Part 2: Go Into the Desert

This is part of a series by Mr. M on "How to Live Joyfully with Infertility" Read part one here: Get Your Treasure Right

Go into the Desert
Now I am under no delusions that the above is incredibly difficult to realize. For instance, a week after I had these revelations I, along with my wife, was babysitting my best friend's children (2 boys – ages 3 and 9 months). We were having a grand time. I was throwing the older boy around on their couches and he was laughing wildly. His younger brother was hyperventilating with happiness too seeing his brother being flung about. Then I spun him around several more times followed by several more tosses! “Again! Again!” He cried. Eventually my arms got tired, but boy did his smile not get tired. It was glued on his face the entire time. When I saw that smile, all I could think of was “Man I wish I could make my own son smile and have joy like this.” It sunk me. Needless to say, amongst all that happiness, I was being dragged into all of these negative thoughts like “God just doesn't want me to be a father. I'd probably wouldn't be good anyway. I don't even have a job yet to support him. Man, I'm a loser.” Luckily, by grace, I am a sanguine by nature so I didn't dwell too long in the moment and moved my thoughts pretty quickly back to that beautiful child at hand and we read many books about dinosaurs. But later when I got home, I just wept internally to God in my prayer. “Oh God, you are so not my treasure right now. I just want to have a child. So please please make me know how beloved I am.” It is at this point that the second step comes in.

If we are going to realize that the core of our dignity and happiness is God alone, then we need to spend abundant time with Him. There is no way around it. If you want to be unhappy, then keep avoiding spending time with God. If we want that joy and love we are seeking, then we have to spend time with our beloved. Period. This is hard for me though as a social sanguine who gets himself into trouble by taking on too many activities. Also, I frequently don't feel like “I get anything out of it”. So I have begun to think of prayer as a desert, as it is often portrayed in the scriptures. After all, Jesus frequently went into the desert to pray. Why the desert? Why not go to the synagogue? Perhaps a comfy room in his house? Perhaps by a beautiful scene of nature? Why the heck a desert? Primarily because it is the perfect analogy and place for prayer. Follow me here for a moment.

How I feel on some days

A desert is a place of emptiness and radical abandonment of all things. Prayer has to be a desert of emptiness. I have to stop thinking of prayer as this always happy place I go for consolation. No it is a desert where there is work to be done to find water in order to survive. That water-finding is the work of person's prayer searching for God and taking time to be with God. More specifically, it is emptying our hearts out to God to receive His love. So prayer is not first and foremost what we get out of it, but first must be what we give to God. This makes prayer difficult at times because it does demand a lot of us. Who here hasn't wanted to reserve a number of places of our soul away from God? I know I have. To empty oneself is to be vulnerable. To be vulnerable is to trust. To trust is to accept. And to accept is downright hard when you are going through pain. Prayer, like the desert, is a hard place to live. Thus, we naturally to some extent want to avoid prayer, but this aversion should be seen for what it is: a clinging to things that are not God, pride, dissatisfaction, lack of trust, not-accepting, and a refusal of one's happiness

Our prayer life has to be simple like the dirt of the desert. In the desert, things are simple. There is a cactus here and there as a reminder to seek God's live giving water, a snake once in awhile to keep us fearful of evil, some tumbleweed balls to distract us, but for the most part it is just sand or cracked ground, miles and miles of nothing. So we need to keep prayer simple like the desert is simple. We too often make it complicated, get disappointed, and move on to something else as quick as we can. We need to have simple prayer times, which means this: simply spending fifteen minutes a day giving to God our concerns in quiet conversation and then just being loved by God in quiet mental conversation. Don't bring spiritual reading to these fifteen minutes. That can be done at another time or if you have longer time to give to God. The only book you should bring to this desert prayer time is the Bible and read passages from it slowly as God always speaks slowly to us or if you really prefer choose a few lines ahead of time from a spiritual book to contemplate.

The joy of prayer is like finding a gushing river of water in a desert. Consolations and desolations come and go in prayer. We shouldn't expect always to have great feelings or great insights. Nonetheless, there are innumerable graces I have felt in my life after trying to have a more consistent prayer life. Through much groping in the desert you will find a rushing river of water. You won't find water the easy way. You will get drops here and there; sometimes finding a nice cactus. But eventually the water will start to build. You will start to see more and more water under different rocks and then bam the river is in front of you. This river is a peace; a peace of heart that God wants you to have and to give to the world. Speaking from personal experience, there is a peace that reigns in my heart from knowing simply and radically that I am beloved by God on some days that you couldn't get me to trade for millions upon millions of dollars and yes even dare I say all the children in the world. But this peace and knowledge of knowing I am beloved doesn't come overnight. It takes a lot of time spent with the beloved. I am still very much learning this simple reality of being a beloved son or daughter of God, which brings me to my next point, to be continued.

