This Started as a Feel-Good Post...Oops...

I've been trying to mentally write a blog post for a few days now, and it's not really becoming anything solid, so I thought I'd open the "new post" button and see what came out.  Maybe I'll hit publish, maybe not.  I got as far as opening blogger, then I decided to open iTunes instead and figure out what the P!nk song is that I heard on the radio at work a few nights in a row and download it.  Then, I thought to myself, "What else can we download? I like that Katy Perry "Firework" song.  Let's do that.  I really like Katy Perry."  Both songs, I have since learned, have thinly-veiled anti-bullying messages.  Funny how you can just sing something mindlessly and not even realize what's going on.  Anyway, that turned into seeing what the top 10 songs were on the country, pop and rock charts on iTunes.  Did you know that "Don't Stop Believing" is #3 on the rock list?  Hilarious.

...ahem...procrastinate much?

Fact is, I legitimately don't know how to form thoughts into words. 

I have been struggling recently, I guess.  It's mostly an inward struggle as I usually choose to not bring everyone else down with my negative thoughts and random thought trails.  It's not that I don't trust the people closest to me to hear what my thoughts are, but part of me is afraid that to externalize my inward struggles will just make them worse.  Or worse, my family and friends will agree with me and our worries will compound into a ginormous mess of stress. 

The fact is, I don't want to say aloud that I feel like I'm treading water.  I feel like my infertility is assaulting me from all directions, but I can't do anything about it.  My period has arrived unprovoked 3ish months in a row, yet I can't go to Iowa City to do any treatments because I'm working at least 44 hours per week most weeks.  I have to sleep during the day and work at night which leaves roughly no time to hang out with my family for more than a couple of hours at a time, much less go to the doctor multiple times a week.  Thinking about this fact proves to only bring me down more.  It seems the large majority of people I know don't have to worry about their work schedules when they want to get pregnant. They get the luxury of saying, "Hey, let's have a baby!" They don't have to schedule appointments and have their husbands take personal days so he can get intimate with a specimen cup.  They just get to go the route that millions of people before them have gone and most of them have a little bundle of joy to show for it within a year or so. 

(Don't even get me started on these people who have baby after baby with no trouble at all.  If I see one more 22 year old come in who is on her 6th baby, I can't be held responsible for what happens.  I'm going to go on an epic tirade the likes of which Charlie Sheen has never dreamed of!)

But all joking aside, here's my true confession: Sometimes, I feel like God is blind to my suffering.  Now, I know, I really do, that that's not true.  He cares very much for me and my trials, of that I'm sure.  But it's hard to not feel like that.  I know it's probably wrong to even think it, even worse to vocalize it (I don't know where typing it is on the continuum). 

Recently, as I've been working through my "chronological bible in a year," I've really noticed that God likes to give blessings to people in the form of children. "Oh, Abraham, you rock! Have a son!" While I am by no means comparing myself to Abraham, in the back of my mind, I wonder why He hasn't seen fit to bless us with a child.  We've "done everything right," so to speak.  Why does He send babies everyone else's way and not to us?  To even type it out seems so petty and ridiculous, but it doesn't make my thoughts on the matter change. 

But, I internalize it.  I don't want to say aloud that seeing my sister's burgeoning baby belly sends a stab to my heart that I sometimes don't think I'll ever recover from.  I hesitate to say that it physically hurts when I see pictures on facebook of my friend's kids who were born 10 months apart, or ultrasound pictures from people who I know didn't spend years trying to get to that point or baby pictures from people who make no attempt to hide that they don't even know who the child's father is.  Situations like that hurt me in ways that I really don't think will ever be forgotten.  But, in the next breath I feel terrible for feeling that way. 

This post is admittedly scatter-brained, and for that I apologize.  I think it's a symptom of where I'm at in my mind right now.  I had really hoped to be "back to normal" by now.  I knew I'd hit a speed bump near the due date, but it's been nearly 2 months since then and 9 months since the miscarriage and I still relive it with disturbing regularity. 

I'd just like to be "normal." 

Infertility, it seems, leaves a swath of damage in its wake that is all-encompassing.