Feeling lucky...

I spent some time today with someone who had just had a miscarriage and my heart went out to her. She had been trying to get pregnant for some time and then lost her baby at about 11 weeks. In many ways, I feel very lucky that our fertility journey has so far been relatively short and pain-free. We all know someone for whom it has been a terrible long, drawn-out struggle. A friend of mine now has two children and is expecting her third; after thirteen years of unexplained infertility and 2 IVF attempts, she got pregnant naturally. Of course, after all that heartache she had almost given up and that was when her babies arrived. I believe that our children are souls waiting to make their appearance earthside and they choose the time they want to be born. At times I have doubted this and wondered if, like all religious ideas really, it is a way of making the unexplainable or unknown an understandable concept. This makes life easier to handle when we are faced with disappointment or misery. However, I personally feel that our fertility journey is a gift to us, as individuals and as a couple, to know ourselves and each other better. Whether we will get a baby at the end of it, I don't know, but we have learnt a lot trying.

I guess in terms of grieving or how difficult we find fertility problems depends on lots of factors and it's all relative. We have found not being able to have children very sad but of course there is still a lot of hope in our hearts and we have age on our side too. Nonetheless, I do now realise that fertility problems are something you have to go through to truly understand. The feeling that your body is failing you sets an atmosphere of mistrust within, something I have to battle with a lot. Although it is R's sperm count that is low, I know that there are factors that may affect my ability to get pregnant too, namely grieving for two abortions in my late teens. It's been an interestingly complex process; attempting to let go of the guilt and stop blaming myself for not taking the chance to be a parent at a time when I truly wasn't ready and was very confused. I have apologised from my deepest depths to the souls who chose me when I wasn't ready for them.

On the whole though, I feel that we are lucky. We have each other and a loving family and plan to adopt if we can't get pregnant soon.