From Mr. M: Some Thoughts on How to Live Joyfully with Infertility

Note: My husband was inspired to write a series of post (four) on his own experience of infertility + how to live joyfully nonetheless. I'm really grateful for his insights (obviously I'm biased!) and also think his thoughts are extra appropriate now, being in the thick of Lent with Holy Week right around the corner.

With no further ado...

I know it seems too good to be true. Really, can I have joy with this incredibly painful and often misunderstood suffering of infertility? Well, yes. But as I type these words I cringe and tremble because it is so hard. I know from personal experience struggling with infertility that it is the hardest thing in my life. Also, I fail at these ideas I'm proposing weekly, if not daily. Perhaps they will help. Perhaps they will be an oversimplification. Perhaps they are presumptuous. But yet they have been a grace for me and my wife in our life so I want to share this good with you. Thus, I thought I would share what God has placed on our broken hearts as healing balm. I will share these thoughts in four posts corresponding to four thoughts but please note that these thoughts are not meant to be in any way exhaustive for the depth and complexity of drama of infertility. And by the way, this suggested Rx is an on-going treatment for all of us, we infertile couples, so please keep me in your prayers as I pray for you.

N.B. Alot of these thoughts occurred to me while I was “on the cross” crying for the children I desired one weekend while I was on retreat. As a result, several of these thoughts I would like to credit to words and encounters with particular priests on that retreat. Therefore, I would like to give due thanks to these unnamed spiritual fathers. Here is the fruit of their priestly presence and teaching in my life.

1. Get Your Treasure Right
   There are two things in this world: God and the Things of God. Sin is placing any thing of God, no matter how good, above God. We do this in any number of ways every day in many different actions. Yet the worst is when we place our identity and happiness in one of the things of God, rather than God. To be sure, God wants to give us many of these good things, but only after we first recognize that God is the giver of these gifts and that He alone is our happiness, not these other things of God. Now, there is a unique temptation of infertility that comes in exactly here. The greatest temptation we face is to place our entire identity and happiness in a child we wish so badly to have. Do we not often think, “I'll be happy when I have a child. When I don't have to deal with infertility treatments. When I (fill in blank here).” Yet the incredibly gut-wrenching, soul-piercing truth is that as good as this desire is, a child is still not God. We have everything when we are beloved by God. Do we really believe that? Is God our treasure above all things, including children? Is God our happiness? A happiness that we can have not tomorrow or down the road, but today. I know there have been multiple times where like the Rich Young Man of the Gospel I have went away sad and empty because I didn't want to make God my sole treasure. Oh God help me to leave all things behind and cling to you as my treasure! Please help to heal my mind and my will when I get my treasure wrong.      

Next: Go into the Desert

same old same old

I've run out of clever titles for writing that CD1 arrived again. Oh well. The only thing my body seems able to do well is end each cycle predictably, like clockwork. 12 or 13 days post-peak, then AF. Done.

Rebecca wrote beautifully about tears yesterday, and CD1 makes me wonder: how many tears could I possible have left? Haven't I used all of them by now? My tear reservoir must be bigger than the Pacific Ocean!! Can I donate tears to a drought??

My tears don't seem to notice that we've been here before. CD1 is far from a new thing. I could tell yesterday it was coming from the aches and twinges that usually precede it.

But then again, every CD1 is different because it's grieving a different lack, a different absence, a different child that might have been. This time it's grieving that we won't have a child due around Christmas (that has always seemed so perfect), we won't have "news" to tell my parents at Easter...and speaking of that, looks like my next "fertile" time is while my parents are visiting, staying in the guest room next to our bedroom...lovely timing.

It's grieving not being able to celebrate new life in my womb while everything is coming to life outdoors. And so on.

Time to get it in gear: I have to schedule a blood draw for day 3 and then an ultrasound series for day 11 until ovulation. I guess a silver lining (grasping for anything here...) is that maybe we'll have some new, helpful information before this next cycle is over.

It is really hard to stay hopeful!!! I'm just so used to disappointment. Sometimes I daydream about how I would feel if I ever actually had a positive pregnancy test, and it just seems so surreal, like something that happens to other people.

Sorry for a downer of a post. On CD1, I set my expectations low: wake up, shower, get dressed, go to work, don't snap at Mr. M, don't cry at work, try to get something down but be gentle to yourself. There are many, many tears "inside" during work hours. Lots of grieving. If no one else sees, Jesus does.

April adopt-a-blogger: thank you!

