My Dirty Little Secret

I have a dirty little secret: My house is a mess. Not like "Oh glory me, I haven't dusted the baseboards in days!" kind of mess, but a real mess. I mean, you've probably seen dirtier. It's not like an ecological disaster zone quite yet, but it's pretty darn filthy.

In addition to the dirt, my house is cluttered. Part of this is not my fault; my husband has a bunch of bins of old stuff that he has no time to go through, including reams of paper, and he tends to leave his clothes in a heap but wants to do his own laundry. Part of the clutter is due to the fact that I was in graduate school and working for a while, and the paper just piled up. I can make a bunch of excuses for it, but there is just clutter all over.

Part of the problem is that I kind of, sort of, maybe hate my house. I'm thankful for it, of course. Shelter is good, and we're fortunate to have a house in a crazy market. However, I hate my house because it's a constant reminder of what should have been. It was to be our forever home, with three bedrooms, so we could fill them with kiddos. Instead, I fill those rooms with stuff so that I don't have to think about the what ifs. 

The worst part about my nasty house is that it shames me. Or rather, it adds to the shame that I already feel, and that becomes a cycle. My mind tells me all the time that I'm a failure. I'm a terrible wife and a terrible woman. I can't have a baby and I'm not a great cook, so what kind of wife am I? The logical part of my brain says that it isn't true, that my husband loves me for who I am and doesn't think less of me for my struggles, but it's hard to believe that. That same logical brain tells me to cut myself slack, that I've been dealing with depression and acing school and volunteering as well as working, and it's okay to focus on surviving some days. Then I look at my messy house and the words just ring through my head: "Failure. Failure. Failure." And instead of cleaning and decluttering, my instinct is to hide under the blankets and cry, because I can't face the reality that once I clear it all out, I'll have to come to grips with the emptiness of those empty rooms that will never belong to a child.

On January 1, I woke up as a woman on a mission. I wanted to clean out this house from top to bottom. I wanted to sweep out all the things that had built up and that were overwhelming me, to stop being embarrassed to have someone drop in. Maybe it was getting past the difficult holiday season or hitting roughly six months since our last set of infertility treatments failed, but suddenly I needed change. Since that day, I've been taking it one day at a time. I bought a filing cabinet to attempt to fix the paper problem. I went through boxes of old paper and tossed most of the sheets that I no longer need for school. I scrubbed floors and I dusted. It's a long-term project, and I may never have that pristine house from the magazine, but I'm getting a little bit proud of my progress. Maybe one day I will graduate to being a real adult with a proper home.

Why am I sharing this story? It's embarrassing, right? I don't want people to know how messy I am. I guess I'm sharing it because maybe there are other people who are stuck in shame and loss and grief and need to know that they aren't the only ones who haven't scrubbed the kitchen floor in a long time. I needed you all to know that this grief I'm in is real and painful and nasty and all-encompassing, but I'm ready to be very real about it and not live in shame. I also want to advocate for us hurting people. It's easy to watch an episode of Hoarders and feel sorry for those poor people in their mess. It's not as easy to walk across the street and hug the hurting person who is in front of you. People like me are everywhere. We are in your Bible studies and in your book groups and at your workplace. We are embarrassed and ashamed of the mess inside our homes and inside our minds. I've had people - even my own mother - chastize me for the messy state of my house, and it didn't help. Instead it just told me, "Keep hiding." What I needed was love. I needed to be told that despite the mess, I was worth loving. So readers, if you aren't in the mess right now, keep your eyes open, because it might be your turn to tell someone that they are enough.

2016: A New Hope or The Darkness Strikes Back?

This year. I can't sum it up in words, more like guttural utterances and tears, with a few profanities strewn in. On top of our personal crises, which included the death of my beloved Sadie and several rounds of failed fertility treatments, we had a number of celebrity deaths, Brexit, the Trump campaign, hurricanes, terrorist attacks, the growing crisis in Syria, and probably a lot more than I'm forgetting. The world feels darker now. My anxiety has been ramped up considerably. My coping has been shaky at best. Despite a couple of high points such as my graduation (which was somewhat marred by my cat's death the day before) his year will go down as a bad one in my life.

