Welcome

I am starting this blog to be more honest. I will post a lot of my everyday momming, using my favorite hashtag #Iamsuchagoodmom. Sometimes people think I use that hashtag ironically when my parenting isn't "typical," and I do, but it's more than that. I like to show that good parenting often looks different from the standard, from other families, and from your own expectations.

On this blog, I will also get personal and vulnerable. My #projecthonesty hashtag will show up on particularly revealing posts, ranging from writing to mental health to marriage.

Infertility #projecthonesty

This week is National Infertility Awareness Week.

I first learned that infertility was an issue for some people when I was sixteen. It wasn’t something anyone ever talked about before that. I remember sitting in the back of a truck, on my way to Young Women’s, listening to two leaders talk about pregnancy. I knew one of them had had trouble getting pregnant, and had been trying for quite some time. The other had just gotten pregnant with their third child. “I’m just so frustrated,” the pregnant one had said. “We weren’t trying to get pregnant at all. Obviously we wanted more children eventually, but we were not ready to have another one so quickly.” The first leader was gracious and supportive. But in my head I was thinking, “What are you doing? Don’t you know that Sis. So-and-so wants to get pregnant more than anything? And you are complaining about it to her? That is so rude!”

Now, I hadn’t planned on having kids for a long time, wanting to finish a couple degrees or so before starting a family. I never thought it would be something I would have to worry about. But my senior year of high school, some medical issues I was having got pretty bad, and I went to a gynecologist for the first time. I was told I would never be able to get pregnant or have any children. I was upset, but for the wrong reasons. I thought people would look down on me for not being able to have kids of my own. I had already decided long before that I would someday like to adopt older children. When I realized I wouldn’t have kids of my own, I was (ashamedly) relieved.

Obviously things did not work out that way. A few months into my marriage, I was pregnant with Hunter, despite being on birth control. I thought a miscarriage was imminent, but it never came. I was completely unprepared to have a baby, so young, so new into married life, and not having more than the pregnancy itself to prepare myself for the idea of being a mom and having a newborn. I was angry and lost and terrified. Hunter came, through a completely terrible labor and delivery, and it took me about six months to recover physically in the ways women are supposed to “recover” in a couple weeks. I thought I was done. And the first two years of Hunter’s life, I had such severe post-partum depression that I hardly remember more than a few flashes of those two years, even now.

Yet almost two years after Hunter, we were blessed with Penelope (again despite birth control). Easy pregnancy, labor, delivery, newborn stage, breastfeeding, everything. The depression lightened considerably. But still, I desperately wanted to be done. I still felt like I was “supposed to” have more kids, but I thought those feelings were coming from societal pressure and Utah culture, and I wanted to ignore all of that. Yet when Penny was one year old, Dan was convinced we needed to have another, immediately. He felt so strongly prompted about it that he asked me about it persistently for months. I told him no. Finally, he softened my heart and opened my mind, and I let myself be open to the truth and listen to what the Lord wanted. We both felt we needed another baby and decided to attempt to get pregnant right away.

Unsure where I was in my vastly irregular cycle, we started trying immediately. With both of our other children, pregnancy came easily, without trying. We joked about being “too fertile.” Yet when my next period came, I was filled with sudden dread and worry. My medical issues had become difficult again the past year, and I thought, “Really? The one time I actually want to get pregnant, I can’t?” It was ridiculous, and I knew it. We had been trying for a few *days*. Yet I spent the next few weeks terrified that I wouldn’t be able to get pregnant, that my dormant infertility had finally reared its ugly head. It quickly became obvious that I was just too late in that cycle, that I had missed the ovulation period, because I was pregnant days later.

I have spent years believing that I couldn’t get pregnant. Then I spent years frustrated that I could get pregnant and kept getting pregnant without trying. But the worst was those couple weeks when I desperately wanted to get pregnant and believed it would never happen. I have thought of that conversation between my Young Women leaders over and over again. I hope I have never been the friend who has complained about pregnancy to those who have been struggling. I hope I can always be as kind and supportive of what others are struggling with, despite what I am going through myself.

Honestly, no matter where you stand in your beliefs about family planning and children, no matter what you are struggling with or not struggling with yourself, we all need to be more supportive of women who are on any side of the infertility spectrum.  You can’t know how much pain someone is in, especially when it comes to extremely personal and sensitive issues.

And for the record, we are for sure DONE having children of our own, and that is our choice, and we are happy with it. And as much as I have hated being pregnant, I would gladly give another nine months if it meant someone I loved could have the baby they are praying for.