I am so blessed, happy and grateful to be this month's "adopted" blogger per Amy/Amanda/the Holy Spirit. Seriously, I couldn't help but smiling all day thinking about all the prayers that will be coming to us this month. I feel especially spoiled because "my" month has not only Easter in it, but also St. Gianna's feast day and the canonization of John Paul II & John XXIII! That's one awesome month!

Amy asked me to write up a "who are you" kind of post, so this is it.

You can read in more detail our infertility journey here, but the cliff notes version is: we got married in May 2011, started trying to have a baby pretty much right away, and almost three years later still have never conceived. We're not dealing with male-factor infertility, and I haven't received a diagnosis, so we're squarely in the "unexplained" category of infertility. We're still investigating root causes and while it feels weird to hope that something's wrong with me, I do hope my doctor finds something that explains why we're fertility-challenged, preferably something fixable! (Not that it's ever that easy.)

We've also discerned that now is not the right time to pursue adoption because my husband is finishing his dissertation and our current apartment has no windows in the bedrooms (not fire-safe). This conclusion took a lot of wrestling, but I'm at peace with it currently. Our hearts are definitely open to adopting though once the dissertation is done and we move wherever my husband gets a job. (At least that's the plan - we all know how certain those are! =))

It's been...tough, to say the least. Infertility was not on my radar at all when we got married (I guess it isn't for most people) and it was a rude awakening to find out that the path to parenthood might be more arduous for us than for many of our peers. Even now, the fact that we're still childless seems a lot of days like a bad dream I just can't wake up from. This has definitely been a journey of faith: prayer is more real to me now, suffering is more real, my absolute dependence on God is crystal-clear. Pretty much every day I have to ask God's help to battle against jealousy, anger, despair, and resentment. That's some serious spiritual bootcamp.

Finding Catholic infertility blogs was nothing less than a godsend for me. To know that there are other women out there who get what I'm going through, and being able to encourage each other in this trial, has been such a blessing. We only know two couples IRL who struggle with infertility (as in, we didn't meet them through the Internet) and one lives in a different state, so this would all feel so much lonelier if it wasn't for the sisters-in-Christ I've met through my blog. I wish we all lived in one happy little town!!

Remember that button the lady in the Truman Show wears? "How's it going to end?" I wonder that every day. Will I be a mother eventually? Will this ache in my heart go away? Will it all become just a bad dream? I guess the more important question is: Will I become a saint through it all? Again and again God gently reminds me: "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but forfeit his soul?" Or as my husband reminds me: a child is good and wonderful and so-desired, but a child is still not God. Every day is a challenge to offer my desire for motherhood up to God, knowing that it's safe with Him, and seek Him first.

If I could be so bold, I have a few specific prayer requests for April:
**for the gift of a child (to be open and honest, my cycle is nearing the end and I'm in that limbo stage of hoping AF doesn't arrive and doubting that I'll ever be pregnant)
**if AF comes as usual, for the tests I'll undergo in April (day 3 labs + ultrasound ovulation series), that they shed light on my body's issues
**for our marriage to stay strong and grow despite the challenges in our lives
**most of all, that I would grow in faith, hope, and love, and that I would accept with gratitude the life God has given me (that's been tough lately)

Thank you, thank you, thank you in advance for your prayers!

hubby happies

Mr. M decided to write his own  Little Happies today!

1. Lego shelfie on my Gmail
2. What does the Fox Say?
3. Getting my back cracked by a PT and every other patient saying “OOOOOOOOh” but lovin' every second of it.
4. Warm days and warm underwear together on the same day (In D.C. you know what I'm talking about as the weather fluctuates pretty frequently)
5. Rooms without a roof (I have never seen one but I have heard they are happy so they make me happy thinking about that – huh does imaginings count as little happies???)
6. Minions and pretending to have minions of my own. “Hey any of you like to write my dissertation?” “Mmakamakamooo” (Yes!! Yes!! - From Minion)
7. Random goofiness as tonic for the soul
8. Funny ranks on April pools day
9. Laughing as I type these up.
10. Holding hot coffee to soothe aching hands after typing for too long
11. Portable bacon attachments for my car and stupid car insurance ads
12. Baby dust and the random woman or man who said “Good luck!” with a smiley face on a letter they gave with my wife's vitamins for CM
13. Snowmen named Olaf and Pet Reindeer
14. Being Sanguine and never wanting to stop this list. Okay one more because you have read this far . . .
15. Large Foam Rolls (for stretching out your back and other incredibly stupid things like playing baseball with random objects not designed for baseball so . . . much . . . fun)
16. Bouncy Ball Pits . . . for . . . bedrooms :-) No joke google it. . . it is the latest sleeping fad. Move over sleep number, here comes sleep balls.

Until next time,

Sanguine Hubster

little happies #4

{one}

Daffodils!!!!

