Over the last 10 years I have been pregnant four times and have given birth to two biological children. The label “infertile” doesn’t seem to fit me the way it once did. I like to jokingly refer to myself as “intermittently fertile” because apparently that is how things work for us. But there was a time when a doctor looked over lab results and told me pregnancy would be difficult if not impossible without major medical intervention– interventions we couldn’t afford and didn’t feel ethically comfortable with.
I remember in the early days of our infertility diagnosis just wanting to know what the point of this whole infertility thing was. I knew God loved me and I knew suffering was to be endured like discipline- for my good and with a purpose- but this felt like some kind of massive and cruel time-out for a crime I didn’t remember committing. I wanted to fast forward to the end where God could tell me what I did wrong and this would all make sense to me.
And I wanted a happy ending, too. I wanted a story that in hindsight would make all the hold-ups make sense. I would sit in my infertility time-out, I would learn my lesson, then God would give me what I wanted– pregnancy and a baby. And everyone would see exactly why it happened the way it did. But that just wasn’t the way it worked.
There are amazing kids that have been added to my family through adoption because of our years of infertility. There are my precious biological boys who came at just the right, God-ordained time. It would be easy to think that the point of my infertility journey was so that we would someday arrive at this family– the family that infertility created. And that isn’t entirely untrue! I am thankful for what infertility did in my life so that we were in the right place at the right time for each of our children, but I have also seen a bigger picture– a picture that has nothing to do with children.
