Infertility Hurts Quotes

The more hurt I felt, the more I blamed the Lord for my pain. As my anger reached an irrational level, I hit one of the lowest points in my life. All of the waiting, disappointment, frustration, faith, hope, prayer, begging, pleading, doctors' visits, and medication seemed futile. God seemed so very far away. Finally I had it out with God in a yelling, stomping, fist-shaking, tearful fit unlike any I had ever dared before. As a "good Christian" I had never fully admitted to Him, or to myself, just how angry I really was. But He had known the true nature of my heart all along. I couldn't shock or surprise Him with my temper tantrum. He was big enough to handle all my rage. By confronting Him, I admitted to both of us exactly how I perceived our relationship. But this didn't drive Him further away; He drew me close. Honesty

I didn't feel anything at first when Miss Ethel told me, but now I think about it all the time. It's like there's a baby girl down here waiting to be born. She's somewhere close by in the air, in this house, and she picked me to be born to. And now she has to find some other mother." Cee began to sob. "Come on girl. Don't cry," whispered Frank. "Why not? I can be miserable if I want to. You don't need to try and make it go away. It shouldn't go away. It's just as sad as it ought to be and I'm not going to hide from what's true just because it hurts.

By trying not to hope, we buy into a false peace. This peace is a controlled variable in our experiment. In reality, we're still grasping to control the outcome and manage how much we'll hurt in the end. To calm the mind storm, we need to give our fears over to the One who brings true peace.

The sneaky thing about envy is that it starts as harmless. We have a desire for something good - a promotion, a bigger house, a baby. The desire itself isn't sinful. But not getting what we desire hurts. And seeing someone else get what we so desperately want adds insult to injury. In my opinion, this is one of the worst side effects of infertility. One woman's joy triggers another's sorrow.

Saying I was lonely or alone in my aches would be understating the gravity of what I felt. My world reminded me constantly of my lack of club membership. For many years I was inevitably hurt by and excluded from mommy gatherings, baby showers, church moms' groups and friends' playdates. If I was invited, my exclusion quickly followed in the form of disconnection. I had nothing to offer the conversations regarding mom advice, funny kid stories, or parenting hacks. The circles I should belong to, I no longer fit into. I felt the pull of our distancing life stages. No matter how hard I tried, the club was out of reach.

Eventually a consultant shook his head as Rachael told him how much she hurt and told her, ‘We have to send you home. There’s nothing wrong with you.’ But there was something wrong with her. Rachael was eventually diagnosed with endometriosis, a disease where womb tissue grows elsewhere in the body, causing extreme pain and sometimes infertility. It takes an average of eight years to diagnose in the UK,56 an average of ten years to diagnose in the US,57 and there is currently no cure. And although the disease is thought to affect one in ten women (176 million worldwide58) it took until 2017 for England’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence to release its first ever guidance to doctors for dealing with it. The main recommendation? ‘Listen to women.’59

We can trust God with our brokenness because Psalm 34:18 shows us exactly where God is when we are hurting: ‘The LORD is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.

I remembered some words Sera's Dad had given us in the depths of our infertility: a reminder that it was never in our control. He said that obsessively gripping particular plans often ends up squeezing the life out of them, and ourselves, hurting everyone more. That often the things we want to keep clutching most tightly are better left to the wind.