Silent pain // #ventsesh

When you are hurting about not getting pregnant, I hear you.

If you are silently suffering, please know I see you.

It’s a silent pain that’s hard to fathom.

(though spoiler alert: it doesn’t have to be there forever)

……

Maybe you are someone who got pregnant easily… it’s such an incredible gift we, in that moment, can almost take for granted; it happened that way our first time around.

The second time, due to health issues that presented after our baby girl was born, was very different.

And for many more woman, the reality is so much harder.

Friends are watching your seemingly easy journey as you post your growing belly and then baby on Facebook, liking your photos and supporting you, all while crying behind their keyboard wishing it could be them just this one time.

I know I felt that way, feeling an extra sting as people would continually ask me, “when are you having another?”

If only it was that simple.

It’s so easy to say you know how someone is feeling or try to make a comparison to hopefully ease their silent pain.

We can’t.

It’s impossible.

 

Imagine each month, peeing on a stick or seeing a doctor hoping for a different outcome than the heart-wrenching one you had the most before.

Until you have that feeling of so powerfully wanting to hold your baby in your arms and feeling like your body is failing you, you can’t comprehend a pain that deep.

To feel like your body can’t do naturally what it seems like everyone else can is the worst feeling.

The. Worst. Feeling.

Sorry to be crass, but how do 16 year old girls get pregnant when they don’t even want to and here we are checking every schedule and making it a full time job and yet, a baby won’t form?

How does that make sense?

It doesn’t.

But it also doesn’t mean it’s your only option.

……

We have our baby that completes our family.

I didn’t grow him in my belly but looking back he sure as hell grew inside me.

He grew deep in my heart.

We adopted our sweet boy from an incredibly strong, selfless woman who knew the best thing for her baby was to give him to a family that could give him a better life.

I can’t imagine her silent pain.

Or that level of strength.

And so I often hear women, friends, talk about their struggles with infertility even as they know I adopted. I listen, and I sympathize.

I’ve been there, and it sucks.

But I’m also smarter now.

I know that families don’t always come together in the ideal way our innocent younger selves might have envisioned.

But it doesn’t mean it wasn’t meant to be this way from the very beginning.

Our sweet Evan who makes the universe shine was always meant to be ours.

I wish I never had to go through the pain of feeling like my body was less than.

I wish I didn’t have to feel that way.

But if life happened differently we wouldn’t be the parents to the most special boy I’ve ever met who radiates sunshine and joy.

He was meant for us and looking back, I wouldn’t want it any other way.

……

So if you are walking through the silent pain right now, I see you and I hear you and I’m crying as I type this for you because I know that feeling.

It hurt like hell.

But that silent pain is gone, and it’s been replaced by a love so much fiercer than any hurt could ever muster inside.

I promise you that if you’re open to it, your family will happen just the way it was meant to be.