Birthdays are an odd mile marker time to stop and evaluate life. We size up the events of the year prior, and look to the year ahead. We're acutely aware of all the things that still haven't happened, we still haven't achieved, we still haven't changed. I have always struggled with my birthday, birthdays have always been hard for me, for as long as I can remember.
In my life I have spent a lot of time thinking about the age I am currently at, and how where I am currently at in life, is no where near where I thought I would be, or certainly should be at at that particular age.
I'm a type A, highly organized, controller - and my life has not gone as I had planned it would go. I'm often reminded of the saying "My life can be summed up in one sentence... well, that did not go as planned!"
When I was in Junior High, I never dreamt I would be looking forty-two in the face and not have a house full of kids, filling various ages, rooms in our house, and scattered through High School, Middle School and Elementary school buildings. I never dreamt I would survive a traumatic miscarriage, deal with years of infertility, and go through a divorce in my twenties. I would have never dreamt I would remarry and spend my entire thirties continuing to deal with infertility and adopt a child. I would have never dreamt I would finally get pregnant and then have to bury that baby in my forties. That right there, is the stuff of nightmares, not of Junior High dreams.
And I know I'm not alone. I know each one of us deals with life's disappointments and unexpected events and diagnosis's. My nearest and dearest friends struggle with the reality of being single and are looking at their forties not far off. In Junior High their dreams were also full of love, marriage, and lots of babies. And as their birthdays continue to come and go, they also face the reality of unanswered prayers, hopes, and dreams.
Some days it all just makes me weep. It makes me angry. It makes me frustrated. My dear dear friends and I are not bad people, we are not asking for bad things, we are not setting our hopes on frivolous dreams - the emptiness we are asking to be filled are with legitimately good things, so why is God not choosing to fulfill and fill those requests?
Even though deep inside, what I've learned over and over through the years, is that is just how life works. That is how God chooses to weave His magic. It's how He continues to wake us up and call us close to Him time and time again. He sets us up over and over to fall off the edge of sanity, wash our hands completely of His grace and walk away... But it's at our lowest of lows that He does his highest of highs work. Our eyesight in the moment is always utterly blinding, but our hindsight is always 20/20. He is always there in the inner workings of our life. He is continually drawing us close to Him, asking us to trust Him... no matter what, no matter how sucky, no matter how hard. He ultimately is in control, and we have to somehow just trust He knows what He's doing. Easier said than done.
And now as I'm looking at this new number looming ahead, I also know it's time to end a really large chapter in my life, in our lives. When we lost Faith, I was forty years old. We had basically given up hope of achieving pregnancy, yes... but it was more something we had just "loosely" let go of. It wasn't "official". When we saw that tiny little heartbeat on the tv monitor in that dark room, suddenly everything changed. My husband and I, together, had created a life. Something God had not previously granted us through all those years of trying.
God surely had a different plan for our little girl than we did. He wanted her beside him in Heaven before we got to have her beside us here on earth. There was a plan and purpose to it, and some days that is easier to comprehend and accept than others. But even though we lost her, we had in fact created her, and suddenly we had new hope. New hope of it possibly happening again...
After losing her, we would return to the doctors office for a long conversation about what to do next. What were the options, what were the odds, what were the statistics, what should we set our hopes on this time? Could we be assured her Trisomy 18 was absolutely not genetic and not going to happen again? Most people are done having their babies before forty. Forty is that scary age of down syndrome and dried up eggs. Babies in their forties means nearly sixty by their graduation. This conversation was much different than one we would have had ten years prior. Losing a baby in your twenties or thirties (in my mind) still allows you to have time and hope to get pregnant again. In your forties however, that all looks very different. We looked at numbers, we talked about options, and in the end we gave ourselves two more years of "trying". We would not dive back in hard-core with some of the all-or-nothing fertility treatment options possibly still available to us, but we would continue forward with injections, smaller scale treatments, charting, recording, timing... We decided to extend our hope two more years.
Twenty-three months have now passed since we said goodbye to our Faith MaryJo. Twenty-three months have passed without another positive pregnancy test. In two weeks I will reach that fateful number, and I know the time has come. It is time, after almost nineteen years, to finally choose to have to be done. I have used the excuse and blamed and cursed God for the last nineteen years for not granting my wish, not answering my prayers the way I wanted them answered. And now it's time to fully accept that He is not, and will not be fulfilling and filling that huge void in my life with a biologically ours, red haired, blue eyed, little baby.
This is, in fact, the God destined plan for my life, whether it's what I would have chosen or not.
I have to figure out how to come to grips with this final chapter of my fertility. It is finally time to be done, and it's time to finally just be ok with it. And to be honest, that is hard. After all these years - even though we had basically accepted the given reality, we still allowed ourselves to always hang on to that tiny thread of hope. It's time to open my tightly little clutched fist, that is still desperately clinging to that one last tiny little tread still in my hand, and let it go. Let. It. Go. Forever.
Has he granted me a husband? You bet (ummmm, two in fact, as horrible as that is to say). Has he granted me a family? You bet, I have two wonderful sons - one almost twenty and one almost nine. He has also granted me two other pregnancies which ended before their births. I know I have to continue to trust His plan for my life, for our families lives... but that is not always easy. It's not ever easy if I'm completely honest. It's time to fully focus on all that I have, rather than all that I was never given.
My mind knows the truth of God's goodness and ultimate sovereignty, my heart and soul however still selfishly longs for more, still cringes when I hear pregnancy announcements, still aches when I see little babies in the church pews ahead of me.
I did not choose this, but God did. God chose me. He chose to create me, to forgive me, to bless me beyond anything I possibly deserve. He did not take Faith from us, or leave our prayers unanswered as punishment for any of our earthly sins. He merely wants us to continually come to Him, cling to Him, trust and worship Him through the highs and lows of our lives. He wants us to live a life that honors and glorifies Him - even through the hard. Especially through the hard, because that is when loving God and worshiping Him fully is at its hardest.
So I shall take a deep breath and try figure out how to face my birthday with my chin up. I will continue to process the steps of closure to this unanswered chapter in my life, in our life, with as much grace and poise as I can muster in the moment. I will try give God praise and glory for MY life, thank him for continuing to wake me up each morning, ensuring me His work through me is not yet done.
It's a delicate balance, this thing called life. While we long for control as we plan our days and futures, we ultimately know it's not ours for the making. It's really only ours for the taking, for the receiving. It's what we choose to do with what we're given, and what to choose to give back to God, to the world, and to others that is ultimately our gift and our reward.
It's also what we choose to do with what we are not given that is the much harder part of our journeys to figure out and gracefully continue on through. It's the outlook, the attitude, the surrendering of self that ultimately shows our true character and God's greater design for our lives, stories, and purposes.
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