IF: Surviving

Read part 1 here.

I can't run.  I can't hide.  This is my life.  I've got to deal with it.

How? Dear Lord, how?

When Himself and I got married we both wanted “a lot” of children, at least four or five.  We both grew up in small families, me with just one sister and Himself an only child.  I even had names picked out for the first couple.  A boy would be Samuel or Daniel with Himself as the middle name.  The first girl would be called Victoria Rose, for his grandmother and my mother. 

I could picture them.  They would all have Himself’s beautiful blue/green/hazel eyes.  Boys would be blond like him and girls would be brunette like me.  They would have great smiles and be quick to giggle.  Of course they would have their father’s brains and patience.  From me they would be crafty and would like to make and build things.

Nice fantasy, huh?

Besides being disappointed that the family plans aren’t developing as expected, or at least as hoped for, there is a sense of brokenness.  Both of those, the disappointment and the brokenness, can take its toll on both the individual and the marriage.   

I think the first thing to living through IF is knowing your priorities.  Yes, we wanted to have children, but we wanted our marriage, our faith and our sanity all to remain intact and uncompromised more.  Without those, what would we have to give to our children?    We had seen families and marriages where that didn’t occur and the view was not pretty.  We didn’t want to go down that road.  Not at all.

With that in mind, it helped us set our limits.  We would not do IVF.  It did not fit in with our faith.  That was a nonnegotiable.  When the “fertility specialist” suggested we start injectibles, he wanted us to consider “selective reduction” if a high order pregnancy occurred.  Huh?  Get pregnant and then kill my babies??  Are you nuts?  So  we walked away from that treatment.  Compromising our beliefs just wasn’t an option.

We also respected each other’s comfort zone.  If one of us was at ease doing X and Y but the other only could handle X, we did just X.   

A number of years after we were married, Himself’s aunt was in town visiting from California.  She paid us a great compliment.  She told us to her it seemed that we lived life to the fullest.  We continued to do things we enjoyed or found important.  We volunteered at church.  We had season tickets to our favorite baseball team.  We saw plays and traveled.  We read books that we loved so much.  Weekly we met with our prayer group to recite the rosary.  Himself played golf regularly with his buddies.  I had my season pass to Cedar Point.  We took walks in the park. 

We kept on living.  We didn’t put something off just in case I got pregnant.  Run that race.  Take that trip.  Decorate that room.  Heck, if a baby comes along you’ll get to decorate it again.  What fun!  Keep on living. 

There’s still more to say.  Tune in next time.

AMDG