Staying Open

I often asked myself when is enough, enough? Having been through many years of infertility treatments, being up there with all the emotions that come with the process, getting pregnant, strong medical suggestions to terminate it at 18 weeks, 17 egg donors embryos that never created a pregnancy, I again found myself asking this question, when is enough, enough?

This race to getting pregnant for me and many other woman can at times be very stressful and place us in the need to be in control, to know that we are doing all that we can and wake up day after day ready to fight the infertility battle. 

I remember the last call I got when my last IVF cycle didn’t work. Again the disappointment, the lack of belief, the feelings of being less than, all came back in a matter of seconds. I couldn’t take it anymore. Here I was, no more frozen embryos, no new plan in sight, I didn’t know what to do next.
Then came the big question, when is enough, enough? I guess for me that day enough was enough. I decided to surrender and stop fighting. It was a hard thought, but for some reason it made sense. I didn’t know how my husband would react to this new thought, but my body just screamed “ENOUGH”.

Today we both know that that day was the turning point for us! That was the minute of surrender! Accepting defeat, accepting that I couldn’t fight any more, was actually the beginning of our solution.

So then I was faced with a new reality. We want kids and we are not giving up, yet I can’t go through this process again. Six years of treatments brought lots of gifts to both me and my husband, yet the biggest insight our last failed IVF brought, was knowing that for us, being parents was more important than being pregnant.

This insight was a big gift for us, surrender brought with it lots of new hope. We placed ourselves on the path to parenthood with a new hope that there might be a new and different way for us to get to achieve our goal.

For this infertile couple, the story shifted to a story about adoption or a story about surrogacy. Most important being pro-active on this new path allowed us to be hopeful again. Is this how we imagined this to be 6 years ago? Not at all, yet is anything in life happening they way we expect it would?

I am writing this blog, because I want to share the message of open mindedness.

We had tried everything, from IUI to IVF, to egg donors and nothing worked. It only meant that this wasn’t our path, yet there are still other ways for us to become a loving family. One thing is clear, as parents we will have the ability to one day look at our kids and say we didn’t stop at anything until you were in our arms.

I think this is the biggest gift of infertility, we enter the process in lots of fear and panic and one day when those kids are in our arms we can teach them what it means to never give up.

Whatever your path to parenthood may be, I am here to support and help you recognize the many gifts that we receive in this hard journey. I will forever be grateful to this process that gave me so many gifts even if it wasn’t the ones I expected.