Where Twin Stars Meet the Moon
A poem for pregnancy loss awareness month about my recent miscarriage of our twin stars, our last embryos from IVF we lost due to an unjust mental healthcare system
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ivf
4 Coping Strategies for Infertility During the Holidays
On Christmas day, after an agonizing two week wait following in-vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments in New York, I’ll find out whether or not I’m pregnant. I didn’t plan it this way, my heart palpitating with anxiety during an already tender time, and yet like so many things with infertility, it was outside my control. For
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A Missionary’s Guide to Peace in Unrest
This entire year has been a year of clenching. Body curled inward, tight. Neck stiff, shoulders closed. Like many of you, it began with a move. Transition. That cavernous word. As global nomad’s, we call many places home and movement seems to be our mantra. Whether welcome or unwanted, whether reentering after living on the field, being
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Surviving Infertility: The Other Side of Grief
Sometimes I can forget. How long I fought for him. How much grief I endured. This morning I held my son against my chest and breathed in his blonde hair, as if trying to inhale him into my body. He’s 17 months now, he’s a toddler tottering around on beach paths and mouthing words, throwing fits
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What I Learned From a Pregnancy Dream Fulfilled
I got to see my baby today. He’s eight weeks and the size of a wild strawberry, tiny as a jelly bean with little limbs. The heart is already flickering at 172. I’d never seen my baby’s heartbeat. I’d never had a happy ultrasound. On the black and white screen this rainbow baby was hanging out upside
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When You Have to Release Control
Surrender. It seems too delicate a word for me to understand, the syllables lilting off my tongue like failure, like giving up. Surrender seems cowardly, a tiny white flag of acquiescence. The signal that a battle is done. I’ve never been one to release control lightly. I’ve always been a fighter. I’ve always fought for what’s
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Should Christians Choose IVF?
Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve been obsessed with “doing the right thing.” I wanted black and white, straight lines to divide the world because I wanted to be perfect and having rules meant knowing I was on the correct path. When it came to infertility and the subject of IVF, I wanted
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How to Not Let the World Break You
I want to stay in bed in the Bible black pre dawn. I want to slip under the grey sheets in waves of dreams and forget that I know the news. Even before I wake, I know the sadness is coming, chasing me like a shadow. “This world will try and break you,” she says.
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When Grieving is the Only Way Through Infertility
When I hold the baby and realize that it isn’t mine and I am not sure I will ever clasp feet that tiny in my hands, there is a small part of me that wants to walk to a building’s edge and simply step off and feel the fluttering of air before nothing else. It
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