Finding Grace in the Struggle

I was back.. and then I disappeared.. but now I’m back! Like the Backstreet boys…

After I posted last we went away for the fourth of July and then our puppy got the runs for the first time (so special) so we were managing that! He’s regular again, so I’m back!

This post is one I have wanted to write for a while, but I haven’t known exactly how I wanted to tell this story. So - here it is: we were at church one Sunday when our priest seemed to be speaking directly to me with the message he was sharing. Going through infertility treatments I have found myself constantly searching for answers, or just somewhere I could go and be offered an alternative to the negative thought spiral that always creeps into my head. On many occasions, going to church has given me that alternative mindset - sometimes its yoga, sometimes its a podcast, and sometimes it is a session of acupuncture. On this particular Sunday I ended up hearing a message I still think about weekly, if not more. I don’t remember every detail of what the priest said but his thesis was about finding grace in the tough moments in life. I do remember how I felt hearing him speak about how important it was for us to try to find grace, for ourselves, for others, in those moments of hardship. I cried during church that day - it felt like the message was directed straight at me, and it was just what I needed in that moment… and still need.

Since that Sunday, I have thought a lot about what “finding grace” looks like. I’ve never been a particularly “graceful” person in the literal sense of the word - simple elegance or refinement of movement. I’ve always been somewhere in the middle - between being graceful and being a bull-in-a-china-shop.

So then what does it look like to find grace in the struggle? Sometimes for me it means noticing how I think about how I’m thinking - and being nicer to myself. For example: I would have a thought like - “I wish for a week where I don’t have to go to a doctors/acupuncturist/therapist appointment… or take hormones that make me a crazy person” and then immediately start internally scolding myself for thinking that because all of these things are helping us get closer to the thing we’ve been chasing for so long, and I just needed to get over it. Would I ever have said those things to a friend going through this? No. So why was I saying them to myself? Finding grace there meant stopping to challenge my inner critic. It sounds so simple. It is really simple, but it required hopping off auto pilot - at least what my internal auto pilot had become. Practically speaking, I did this by writing down the times where my inner critic came out, which made me realize how frequently I was saying terrible things to myself. Just by doing that I started to be able to turn the critic off.

Finding grace also meant just starting to embrace the suck. Embracing all of the stuff that just makes me want to scream “ITS NOT FAIR! WHY US?” at the sky. I credit this mantra to my mom. I’m not even sure if she said it during our journey but it sounds like something she would say :). By embracing it, I stopped fighting it… which took a whole lot less energy.

Through my journey to find grace, we were actively going through IVF treatments. My next few posts will be all about IVF - the crazy things I did to optimize my egg quality, the emotional roller coasters… all of it!