If these look suspiciously like the daffodils Mary Beth listed as her 1st happy, that's because we both bought them at Trader Joe's. I just couldn't resist their cheerfulness and spring smell! They brighten up our kitchen and I may or may not carry them into the living room with me too.

{two}

Good books

I hope it's okay to list the same little happy twice in a row! At least it's a different book. This one's about time travel back to the Middle Ages and how the main character may or may not be stuck there just as the Black Death is starting to happen because the characters in the present (future, really) are coming down with a mysterious flu virus. Dun dun dun. Definitely a page turner. Definitely stayed up too late last night reading!

{three}

Good laughs

So at my most recent doctor's appointment, I was told to begin B6 500 mg sustained release + something called "FertileCM" to increase you know what. Well, the Fertile CM arrived today, and along with it in the box was this:

Don't know what that is? It's baby dust. I kid you not!!! The little "poem" on the baggie says: "This baby dust is Special and is being sent to you hoping it will help your fondest dreams come true."

Whaaaaat?!?! I sincerely hope that 1) that isn't why FertileCM costs $20 for a month's supply and 2) please please please let this not be sent with every shipment! What is one supposed to do with baby dust? Sprinkle it on the bed? Throw it up in the air and dance around? Take one star or crescent moon with each vitamin? No instructions were included...

You just have to laugh.

{four}

New plants

This might look like a bunch of pots with dirt in them...which it is. But there's also seeds inside! I planted them on Saturday, in the rain, because it was way too wet to dig up the ground. Parsley, spring onions, arugula, lettuce, and spinach. I'm considering this a test of what grows well in pots.

{five}

Pretty teakettles

This is on the wish list! I think it's so charming. Guess how much....$100 big ones, no joke! It's made by MacKenzie Childs, up in the Finger Lake region of New York. On our first anniversary getaway, we happened to stay right down the road from their factory. They make really whimsical stuff: flowers and butterflies and lots of colors. Mr. M and his mom bought me a cake stand from them for Christmas two years ago and ever since then we get their catalog and I drool over their teakettles.

{six}

Mr. M!

He's always a little happy in my book =) We spent a lot of time this rainy weekend watching basketball, and I always love how into the game he gets - even if he doesn't care about either team! He just appreciates live sports.

Also he made dinner tonight and went for a walk with me. Double happy.

sleepless

It's almost midnight and I can't get to sleep.

I tried, and failed.

I'm usually not an insomniac; I usually fall asleep peacefully and sleep soundly all night, so I'm always perturbed when I can just not my mind to stop racing long enough to drift off to dreamland.

At least I know why I can't sleep. I came home in angry, no, furious tears after a church event where I felt absolutely swarmed by all things pregnancy and baby. Three of the other ladies were very, very pregnant, and there were many jokes and half-complaints about baby-carrying. Many expressions of interest and concern for the expectant mamas.

An entire aspect of life - namely, pregnancy and childbearing - that not only do I not feel a part of, but I want to run away from as fast as I can while screaming at the top of my lungs.

At this point in my blog's life, I feel like I could recycle any number of posts:

I felt extremely jealous tonight. Just like last Lent (and many times between).

I felt angry at my childlessness and others' (unintended) insensitivity. Just like I wrote about here.  

I felt vulnerable and exposed as I was the only one (seemed to me anyway) not laughing at the pregnancy jokes or rummaging in my purse instead of engaging in pregnancy-related conversation.

I have to trust I'm moving forward with increased acceptance and peace, but sometimes it just feels like I'm in a sickening vortex where the same emotions and challenges keep getting dredged up again and again, except with even more intensity as the babies around me and my months of childlessness keep multiplying.

The worst of it is, no one seems to hear my heart-cries of pain. (Kind of what I wrote about here.) Of course that's not entirely true - my dh would remind me immediately of all the wonderful, caring, supportive friends who have rallied and prayed for us, of course including blog friends!

But sometimes it just feels so darn lonely. Like I just want to say, "Can we all not talk about pregnancy? Because it feels like daggers to my heart. Honest." (An impossible plan) Like I crave someone to just get it before I have to spell it out for them.

Frankly, I just really want the pregnant belly or the child in my arms. It is just so hard feeling like an outsider in woman-land, feeling like the wierdo who isn't able to conceive and birth a baby already! I know there's ultimately no answer to the pointless question "Why me?" but that doesn't mean I don't ask it sometimes.

I should really try to fall asleep. Last thought: I appreciated this post by "All You Who Hope" so very much. Not because it gave me hope that one day I may indeed look back on this time as a horrible bad dream - I'm not really in a hopeful mood tonight - but because of its acknowledgement that infertility is blazingly, mind-numbingly, soul-crushingly, depressingly hard.

Jesus, I trust in you. Jesus, help me.