What Does Grief Look Like When a Lifelong Dream Is Shattered?
Walking through the reality of infertility
I live with a pain, that for three years, has never left my side. It sits there, always ready to express itself through my human tears, a gripping of my heart or a wash of despair.
It’s mostly a silent pain, day in and day out, only I know is there. You would never know it from the outside. It’s pretty good at hiding itself underneath the veneer of the “I’m okay” answer to “How are you?”.
Pain is a funny thing. It comes and goes as it pleases. The scale can be tipped in favor of hope for a moment of time, but pain always comes back with a little bit more.
These ongoing gut punches have slowly morphed into shadows of grief. A grief that the only way around is through.
How do you grieve the loss of humans that have never even existed?
Humans that you only meet in your dreams. Humans that you push on the swing, cuddle in your arms and cherish their laugh in the dreamlike world that exists in your head.
Infertility is not just a season of pain to walk through, it is the loss of lifelong dreams my little girl self could only imagine.
It’s watching that dream slowly start to slip out of your grip when you see that one red line on the pregnancy test over and over. It’s crying on the bathroom floor, month after month that spills into years.
And while elements of that dream are still possible, how you thought it might look is not. Every year that goes by is one less child you may meet. The 4–5 has morphed into 2–3 which has been swallowed by the reality of, “Lord at least give us one miracle!”
It’s a strange kind of grief. When you grieve the loss of a loved one, you have the memories to hold onto. But when you grieve something that never was, it leaves an odd sense of hope you grip tightly to, that a version of it is still possible. However, that hope is overshadowed when parts of it slip out of your fingers into the past.
This grief is also coupled with moments of guilt. Guilt for feeling so much pain, when your life is full of a million other beautiful things to be grateful for. Guilt for even grieving, when it pales in comparison to those who suffer the loss of infinitely more around the world. Guilt for feeling like someone knocked the breath out of you when a friend announces their pregnancy. Guilt for refusing to go to baby showers full of ridiculous games and “oo-ing” and “aw-ing” over the cute baby clothes you’ve waited years and years to be able to buy.
Infertility is throwing your timeline out the window. And then the next timeline out the window. In fact, it’s getting rid of any timeline whatsoever. There’s no “planning when we’ll have kids.” There’s no spreading out the age differences. It’s accepting that you’ll be “older” parents.
Infertility is wanting to crawl into a hole on Mother’s Day, or Father’s Day, or really any holidays with Instagram reels full of happy families with beautiful children. It’s celebrating each birthday, thinking, maybe by next year. It’s trying your best to be in the moment, and enjoy what is, suppressing the pain you can’t get rid of.
Infertility is a season that revolves around planning weekly doctor’s visits, planning events and outings around cycles, canceling outings because of what the medications and hormones do to your body, giving yourself shots, spending hours on the phone with doctors, billing departments and insurance companies. It’s trying to take care of your mental health and fighting depression on a daily basis. It’s going to acupuncture, seeing a therapist, joining a support group, doing yoga, taking supplements and trying anything and everything that could help. It’s trying to stay involved in church and maintain a relationship with God when everything in you is asking why.
It starts to define everything about you. Everything revolves around it. Everything. Your time, finances, marriage, work, social life, emotions, mental state and spirit.
It’s not something that can be put aside or ignored. You can’t just “relax and it’ll happen.” And no, you don’t have “plenty of time.” Contrary to what those moms who pop out baby after baby may think, it’s an actual medical diagnosis that means you either address it with medical assistance, or there’s a good chance you may not have children.
It’s one of your worst fears come true. Surely this wouldn’t happen to me. It has.
Every day I feel moments of cautious hope. Hope that the next treatment, or the next thing we try, will finally work. Hope that my body will not only conceive, but bring a pregnancy to term. Hope that God will finally answer our desperate prayers.
I fully believe in having hope. I fully believe in miracles. But I won’t let forced positivity whitewash my journey of grief. Feeling both joy and suffering is not a zero sum game. You can feel both, all at the same messy time.
I’m not a victim of this circumstance. But I am a human, walking through a form of grief, that I’m not sure when I’ll see the other side of.
And so our story continues. I’m not sure what I’ll think one day when I look back at this season. I know it will someday come to an end, and I can only pray we find joy on the other side, whatever that may look like. We’ll grow our family one way or another. But it doesn’t mean the road to get to the starting line won’t be riddled with more hardship.
It’s a season that has driven us to be vulnerable with the community around us, cheering us on, holding us up, and praying alongside us. It’s a vulnerability that has opened doors to relationship. And I want to be brave enough to walk through them.
It’s a season that has made me ferociously protective of those walking a similar road. When words or advice are frivolously thrown around, I am keenly aware of the silent suffering of some in the room. I’m aware that one in eight couples go through this journey that the other seven will never understand.
But I do. I know your pain, and I will never minimize or gloss over it. It’s okay to feel hope and joy and beauty while also holding suffering and grief in both hands.
To those who want babies, but can’t right now, for whatever reason it may be–I write for you. To those who are grieving the loss of any lifelong dream, or at least a version of that dream–I write for you.
The beauty of holding suffering and joy in both hands is that we come to realize that one births the other. And that’s a beautiful thing.
Michelle