On Friday, I went to do something I had really been looking forward to: a friend date to see the film Rogue One. You see, I have been a Star Wars junkie since I was quite small. I grew up enjoying the exploits of Han, Leia, and Luke. Just before meeting my friend, I learned that Carrie Fisher had suffered a heart attack, and on Tuesday her death was announced, followed by her mother's death the following day. I grieve. I was then reminded of this post from one year ago today, when I was feeling low about the year that was, and found a sliver of hope in watching Star Wars, Episode 4: A New Hope. I wrote these words, which feel ridiculously optimistic after the year that we just experienced: "So maybe it's there, somewhere, that hope. Maybe I can find it and grasp it, if even for a little while."

Looking back on 2016, it feels less like A New Hope than The Empire Strikes Back. It feels like this year was spent fighting the darkness within and without. I did a year-long study of Revelation and then an autumn study on spiritual warfare, yet I feel more helpless than ever against the darkness. I feel like I'm losing and being closed in on all sides. I have prayed and sought and prayed and sought some more, but it's hard to find God in the darkness. As we close off the year, it feels like the Emperor is in charge, Darth Vader has the upper hand, and Han Solo is frozen in carbonite. All I can do is hold on to a tiny hope that this isn't the end and that this darkness will not define the rest of my life.

However, in a dark time such as this one, I am reminded that Carrie Fisher, too, struggled with dark demons, that many people consider her a powerful spokesperson for those dealing with mental illness. So in honour of Carrie, I will raise a glass to toast the end of the year that was, and go forward hoping and praying that this year will be the one when the tide turns, when the darkness ebbs, and when I find hope again. Perhaps 2017 will be the year when I learn how to fight like Princess Leia. May it be so, and may the Force be with you.

Long weekend musings on summer and infertility and grief

It's that time of year now when the temperature drops in the evening, kids go back to school, and even though the leaves are still green, we know it's only a short time before the autumn will be back in force. It feels like every day, someone else wants to talk about how the summer has just flown by, and where did those months go? To be honest, I'm finding this difficult. My summer has not flown by. My summer has been painful and grief-filled. I struggle with the balance between being authentic and not wanting to alienate people with my grief.

I haven't updated in a while about our infertility journey, so here goes: In the spring, we decided to head back to the clinic to try again. The timing made sense as I was finishing school, but did not have a job lined up, so my schedule was free enough to allow for the myriad of appointments without being too draining. This new procedure required me to give myself daily injections for the first 10-12 days of my cycle, which was pretty daunting, but I quickly got used to it. Anyway, the long and the short of it is that we tried this for several cycles, and it was unsuccessful.

Gil and I now find ourselves in a quandary. There are other possible options, if we want to be more aggressive. People tell us we have to try everything, that it will certainly work one time. On the other hand, the reality is that isn't true. There are many people who try everything and still end up childless. Success rates for IVF and surrogacy and all that stuff are actually not nearly as high as people think. Moreover, I am losing so much of myself due to depression related to infertility. I miss the person I was. I don't want to live through three more years of constantly oscillating between optimism and grief. When I went in for my last blood test towards the end of July, I had this sense that I was done with the clinic, that I just really did not want to go back. But the other option, the one that says we will never hold our child in our arms, is almost unthinkable.

So now we grieve. I grieve the life I imagined, the exhausting days of looking after little ones, the hectic years of school-aged children, the lonely days of seeing teenagers fly the nest, the moments when I would see my husband or my grandmother in the fact of my own child. I don't know how to imagine a life without children. I don't compute how I will never be a grandmother.

We grieve alone. People do not understand this or even recognize it as grief. They want to tell us how we can have such a great life without children, as though it's easy to just change course. As though it's not the greatest tragedy of my life to lose the future that I imagined since I was a young child. So I have to smile a few dozen times and say, "Yes, summer is over. It's gone so fast," when really, it was slow and painful and sad. There were no bike rides with kids, no water parks or camp outs or walks to the park. My cat died. My dreams died. Yes, there were fun moments, like when I graduated and a brief trip to Spain in June, but mostly, 2016 has been a summer of grief.

Do I believe God is good throughout this journey? Yes. Somehow I do. Somehow, I trust that He can redeem these awful years, that He can put beauty into our darkest moments. I fight with Him daily. I ask Him why. I ask Him where the Church was, how it could be that His people were not there in the moments when I was begging Him to let me die instead of giving me this childless future. He does not answer, but He tells me to trust, so I have faith that one beautiful day, the pain will make sense and the tears will be wiped away. Until then, we grieve.

