“IVF is a divine download,” she said to me.
Goosebumps.
My therapist said this to me in my last session, and I basically heard angels singing. I never thought of IVF this way. I’ve only thought of it as a scientific procedure that a woman has to go through when her body fails her. Looking at it as a sacred gift changes everything.
It is a gift to us straight from the Universe (God, Source, Spirit, Divine, Cosmos, whatever feels right in your heart to call such magnificence) to help babies make their journey to Earth. It’s a method, and it’s not the “wrong method” to conceive. My body isn’t failing me, I’m just destined to experience this. I’m privileged to be experiencing this. The hard emotions that have been stuck in my body for years have been released and replaced by a gentle softness that overflows like gooey, sweet honey.
The Universe gifts you what you need at the right time. It’s not always pleasant, but if you listen and are open to receiving, it will come.
For the past five years, my heart has been cracking open, bit by bit, slowly at times and at light speed during other times. Heart aches, heart opens, repeat.
My mind asks, “How have I survived the past almost five years of going through infertility? How will I survive IVF? How am I surviving this? Am I really living this right now? This is my reality? How did we get here?”
My heart asks, “Do you feel that? Do you feel in your bones that you are right where you’re supposed to be?” And says, “Your journey is sacred, it is yours, cherish it while you’re alive. All that comes to you is in your highest good, and that’s the truth.”
We are beginning the IVF retrieval process and I feel at peace about it. In this moment, not a single piece of me is dreading the needles, the blood draws, or the waiting (well maybe the blood draws). I’ve experienced great healing within the past couple of years, and especially over the past few weeks with my therapist. I found my therapist through a friend of a friend, another divine download and gift delivered to me at exactly the right time.
I’m enjoying these moments of connection to spirit, self, and Graeme. It’s an area of discovery, learning, and adapting. What I know is, this ultimately isn’t about me. This is about the child that we want to bring to this Earth. Children AND infertility, whether we like it or not, force us to enter and live in our presence.
Life is to be experienced as is and we are to engage with it fully, no matter how uncomfortable it gets. It’s easy to grab the wine bottle or succumb to the caffeine cravings to numb discomfort. I have to avoid both of these at the moment and I’m feeling more and more each day. Quite frankly, I love it. I feel, thank, shed. It is a process of release and replenishment.
The truth is, I’ve never felt this alive.
Life is precious. If we don’t move through what’s uncomfortable, where does that leave us? As the famous Mary Oliver poem, “The Summer Day” asks, “What will you do with your one precious life?”
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down --
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?Mary Oliver
The Summer Day
We are going to CCRM in Edina, all thanks to the new fertility benefits I have and CCRM finally being in our network. I’ve been wanting to go there for years but our insurance stopped us from being able to do so. After several invasive tests, our new doctor told us that we are perfect on paper and officially diagnosed us with unexplained infertility. It’s equal parts frustrating and comforting. She told me that I’m young (haven’t heard that in a while), that my uterus is beautiful and my ovaries are perfect. Graeme’s numbers are better than perfect. All of this does bring us ease, but it also makes us question what the bleep is going on.
Our doctor is a breath of fresh air. She is cheerful, and our advocate. She is fascinated by the reproductive system and knows how to manipulate and tweak hormones to work in our favor. She is comforting. We walk in the room and she greets us with a smile –wiping away our worries every time. She is now, however, on maternity leave. We’re going to move ahead with retrieval and then meet the other doctor at the clinic to see how we want to proceed before transfer, which might be several months from now.
With all of this said, we know that this is going to be hard. We are going to have our fair share of never-ending days of waiting and a lot of uncertainty. In the end, our goal is to bring home a healthy baby. There is no guarantee that it will work and we have to be aware of that. For now, though, we hope.
Our hope is supported by the team of incredibly talented professionals behind us. We’ve been doing everything that is in our control to boost our chances of our favored outcome.
I’ve been seeing my acupuncturist every week for the past year, I get Mayan abdominal massage every month, meditate, and do castor oil packs 4-5 times a week.
I also have the greatest man in the world next to me – he’s my support, my love, my everything. We’ve got our dog, Nurse Snake. She is constantly reminding us both to live in the present moment. She reminds us to love fiercely because nothing will last forever. Our family, our friends, everyone is on our side. Science is on our side at this point, too.
I also have supportive co-workers who I can talk freely about this process with – I don’t have to hide at work! Two of them are pregnant and it doesn’t even upset me. Now THAT is progress. I love the company I work for and am so in awe of that divine gift, as well. I randomly got called by a recruiter to go in for an interview last spring and after a long summer of endless interviews, they offered me the job and told me that they offer fertility benefits. This is rare in America! It was destiny, because without these benefits we wouldn’t be able to afford IVF on our own.
We are privileged to be able to move ahead with this opportunity and we are optimistic. I would not be who I am today without this journey, and for that I am grateful.
Thank you for reading and for your never-ending support.