Loving the Life I Didn't Choose

For the last five years I've had a pumpkin spice latte from Starbucks during early September. In 2011, it was the day I received my first and only positive pregnancy test and I felt so guilty for the caffeine as 1,000 what-ifs ran through my devastated mind. For the next four years I drank that latte in memory of what might have been. It was a way to pause and remember my first child who was shed from my body far too soon.

This year, I didn't do that. In fact, I barely recognized that the date had come and gone. I was playing on the beach with my son. Our vacation was glorious and deserves a whole post to itself (that I might get together by Christmas). But it was a poignant moment for me to realize that I was too busy loving the life before me to remember the life I wanted. 

I've always struggled with the idea of being thankful for hard things. Well, that's not true. It's a specific hard thing. It's death. To be thankful for death is just a hard concept for me to grasp, especially the death of a child, be they born or still in the womb. Throughout the years, I would hear people say, "I'm so thankful things worked out this way. Otherwise, I wouldn't have (fill in the blank)."  That has always been hard for me to process. To be thankful for the miscarriage or stillbirth of one child which allowed you to later have a different child. I've always clung to my theory of both. I've said I want both. I've refused to be thankful for that first miscarriage even though it eventually led me to my son. I rationalize that I would have wanted both. I would have wanted that first child (and each of the others) and I would also want my son. But if I'm honest with myself, it's very, very, very unlikely that I would have Garrison if I had given birth in May 2012 and everything had gone according to my plan. Sure, we always said we'd like to adopt. But the adoption plan was never for a blue-eyed infant from Florida four years later. 

How do you love the life you didn't chose? For a long time, that was really, really hard for me. There were years where I simply didn't like my life. Sure I was thankful that I was alive, but actually like my life? It was too easy too look around and say, "that is the life I want." I wanted the life I had planned. I couldn't see the possibility of anything good, let alone better. I've learned to love this life I didn't chose. And not in a "this is the best I can hope for," or Plan B kind of way, but in a "I couldn't have dreamed it better" kind of way.

But therein lies this tension. Garrison is mine and I am his because of "unfair" circumstances. Infertility ran over my life like a runaway train and I screamed about the unfairness through the whole journey. My son doesn't know this yet, but his circumstances were unfair too. It's weird to mourn the loss and pain while simultaneously being incredibly grateful that we're all together because of it. It's an odd thing to wish I could remove the pain and hurt that these years have caused while recognizing that without this pain and hurt, the journey would not have led us together. It's weird to think that I would have missed him if I'd gotten what I wanted all those years ago. But admitting I prefer this life, feels like saying I'm glad my first children died. You see? There's this tension. 

I have no neat bow to tie all of this up. No words of wisdom. No answer to the tension. All I can leave us with is this quote from a really fantastic book that I've been reading and rereading, trying to soak in as much as possible from a fellow infertility survivor. Melanie Dale, author of It's Not Fair writes this, "after years of telling God it's not fair, I can now say that I'm grateful for my struggle. I would never tell someone else to be grateful for theirs. We can't tell people in pain to be grateful. That would be the highest cruelty. But over time, after having raw conversations with God and acknowledging the life unfolding around me, I see the beauty of his creation. It's not fair. It's different than fair." So while I learn to live with this tension of desperately loving this life I didn't chose, while mourning the life I thought I wanted, all I can say is I'm grateful. Oh so very grateful for a God who holds this tension with me and leads my family on this journey with love and compassion, strength and security. I'm thankful for the journey and thankful for the one who journeys with me.