I just read a few journal entries from the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009. I usually hate doing this. As a matter of fact, there have been many a journal tossed in the trash immediately following one of these look-backs. Mostly I hate remembering where I have been. I have gone through vast wastelands of Godlessness and hopelessness and ugliness. And I wrote about all of it. Writing has always been this release for me. There is so much more I can say with written words than I can say with spoken ones. Somehow I get behind the pen (or the keyboad these days) and am eloquent and thoughtful and fluid. When I speak, I stumble and stutter and forget and start and stop... and edit. Maybe that's the biggest difference - when I write, I don't imagine who will be reading my words and what the reaction will be. I only write - without hesistation or consciousness and sometimes without filter.
Funny though that these entries were actually beautiful. They are too spaced out and unkempt. I wonder what happened in between February 2 and March 9 of 2008. It's only left to my weak memory. But what years were 2008 and 2009 for me! It's too easy to forget them - so freely it slips from my memory where I was and what I've been through and where I am. I'm taking a moment to recall, and to share.
You may or may not know (I'll pretend you don't) that it took me a year to get pregnant. I went off the pill in January of 2008 and got pregnant the very end of that December. I had not before and have not to this day been through anything so difficult. There have been things before; I am from a broken family full of broken people. There have been illnesses and deaths and divorces and tragedies all around me. In fact, there is so little of my childhood bobbing around in my memory that I have to make effort and focus to remember parts of it - and even then, I am not sure what's reality or dream. The difference is that I have not ever had my own tragedy. I have always, always been a supporting role, and I mean that in the truest since of the idea. I have prided myself on my pillar-esque reactions to life. If ever you needed a sholder to cry on, just give me a moment to wipe the tears of the previous mourner away and my sholder's all yours. I felt very little and processed even less. I was strong and steady and wise beyond my years, full of good advice and well-tuned ears.
Until 2008, I had never needed a God, especially not a big one. My life was playing out close enough to how I thought it should. It felt good, mostly. I did the things I was supposed to do - hassle-free high school complete with state championships, attendance at Auburn University, well-reputed sorority, skip a few mirky years, perfect wedding, marriage and on to child-bearing. Only it didn't happen like that. For the first time in my ever, my plan failed. I prided myself on my intense and complete control over everything in my life. It was as though I was going down a life check-list completing each event with one of those glorious marks of accomplishment... until 2008, which became an abrupt halt to all that I had known - praise the Lord.
I knew from forever that I would be a mother. It wasn't until late in high school, into college, that I knew that was all I wanted to do. It became more and more clear to me that mothering was my calling. Everything between where I was and motherhood became one more task to accomplish before I held my own precious baby in my thirsty arms. So, as a matter of fact, it felt to me like I had been trying to have a baby for the better part of a decade.
In September 2006, I was finally married and closer than I had ever been to fulfilling what I had come to believe was my destiny. If it had been my call alone, we would not have used any prevention from night one. In his elderly wisdom (he's six years older than me), Joey convinced me otherwise. So I continued to wait. And pine.
Come January 2008, the time seemed right. . . in our limited, finite sight. What was supposed to have happened right away did not. I was appalled. How could my body fail me? How could it not do the thing it was made to do? How could this be happening to me? Month after month, my hopes would rise so high and fall so far so fast. It was miserable. I hurt more than anything I've ever felt. I felt forgotten by God. It felt like punishment for everything wrong I had ever done in my life. I remember thinking and praying, 'What do I need to learn from this? Please teach it to me quickly so I can have a baby!'
I joined a support group at our church for women struggling with 'infertility' (although after just a year, I would find out, I hardly qualified as 'infertile.') There was one precious woman there who had been wanting to be pregnant for 9 years, all of her marriage. She works at Sav-A-Life as a counselor to mothers who accidentally get pregnant with babies they never wanted. She still hopes. Most of the women in the group had been trying for over a year. I felt silly. But they loved me and prayed for me and ministered to me in so many ways.
During that longest year ever, through all that pain and dashing of hopes and misunderstanding, I found a new God - one that is bigger than any God I had imagined or needed before. I learned lots of staggering statistics about infertility and more about infertility treatments and drugs than I ever wanted to know. But, more than that I discovered a God that not only hadn't forgotten me, but was focused on me - like I was an only child in need of some Daddy time.
One of the things I learned about myself in 2008 is that I have, or had, a problem with trust. I didn't know what it was or what it looked like or how to do it. In all of the journal entries I re-read I talk about needing to trust, learning to trust, what it would feel like if I could just trust. I stopped journalling somewhere along the way and I wish I wouldn't have. I would love to know more of what I was thinking through all that hurting and learning.
I know now how sweet trust is. I am boggled by people, especially married ones and parents, that do life without trusting in the God I know. There is so much freedom in trusting Him and so much peace and so much hope. It's so necessary.
Looking back it seems like such a short period of time, that year that felt like forever. It came and went just like all my other years, but left so much in its wake - almost more than any other time in my life. The only year that has had a greater impact on the person that I am is the year that I have just finished - from September 6, 2009 to September 6, 2010 - the first year of my first-born's life.
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