Let's get personal.

Deep breath.  My palms are a bit sweaty and my heart is racing because I'm a little scared to share this with the internet.

So there's been this skeleton in my closet and while my real closet doesn't have a lot of room, my emotional/spiritual one is lined with them.  They're piling up and it's time that I've let someone know they're there so they can come and investigate and maybe help me clear them out.

I'm here to talk about infertility.  There's your cue to leave if you're uncomfortable with the subject and it's a bit too raw for you.

For the last 3 years I have struggled and by struggle I mean my chest has been ripped open, my faith questioned and my spirit broken.  I have taken countless pregnancy tests, cried A LOT, and grown a beard.  Sometimes I feel like I belong in one of those freak show circuses.  Line up to see the bearded lady everyone!  I bet she had some real illness like Poly Cystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) and I kind of feel bad for her.  I've been there except I bought an electric razor at Wal-Mart for $9 and I tried to hide it from the general public because I can't afford laser surgery and I'm embarrassed.

Last night was one of those really bad nights I was lamenting my abnormal facial hair.  If you can't tell that I'm a Mormon or LDS, I'll tell you, I am.  We have this thing in our culture where we teach young women how glorious it is to be a mother.  We have countless Sunday School lessons about how wonderful we are as woman (and we are) and we have Young Women lessons about becoming a mother one day (which is wonderful).  We have been taught to want and love and crave being a mother.  So I do.

I want to be a mother so badly my heart is breaking.

I want to be just like everyone else who is having children.  I want to be so ill I'm throwing up and I'm miserable if it means that I am cool enough to get the chance to grow a human being, but I'm not.  I'm also not angry that you're having them.  I think it's amazing and I'd love to come chat with you at your baby shower.

Now, some of you are thinking, "Well Becky, there are drugs for that you know.  My friend so and so got pregnant right away on Clomid."  Sorry, I didn't.  "Well Becky, there's in vitro and there's the possibility you could lose some weight and it would fix a lot."

Thanks for the advice.

Excuses aside, you honestly don't really know what it's like to be me and you never get to (lucky for you).  So if I want your advice on fertility I'll let you know, but for now I'm going to tell you how it feels to be LDS and to be infertile from my point of view.

For the longest time and even now I have this fear that because I'm not getting pregnant that I don't have enough faith and that I've somehow sinned in some way that God won't follow through on His promises to me.  I know that's a lie, but I still believe it sometimes.  I'm afraid that God has forgotten me and that He doesn't really want to give me a baby and that I'd probably make a miserable parent anyway.

I've been taught that it's my purpose in life to be a mother and to bear children, but I physically can't.  My reproductive organs disagree with the commandment to multiply and replenish the earth no matter how much I will them to start working.  I thought to myself, "Why am I so faithless?  Why does God not care and see that I'm suffering here?  Where is my Balm of Gilead?"  It got so bad that I started to question everything.  "Does He really exist or is this some joke?  Or maybe it's something we've all made up to make ourselves feel better."  It's not.  He's really there, but I'm just not pregnant and it doesn't mean that I'm not faithful enough.  It doesn't mean I'm a lazy slob and that I don't know how to have sex.  I got the same talk you did.

It's my gene pool folks and God can perform miracles, but it doesn't mean I have to sacrifice my self image, my faith and everything else for me to finally have a baby.  In fact, it's probably best that I don't sacrifice any of those things.

So I'm going to keep enduring for a season and say, I guess I don't really have an answer for anyone about infertility.  I guess I'm just here to say I'm not a success story (yet) and it sucks to suffer this way, but I have hope that it'll end and one day I'll get to snuggle my own baby in my arms whether it comes from my own body or someone else's.  In the meantime, do you mind if I hold your baby?