Infertility and Depression: Let's Talk

I am writing this as part of the Bell "Let's Talk" campaign, which aims to reduce the stigma of mental illness.

Let me give you a hypothetical scenario: Imagine that for about 18 months now, your friend has been intermittently complaining about pain in her leg. She doesn't mention it every time you speak, but often enough that you realize it's an ongoing problem. You start to realize that she's actually cut back on social engagements due to this pain. She has not seen some of her friends because they always want to go out and do active things, but she can't go with them because of this pain. She seems to have given up on it ever getting better, and you get the sense that this is something that troubles her most days, if not all the time, and it seems to be getting worse.

What would you do? If you were her sister, or her close friend, you would probably be nagging her to go to the doctor. You would point out that this could be something serious, that you are really concerned. You might even offer to take her to the doctor yourself. If you knew a specialist, maybe you'd call them to try to get her in. You wouldn't just accept it or tell her to figure it out herself.

Yet, friends, this is what we do with depression. It happens all the time. It has happened to me. I cannot tell you how many people that I have talked to in the past 18 months, how many times I have said that I'm sad, that I cry most days, that I feel hopeless, that I struggle with feeling like I've lost many of my friends because I can't relate to their lives as parents. Some people act sympathetic, while others are clearly uncomfortable. Even my former doctor said she was concerned that I was showing signs of depression, but her response was to tell me to come back in 6 months and we'd talk about whether it was worse. (This is part of the reason why she is my former doctor and not my current one....) Yet no one ever stepped in. A few people suggested counseling, and one promised to follow-up with some contacts and never did. I'm not saying this to blame people, but rather to point out the difference in how we treat depression versus physical illnesses. If I had cancer, all of these people would be bending over backwards to help, bringing meals, driving me to treatments. I know this because I know and love these people. But when it's mental illness and not physical, we step back, because it feels so personal and we don't know how to help. As a result, those who are suffering in darkness get the message that it's "their" problem and that, as one person recently told me, "Only YOU can figure out how to help yourself." Is that true? Maybe, but would you say that to me if I had diabetes or cancer? Probably not.

The truth is, infertility and depression go hand in hand. Lots of sources corroborate this. It is hard to describe how debilitating the emotions surrounding infertility can be. There is something spectacularly awful when you fail at a reproductive norm; it's like you have actually failed at being a human being. Then you go into tests that are often embarrassing, and you often end up with hormonal supplements that play with your emotions. To add to that, for women especially the culture around motherhood is all-encompassing. It can be hard to make friends, because after a certain age, women's lives often revolve around children. This leaves childless women and single women out. It's hard. It's isolating. It is honestly a recipe for depression, and yet so many people brush it off with comments like, "You don't realize how hard it is to have children" or "You'll get there someday." Maybe, but a person struggling in darkness doesn't need someday, she needs help right now. She needs a hand to help her get out of the pit.

"Why can't you ask for help?" many will ask. "Why can't you pull yourself out?" The answers are as varied as the sufferers. Sometimes we ask, and are rebuffed, so we learn not to speak up. Sometimes the pit is too deep and too dark. When you are infertile, sadness and futility can easily become the norm. It's not as though I went to bed cheerful and woke up deeply depressed. My walk into depression was like walking into the ocean, where before I knew it, I was in over my head. It became normal to feel low, and then to feel sad. Treatments were difficult, and disappointment came month after month after month. After a while, it seemed incomprehensible not to be sad, to think that I could ever be happy when the dream I had had for my whole life had collapsed. After a while, it felt like the pit was all I knew.

If you are in the pit, please please keep speaking up. You may have to scream and shout, but do it until someone listens. If no one else will listen, I will. Email me if you need to. Being depressed does not mean that you are weak or that there is something wrong with you. It just means that you need help finding the light.

If you have a close friend who is infertile, really listen in to what he or she is saying. Don't ignore signs of depression or other mental illness. Come alongside others, urge them to see a doctor or to look into counseling, and don't let it slide. Many people like me are just waiting for someone to really see them, to realize that they are losing part of themselves, that this isn't normal. Don't let it happen without a fight. Sometimes the most loving thing you can say is, "You need help. Let me get it with you."

What's the end of my story? I don't know yet. I've seen two counselors, and neither one was a great fit for me, and I wasn't able to get another appointment until the end of February. I am strong enough to advocate for myself, but I know that not everyone is, so I want to keep the dialogue alive. "Let's Talk."