Tonight Doug and I had a long chat over my internet usage and the websites I visit. None of them are bad websites or anything, but they do consume an inordinate amount of my time and are beginning to impact my view of the outside world. Let me try to explain...
Our journey through infertility has left me somewhat jaded. I no longer take pregnancy announcements with true joy in my heart, and spend the first 14 weeks of my friend's pregnancies in fear that something is going to happen and they will lose their baby. I know too well what CAN happen, and it impacts the joy that I should feel for them. I also look with envy at those that appear to have the "perfectly functioning" body. The ones that plan to have a baby and BOOM the next month are announcing they are pregnant. Why is it so easy for some and others wait and wait and sometimes never bring home a living child? I feel anger and resentment, not just for myself, but for those other ladies in my life that want so desperately to have children and are unable to. It has become a focus in my life, and one that is warping my sense of joy in God's miracles-- even those that aren't realized as such.
Our journey has also left me with a bitter taste in my mouth for insensitive comments. I no longer respond with patience and love, but instead with anger and hostility. I hold on to those comments, mulling them around in my head until they sour my heart. I want so badly to be able to let go and turn the other cheek, but am unable to do so when surrounded by constant hurt and disappointment.
One forum that I frequent is a Christian forum dealing with infertility. This forum has been my crutch for the past few years, but it is now such a focus for me. I have surrounded myself with others in pain, therefore am no longer able to pull away and feel joyous. I need to step away and recharge, so that I am able to properly love and support these women who have become my friends. I can no longer be the hypocrite telling someone to look for the joy when I can not seem to find my own.
As I approach Thanksgiving, I am doing an exercise with myself that will focus on weeding out things in my life that I feel are holding me in. I am paring down my facebook list, my website list, even my social calendar, in hopes of reclaiming me and the joyful girl that I was...the one I want my daughter to see as she grows. The one that laughs, and loves, and embraces life and all of her blessings. The one that feels the pain, embraces it, and keeps moving....not forgetting, but honoring and moving forward with it. The one that loves her friends, supports her friends and grows with them-- in good times and in sorrow-- in true Christian fellowship.
I am embracing a new journey, to a new and improved me. A me with the right focus; God, my family, and my friends.
Thanks for following my journey, and I pray that you will continue to walk beside me as I take a slight turn in the road.
I think its a great decision to step back a little - Even if just for a period of time.
ReplyDeleteI was involved on online IF forum for only a short time as I was personally unable to deal with all the negativity and the attitudes towards pregnant people.
I could see where it was driven by hurt, I could see that ministry happened, I could see people even getting free from the pain they had before they found the forum - through the forum and those on it :)
I have made great friends from there, some lasting, who I talk to daily on skype or by email or even on FB just being a little involved in the lives of others I met there.
I felt guilty that i could not do the forum thing - especially when in the first few weeks it was a crutch for me. But I just decided that it was not that I was bad or that the forum was bad, it was just that it was no longer for me where I was at and that it might again be one day - that there are seasons and so on
So this is just something YOU have to do now in your current situation and thats OK :) xxxx