Done Fighting

I am about to say/write something that I don't fully understand, but here goes...My husband and I have been really happy together for the last few months. Very inactively talking to the RE and planning our next moves but not yet making them. And as the day that I am supposed to start taking this new fertility drug approaches, I've had a looming sense that there is a decision I am meant to make. This past May I graduated from college with my bachelor's degree. I decided that I was not going to use said degree and that I would instead follow my dream of going to hair school. I have a great job right now where I make good money and have great insurance, but that does not feed my soul. So all summer I've been going over and over in my head this timeline of beginning infertility treatments again, starting school, and working full time. Here are my fears: 1. this drug will make me as crazy as clomid did 2. it won't work and I will have set us up for yet another failure 3. it will work and I will be too busy with work and school to be able to enjoy being pregnant. I talk a lot about my fears. They consume me sometimes and I feel that I am constantly at battle with them. I feel that there is some war that I have been training for my whole life and I have spent 25 years fighting in preparation, but I don't know if this is a battle I can continue fighting. I have been trying and trying to give this up to God and to trust Him enough to know that I can do nothing and if He intends for us to have a child we will, but the fighter and the control freak in me say that if I don't keep fighting, I will have wasted valuable time and I will just end up back here anyway. But I have to wonder if this yearning for a baby has turned into a seeking of God for a reason. Should I be seeking peace and with peace will come all of life's desires? And maybe God knows that I won't be happy with becoming a mother this way? Maybe He knows better that I do that I won't be able to enjoy it as much as I want to if it happens now? And then there is that annoying voice that lingers in my head and says that maybe if we stop trying we really will get pregnant. 

A friend of mine recently said to me that she is "too old and practiced in punishment to be interested in it anymore". It got me to thinking about all of the ways that I punish myself. I have been at war with my body for almost three years now. But how can my mind be at war with my body? And is there a difference between the mind and the soul? I've been talking it through and I think the problem with me is that I am so in tune with my soul that there is a disconnect for me between the three (mind, body and soul) and I have been at war with not only my body but my mind that wants to makes a completely irrational situation rational. It is my mind that tells me that it's just as simple as going to a doctor and taking a pill and that it makes perfect sense that a doctor should be able to fix my broken body. My soul tells me a completely different story. My soul tells me that this is a journey that God has sent me on that I could not have gone about without all of these difficult moments that will lead me to the peace that can only be found in Him. The truth that I know is that it wouldn't matter right now if I had the most beautiful twin babies in the next room, my life is not what I want it to be right now. I'm not saying that there is a perfect world out there for me that I need to find first, but that I need to find contentment in what I have now before I will be able to appreciate what more could be. I want to get to a place when I, like my friend "don't see milestones or accomplishments, just a fulfilling, steady, unexciting but centered walk". 

So how did this epiphany come about? I was really trying to work through all of these things late last night before bed. It was as if the answer was just outside the rim of my understanding. All night I had vivid dreams of tribulation and turmoil and woke up with a lump in my throat. This is what I dreamed: I was running through the streets with a tornado following me. I believed the tornado was my husband. I could feel how angry everyone around me was because this tornado that was meant for me was causing so much danger and destruction. Once I finally got to safety (in a movie theatre with a large crowd), I felt this overwhelming feeling of failure through the crowd's anger at me. And then suddenly my husband walked in and I realized he was not the tornado. He was not coming after me to hurt me. And maybe everyone in the room hated him just as much as they hated me. I'm not sure if the tornado was God or if the tornado was fear, but all I know is that I was no longer afraid of it. God gave me my husband as a partner to get through the fear. Even if the whole world hated us, we had each other. I think until this point I had been dealing with this decision all on my own because I didn't want to disappoint my husband. But the dream made me realize that I was wasting energy on an unnecessary fear. 

So my decision is to stop fighting and to seek peace. This is no longer just my infertility story, but my search for peace and centeredness. I still desperately want to be a mother, I'm just not going to give any more power (or money) to something that is out of my control. I am going to put my faith in God instead of doctors.