This is Infertility

Our Keepsake Journal is Here! 🎉

I see you.

I see you buying the 50-pack of ovulation sticks from Amazon, because your cycle is never regular. I see you using those sticks every day, just waiting. Waiting for the rollercoaster to begin.

I see you. Googling every symptom during the two-week wait. Every month you tell yourself you won’t, but again, you break down. Out of desperation, you start thinking of your symptoms. You’re obsessing over the possibility of “maybe”.

I see you. Loving an imaginary baby, month after month. You calculate the due date, you imagine the gender. You take good care of yourself and cut out everything bad . . . just in case.

I see you. Taking too many pregnancy tests in hopes of two lines. Month after month. After month. After month. To see stark white. Nothing but white, where there should be pink.

I see you. I see you angry at yourself, for letting yourself experience hope again, for being crushed again. For not protecting yourself. For spending days not being able to pick yourself up, because your body failed again. Because you loved something made up in your imagination.

I see you. Mustering strength. Pulling yourself back up. Sharing in genuine happiness for all of your pregnant friends, their ultrasounds, their announcements, their baby showers.

I see you. But I also see when you cry, when you have to break down, when the jealousy stings your heart, and you hate yourself for it.

I see you. I see you in the days where you just don’t want to start over again. You are so tired of the rollercoaster. Month after month. Sometimes years. The constant rollercoaster.

I see you. I see you not wanting to talk about the pain of it, because now it feels like it’s become an old record to everyone. I see you realizing you just have to pick yourself back up.

I see you. I see you knowing your husband is right there by your side, and he’s been nothing but loving and strong. But sometimes you still feel so alone.

I see you. I see you being gentle to yourself. I see you letting go, and somehow getting yourself and your strength back. Strength to do it all over again. Another month. Another rollercoaster of high and lows, of hope and grief.

I see your strength. You’re the strongest of the strong. The fiercest of the fierce. The most resilient.

I see you not giving up trying, not hopping off the rollercoaster, but instead staying on it because your heart aches for that baby.

I see you. You are not alone. We’re all right here, on the rollercoaster ride, holding onto hope. Silent tear after silent tear.

You may also like:

Infertility Has Refined My Marriage In Ways I Never Expected

5 Things I Wish People Knew About Infertility

Infertility Wrecked Me and Made Me Stronger

So God Made a Mother book by Leslie Means

If you liked this, you'll love our book, SO GOD MADE A MOTHER available now!

Order Now

Check out our new Keepsake Companion Journal that pairs with our So God Made a Mother book!

Order Now

So God Made a Mother's Story Keepsake Journal

Her View Shop

Kaleigh Christensen

Kaleigh is a stay at home mom, wife, and former Kindergarten teacher. In her spare time she loves to write about the things that matter. She shares real and honest vulnerability about the ups and downs of motherhood, marriage, infertility, miscarriage, and just plain life. She loves to inspire others to find the beauty mixed in with the mess of life. To read more of her writings, like her Facebook page, Messy Footprints, @MessyFootprints

I Obsessed over Her Heartbeat Because She’s My Rainbow Baby

In: Grief, Loss, Motherhood

Mother and teen daughter with ice cream cones, color photo

I delivered a stillborn sleeping baby boy five years before my rainbow baby. I carried this sweet baby boy for seven whole months with no indication that he wouldn’t live. Listening to his heartbeat at each prenatal visit until one day there was no heartbeat to hear. It crushed me. ”I’m sorry but your baby is dead,” are words I’ll never be able to unhear. And because of these words, I had no words. For what felt like weeks, I spoke only in tears as they streamed down my cheeks. But I know it couldn’t have been that long. Because...

Keep Reading

We’re Walking the Road of Twin Loss Together

In: Grief, Loss, Motherhood

Mother and son walk along beach holding hands

He climbed into our bed last week, holding the teddy bear that came home in his twin brother’s hospital grief box almost 10 years earlier. “Mom, I really miss my brother. And do you see that picture of me over there with you, me and his picture in your belly? It makes me really, really sad when I look at it.” A week later, he was having a bad day and said, “I wish I could trade places with my brother.” No, he’s not disturbed or mentally ill. He’s a happy-go-lucky little boy who is grieving the brother who grew...

