2014 and a New Year

A year ago today, on January 1st, 2014, I woke up knowing I needed to take a pregnancy test. This is one of the worst parts of infertility, the taking of the pregnancy tests. There are few things that make me shake in fear like this task, waiting on a little strip of chemically-coated cardboard to once again crush all my hopes and dreams.

This little strip looked negative, as they always did. And then, all of a sudden, it didn't. I spent the next hour staring at the test strip in a windowsill, letting the sunlight accentuate the second line and taking pictures of it on my Iphone to better evaluate it's legitimacy.

[caption id="attachment_1837" align="aligncenter" width="200"] A fuzzy remnant from last year's photo session in the windowsill.[/caption]

 

I can't say this was a happy day, because we didn't know how to process a positive test, after a full 6.5 years of negatives. It was a holiday, which meant that I couldn't go in for a blood test, so we just went through our day in disbelief. That night, I woke up at 3 AM to take another test. It was darker. So I went downstairs and sat in more disbelief until 7:30 AM when the fertility clinic opened.

The next few weeks should have been happy ones, but they were instead filled with fear and then horror. We learned the excruciating way that a positive test doesn't mean a live baby. It crushed us in ways we didn't know we could be crushed. The agony leading up to February 6th, when I miscarried the two babies who had been unable to thrive in my womb, was a pain like none other. I still don't quite know how to process it all, if it is even possible to do so.

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Early this morning, I woke up with a girl in my belly who sleeps just like her father, spreading out and maximizing all the space available to her, resulting in sharp pain everywhere until I can jiggle her enough to convince her to move. She finally curled up in a more comfortable position, and I fell back asleep, waking up several hours later to her delightful, happy kicks.

For months I have been saying that her birth feels ages away, because it has always been "next year". But as of today, her arrival will not only be this year but next month.

Last January 1st, I hoped to have one or two babies born in September. I don't have that. That pain is still there, the loss still real. But this January 1st, I have a daughter coming to me next month. The nursery that taunted me with it's emptiness last year is now daily being prepared for her arrival.

 

[caption id="attachment_1838" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Nursery![/caption]

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I wrote last year about God's creativity in working good from our pain:

I don’t really know how to pray these days, as we sit in the midst of so many unanswered prayers. I know I’m not guaranteed prosperity and health and fertility, and I know that we may still have a very long road ahead of us when it comes to building our family. But I also know that whatever darkness presents itself, I have a God who will create good from it. No matter how ugly, desperate or dark, he will create beauty, hope and light. It’s all I can do these days, to offer up that which I can’t control and believe that he will work it to good, for me and for the world.

I'm thankful for God's creative redemption in 2014, thankful for the ways he took the most painful deaths and brought resurrection. I'm thankful for the ways in which the hope of this January 1st lies in a firm fist currently punching my side instead of a cardboard test with more variables than certainties. And I pray that this year, as I sit in the midst of so many fulfilled dreams, I will continue to seek out the barren places where life is needed, allowing our creative God to bring life where there is death.

For those sitting in death and emptiness and lack this January 1st, I pray for a year of resurrection. And for those of us in a place of resurrection, may we lend our life to those who are dying around us, embodying the God who never ceases creating light out of darkness.