: Part 1

I woke up this morning feeling compelled to write this post. Bear with me - this is going to be a long one.

I am a planner. No, actually I am more of a controller than a planner. I don't have to have a plan, but I DO have a need to be in control. If you know me, you recognize this as true. Believe it or not, it used to be worse.

To understand this story, you have to travel back in time almost 20 years. In 1992 I found myself, much to my dismay, divorced from my husband of 8 years and the single parent to a 3 year old daughter. That daughter, I would have been proud to tell you, was the product of a planned pregnancy. And when I say "planned" I do mean planned. As in, I decided what 6-month span I wanted my child born in, taking into consideration future birthday parties and school age cut-off dates, and I allowed myself 6 months to get pregnant. I went off the birth control pill a month before my scheduled "conception window" began and put my plan into action. In the third month of the plan, I was pregnant. Well, of course I was! I had a plan, I did what needed doing, and I got the desired result. I conveniently forgot to run that little "plan" past God, much less ask His approval or consider what might be His will. I just assumed that His will would naturally align with mine.

Nine months and an amazingly smooth pregnancy later (other than my baby's refusal to show her gender during ultrasound and her stubbornness regarding birth position), baby Dana was born. She was absolutely beautiful! Now, I grew up without siblings around me until I was 15, when my little brother was born. I made a point of telling all my family members how I wasn't going to have a huge gap between my children. Uh-huh. My plan was to have about 2, no more than 3, years between my kids. And I would have two of them, preferably one boy and one girl. I had it all figured out. And then came the day in October 1991 (the day before Halloween - yes, I remember) that my then-husband told me he wanted a divorce. For one of the first times in my memory, something was happening that I couldn't control. Oh, I tried. I bought a pitiful book about how to win back a spouse who didn't love you anymore and I put a "plan" into action. I prayed - oh, how I prayed! I prayed for God to bring him back to me - basically for God to enforce my will for me. That was a dark time in my life and I see now that I could have easily slipped into depression except that I had a small someone who was depending on me to get us both through the mess and into the clearing beyond. Complicating my grief at the loss of my marriage (which is - let's be honest- the loss of an entire future) was the fact that my husband's leaving reopened all the wounds from my own parents' divorce when I was 4. I had a wonderful stepfather and a mother who did the best she could in a bad situation, but a kid just doesn't come through that experience unscathed no matter how amicable the divorce may be. Maybe that's one of the roots of my need to be in control.

So I bought the book and I prayed for MY will to be done, and.... nothing changed. At least not right away. And when the change came, it wasn't in my situation - it was in ME.

Part 2: coming soon!

It Only Takes One

There is a lady I know that I have served with on a committee. A few months ago, she dropped off the radar. She didn't return phone calls and simply disappeared from view, more or less. Then I saw her at the ball field last Saturday. We had always had a decent relationship and she asked if she could talk to me about why she dropped out of sight.

She started off by saying she wanted to talk to me because I was the only one in that group that she had never heard say a bad word about anybody. I felt good for about five seconds and then reality hit me because the truth is, I certainly HAVE said bad things about other people. Apparently this lady was just not around at the right time. She went on to say that she didn't like how our group seemed to spend the first 15 minutes of every meeting talking about other people. I don't remember every single instance but I believe it's true.

I'm sure it wasn't her intent but God used that conversation to humble and convict me. I gossip and I enjoy it, and it's wrong. What is it about gossip that is so attractive? Because it is, isn't it? It's simply delicious sometimes to have the dirt on someone! Is it the idea that tearing someone else down makes me look better? Is it the feeling of knowing something that not everyone else knows? Our culture today makes gossip seem harmless, part of the "everyone does it so it's not so bad" genre. There are entire TV shows, magazines and websites devoted to gossip alone. Previously when I've been made aware of my tendency to gossip I've had to look at friendships that seemed to encourage talking about others and wonder what on earth we'd have to talk about if we weren't talking about other people.

And what's the test of gossip? I've always heard that before you speak you should test your words: is it true? Necessary? Kind? Beneficial? I've also heard that last one as "uplifting" or "encouraging". I've also heard it said that if you are not part of the problem and you are not part of the solution, you have no business talking about it. I've heard that you shouldn't say something about another person that you wouldn't say if they were standing right in front of you. And there's always "do unto others as you would have them do unto you". Do the rules about gossip apply to celebrities too? The Bible says "May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be pleasing to you, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer." Is what I say and think pleasing to God? Do a Bible search for passages about "words" and/or "mouth". It's an eyeopener!

Meanwhile, my talk with my friend shamed me on another level. If we as a group were truly off-base and spending so much time slamming other people, somebody should have spoken up and stopped it. Why didn't I? It only takes one person to say something like, "I don't think we should be discussing this. Let's talk about something else." At heart most people KNOW it's wrong to talk about others behind their backs and a gentle reminder will get them to stop. Silence implies consent. If you don't speak up everyone assumes you don't mind it, or that you agree with them. You don't have to be confrontational or judgmental, just redirect the conversation to something safer. And if you don't speak up, who will?