Keep Reading

Until I See You in Heaven, I’ll Cherish Precious Memories of You

In: Grief, Loss, Motherhood

Toddler girl with bald head, color photo

Your memory floats through my mind so often that I’m often seeing two moments at once. I see the one that happened in the past, and I see the one I now live each day. These two often compete in my mind for importance. I can see you in the play of all young children. Listening to their fun, I hear your laughter clearly though others around me do not. A smile might cross my face at the funny thing you said once upon a time that is just a memory now prompted by someone else’s young child. The world...

Keep Reading

The Day My Mother Died I Thought My Faith Did Too

In: Faith, Grief, Loss

She left this world with an endless faith while mine became broken and shattered. She taught me to believe in God’s love and his faithfulness. But in losing her, I couldn’t feel it so I believed it to be nonexistent. I felt alone in ways like I’d never known before. I felt helpless and hopeless. I felt like He had abandoned my mother and betrayed me by taking her too soon. He didn’t feel near the brokenhearted. He felt invisible and unreal. The day my mother died I felt alone and faithless while still clinging to her belief of heaven....

Keep Reading

To the Healthcare Workers Who Held My Broken Heart

In: Grief, Loss

Baby hat with hospital certificate announcing stillbirth, color photo

We all have hard days at work. Those days that push our physical, mental, and emotional limits out of bounds and don’t play fair. 18 years ago, I walked into an OB/GYN emergency room feeling like something was off, just weeks away from greeting our first child. As I reflect on that day, which seems like a lifetime ago and also just yesterday, I find myself holding space for the way my journey catalyzed a series of impossibly hard days at work for some of the people who have some of the most important jobs in the world. RELATED: To...

Keep Reading

Can I Still Trust Jesus after Losing My Child?

In: Faith, Grief, Loss

Everyone knows there is a time to be born and a time to die. We expect both of those unavoidable events in our lives, but we don’t expect them to come just 1342 days apart. For my baby daughter, cancer decided that the number of her days would be so many fewer than the hopeful expectation my heart held as her mama. I had dreams that began the moment the two pink lines faintly appeared on the early morning pregnancy test. I had hopes that grew with every sneak peek provided during my many routine ultrasounds. I had formed a...

Keep Reading

Giving Voice to the Babies We Bury

In: Grief, Loss

Woman looking up to the sky, silhouette at sunset

In the 1940s, between my grandmother’s fourth child and my father, she experienced the premature birth of a baby. Family history doesn’t say how far along she was, just that my grandfather buried the baby in the basement of the house I would later grow up in. This was never something I heard my grandmother talk about, and it was a shock to most of us when we read her history. However, I think it’s indicative of what women for generations have done. We have buried our grief and not talked about the losses we have experienced in losing children through...

Keep Reading

A Friend Gone Too Soon Leaves a Hole in Your Heart

In: Friendship, Grief, Loss

The last living memory I have of my best friend before she died was centered around a Scrabble board. One letter at a time, we searched for those seven letters that would bring us victory. Placing our last words to each other, tallying up points we didn’t know the meaning of at the time. Sharing laughter we didn’t know we’d never share again. Back in those days, we didn’t have Instagram or Facebook or Snapchat or whatever other things teenagers sneak onto their phones to capture the moments. So the memory is a bit hazy. Not because it was way...

Keep Reading

I Asked the Questions and Mother Had the Answers. Now What?

In: Grief, Living, Loss

Older woman smiling at wedding table, black-and-white photo

No one is really ever prepared for loss. Moreover, there is no tutorial on all that comes with it. Whether you’ve lost an earring, a job, a relationship, your mind, or a relative, there is one common truth to loss. Whatever you may have lost . . . is gone. While I was pregnant with my oldest son, my mother would rub my belly with her trembling hands and answer all my questions. She had all the answers, and I listened to every single one of them. This deviated from the norm in our relationship. My mother was a stern...

Keep Reading

Grief Lingers in Hospital Walls

In: Grief, Loss

We drive by a hospital. It’s not the one my mother was in, but it still brings the same sting and reminders. It brings pain just looking in the windows, knowing what’s inside. Sickness. Death. Dying. Probably other things too, but my mind doesn’t know those. It knows the devastation of test results, and surgeries, and cancer—my mother’s cancer. It only took 10 seconds to pass that hospital as we drove on the interstate, but the feeling of that view is still sitting with me, just like grief has done since the moment my mother passed. RELATED: The Day She Dies It’s ironic...

Keep Reading