Praying for strength

I am asking God for strength today.

I'm pretty sure it's cycle-day one. My day began by taking my temperature about seven different times throughout a two-hour period, while forcing myself to go back to sleep, hoping it was wrong.

It was hard to get out of bed because I knew once I did I would see some spotting, which I did. Now I have to go about my day like nothing's wrong. But so much is wrong. Once again, I feel depleted, completely weak. I am thankful I have nothing to do because I can barely function.

I am trying to be good and not despair, because I know this is when it is most important. But I just want to be unconscious for a while and get through this and wake up on cycle day 12. Wouldn't that be nice? Well, nothing about this is nice, but it would be a little less horrible.

I am just praying that I can function this week, since I am away from home and can't just lay on the couch and cry. I pray that I can get through this entire part of my life, because, after nearly five years, it is weighing extremely heavy on me (understatement of the year). Each month I am unsure how I will go on. But you know what? That is the joke of it, because we all just go on. It just keeps getting harder and we just keep getting sadder. And we have no choice but to endure it.

Last night I decided that infertility is like a life prison term. Just like when someone is sentenced to life in prison, and they have to realize that the rest of their days will be spent behind bars, so, too, do we have to realize that the rest of our lives will be spent without carrying a biological child. That is what we have been sentenced to. It's not the "normal" life and it's not how we expected our lives to go. And just like when faced with life in prison, you are forced to deal with the idea that your one shot at this world will be severely compromised.

But, perhaps even worse, we have the chance of parole each month and each month we get our hopes up that our prison term will end. And when it doesn't, we are forced to confront the idea that it never will.

I don't mean to sound overly dramatic, and this comparison might sound really horrible to those who aren't experiencing infertility, but those of you who are will know what I mean. And, actually, the reason I started to think about it this way is because I was trying to relate to how some prisoners, when faced with spending the rest of their lives in prison, find God. Or, for those of you who have read Left to Tell, it's kind of like how Immaculee was forced to depend on God when she was trapped in the bathroom during the Rwandan genocide. It's not that these people didn't need God before, but when faced with these dire situations, God is really all they have. In reality, God is all any of us have, but with everything going on in our lives, we forget that. So maybe the one bright side of infertility is that those of us dealing with it are among those who are forced to rely on God because we, too, are trapped. In that sense, it's a blessing, I guess. I'm not quite ready to rejoice at that concept this morning. Maybe later.

So hopefully I'll get through this today without breaking down. Hopefully God will give me strength and hopefully the saints I am praying to for help will protect me. That's all I can hope for.