Psychologists have broken grief (defined as “deep sorrow,
esp. that caused by someone’s death) into 5 stages:
- Denial
- Anger
- Bargaining
- Depression
- Acceptance
These stages are the work of psychologists Elisabeth
Kubler-Ross and David Kessler, who wrote the book On Grief & Grieving. Check out their website for lots of great
information about grieving.
When we suffer loss, it’s typical to progress through these
five stages. The last stage is acceptance, which is defined as “the action or
process of being received as adequate or suitable.”
I think that definition is fascinating in the context of
grief. Accepting means to receive the heartache and loss and make it a suitable
part of yourself. As Kubler-Ross and Kessler say, “You will never ‘get over’
the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you
will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole
again, but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same, nor would
you want to” (grief.com). Grief isn’t something that you suffer for a while and
then it goes away, like the flu or a sprained ankle.
It stays with you. It becomes part of you.
That sounds…daunting to consider, in all honesty. But when I
started considering the emotions of the past 10 months or so of this fertility
journey, I can see that it’s been a grieving process.
Facing the reality that we might have a long wait ahead of
us for a baby, or a future with no babies at all is a kind of trauma that
elicits grief. It elicits deep sorrow.
Sorrow that threatened to choke me. Sorrow that was so overwhelming I couldn’t
talk about it for a long time.
Denial
The first months were filled with denial—I don’t have a problem; this is nothing.
We’ll get pregnant. The doctors are wrong. It can’t be that bad. Everyone gets
pregnant. We’ll get pregnant too.
But the longer it went on, the harder it was to deny that
something was not working the way it was supposed to. When I hit that point,
denial gave way to anger.
Anger
I remember being taken aback by the sheer force of the rage
that welled up in me after those first few months. Suddenly, I was MAD. I was
mad at God, myself, every couple around us that got pregnant, each birth
announcement on Facebook.
I wanted to scream, rage, yell.
Throw something. Break things.
I didn’t want anyone to ask me how I was or if the “trying”
was going well. I desperately wanted to throw my problem in the face of every
person who dared asked me, and I wanted desperately at the same time for no one to ever know.
Mostly, I wanted this problem to be someone else’s problem.
From the time I was young, I had always feared that I would
have problems having children. But I’d never thought those fears, irrational as
they were, would become a reality. And that made me feel even angrier. Why
hadn’t I listened to that inner voice? I felt angry at myself for being so
foolish, regardless of the fact that there would have been nothing I could have
done about it.
God seemed so far away, and I was mad at Him anyway.
I had struggled for years with having enough faith in Him to
trust that He would provide me with a spouse. And I had finally given that over
to Him. Then He blessed me beyond anything I could ever imagine through giving
me Hubster.
But here I was again, struggling with the same battle, MAD
that I was being tested yet again. Hadn’t I learned my lesson? Hadn’t that been
enough?
Why this too?
It took months to finally get to a place where the mad
subsided.
Bargaining
But then I was desperate.
I just wanted to get pregnant. And I felt the desperation of
bargaining. The prayers that asked, begged, implored to just let me have a baby.
Bargaining puts you in a place where you think that if you
could just do it right, do it enough, or
be enough, God might give you what you want.
I knew the flaw in this logic, but it didn’t stop me from
those prayers: I’ll never ask for
anything else again, if I could just have a baby.
Depression
But there was no baby. There was a loooooooonnnnnnngggggg
cycle, wherein we thought that perhaps we had gotten pregnant, despite a
negative home pregnancy test. My period just kept not showing up, so I ended up
going in for a blood test.
But that was negative too.
The crash from that news was soul-crushing.
Depression wasn’t unfamiliar territory to me. I had been
there before. I have a propensity for it. Not the kind where you just feel
bummed out for a few days. I mean the real-meal-deal depression. The
dark-cloud-can’t-muster-the-energy-for-anything-and-I-don’t-really-care kind of
depression.
I hung out in this stage for a long time. Suddenly all the
work we’d done with the Naturopath and Acupuncturist just seemed like too much.
There were too many supplements to take, too many Essential Oils to use, too
many things I had to do in my quest to try and get pregnant.
I was failing at all of them anyway, so it all started to
feel pointless.
My job felt like more than I could handle, and I spent more
than a few nights curled in bed, crying hysterically because I wasn’t sure I
could keep going.
The panic attacks that I’d suffered as a result of
Post-Traumatic Stress in high school were creeping back, and I couldn’t seem to
figure out how to alleviate them.
It was all just too much.
I was exhausted, depressed, and hormonal, and it wasn’t a
good place to be.
Acceptance
Thankfully, I have a great Hubster, great family, and some
really great girlfriends who really banded around me while I wallowed in
misery.
Acceptance wasn’t easy, and it came on slowly. It wasn’t
until I reached out for help with the depression that I started feeling better.
And feeling better eventually brought a feeling of acceptance with it.
I started to rebuild a small store of hope as I started to
rebuild my depleted internal reserves. Summer began and I found a much needed
respite from all the urgency and stress of both my job and the pressure to get
pregnant. I realized that this struggle is something that I have to live with,
make a part of me, and figure out how to walk forward from that place. Rest,
support, and articulating this struggle have all played significant roles in
accepting this struggle.
Don’t mistake me when I say this, because acceptance is a
far cry from I have it all figured out
or I feel great now.
I don’t have much figured out. And I don’t feel great about
struggling to conceive.
But I do feel like it’s becoming a burden that I can live
with. I can carry it around and figure out how to make it a part of who I am.
It’s also not stealing all the joy from my heart any longer, and that’s huge. In
the midst of sadness over this struggle, I can still find joy in my life and be
thankful for all the good things I have been blessed with.
And acceptance has also been a step in my spiritual journey, one that has required me to surrender all the hopes and fears and anxieties and sadness to the One who holds me in His hand. I have had to remember to lean on His strength and take comfort from His provision, even when it's not all working the way I want it to work.
Final Thoughts on Grief and Fertility
Recognizing this fertility struggle as a process of grief
helped me make sense of all the roiling emotions I have struggled with, one
right after the other. It’s helped me rethink what place fertility has in my
heart and soul. Rather than a problem to be solved, an issue to get over and
move on from, I recognize now that there will be no simple “getting over” of
this issue.
I hope and pray that at some point, this will be more a
memory than a reality, but I also know that struggling to conceive has changed
me, similar to the way that grieving the loss of a beloved friend or family
member changes people. I will carry this grief in a part of my soul, along with
the lessons learned, and it will be part of how I go about my life from now on.
And that’s okay.
It’s not what I wanted, but rarely does life unfold just how
I wanted it to.
I would prefer that struggling to conceive not be part of mine and Hubster’s
journey. But it is. I can’t change that. But I can embrace the fact that God
uses our grief just as much—oftentimes more—than He uses our triumphs to touch
and reach other people.
He has a plan for all this. I can't see it yet, but eventually, I will. And that's a beautiful promise the Lord makes to us.
So I grieve and walk forward, and remind myself to trust God in all things, even when the grief feels overwhelming.
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