All it takes if Faith and Trust...(part 1)

OK.  So I couldn't resist the chance to borrow a line from my favorite movie as a kid.  Sorry, but no pixie dust in this story. 

There are a lot of issues that make a pregnancy after the journey we have been through unique, but I think this is the most central.  At some point during my infertility process, I was at a conference, and I came across a sticker that said “Trust Birth”.  I’ve seen it many times before; it’s a common slogan for midwife and doula groups, representing a belief in the fact that pregnancy and birth are natural processes.  I’ve always believed it, and still do, but I remember thinking at that time, “Trust birth?  I can’t even trust conception!”  We don’t always think of infertility treatment as a loss, but there are several losses along the way, and the most important is faith or trust.  It may be a spiritual faith that the universe or God will take care of you, or trust that your body will not let you down in what seems like the most basic of functions.  Faith is something that may vary from day to day, depending on your situation, and it may be somewhat restored with that positive pregnancy test, or first ultrasound.  For most women, however, it will never be exactly where it was when you were still assuming a baby would come with a simple night of intimacy. 

There was a commercial running on television, during the time I was going through IVF, that used to make me cry.  It had nothing to do with pregnancy or babies (although those “having a baby changes everything” ads used to get me too).  There was a Weight Watchers ad with a line that said, “For every woman who has tried and failed more times than she can count”.  That was me.  Intellectually I knew I had a medical condition, that infertility was not a personal failure.  It didn’t feel like that at all.  

I had two miscarriages before my first term pregnancy.  It was uncanny, but around the time I was going through both of them, I had clusters of patients with miscarriages.  I found myself saying over and over to these women what I tell all my patients who have the misfortune of experiencing miscarriage:  you didn’t do anything to cause this, you couldn’t have done anything to prevent it.  And yet I’d still go home at night and think “maybe if I hadn’t eaten this, or done that”.  It didn’t matter what I “knew”, what my gut told me is that I was a failure and I couldn’t have a baby.  

As a new blogger, I'm trying to stick to the rule of short posts, so to be continued next week...