Here at Yet We Thrive, we often talk about how it’s okay to not be okay. It seems like the world’s hustle and bustle holds no place for grief so it’s easy to feel the pressure to just get over it and be okay. We want people to be aware that sometimes we aren’t okay and that’s okay! But there is a flip side to not being okay and that’s being okay.
Month: May 2021
Find A Listener
My husband does this thing when he doesn’t want to talk about something. Whenever I start a conversation he doesn’t really want to discuss, he does this fake yawn, followed by a “erm… umm… errr…. I don’t know.” And we change the subject. For the first four years in my journey of infertility, each time I brought up the subject of kids, I got the fake yawn. So I learned to shut it down, feelings and all. I stopped trying to communicate where I was emotionally and my desire for children because he just didn’t want to talk about it at the time. And that was terribly horribly bad for me and our marriage.
Being Broken
A long time ago, a pastor said in a sermon that your waves are your waves. Other people’s waves might look bigger but your waves are big to you and you shouldn’t try to minimize them. That has stuck with me, especially in infertility. There will always be the woman who has done IVF twenty times and failed. There will always be a woman who tried for thirty years unsuccessfully. There will always be a woman who lost a baby to cancer. It taught me not to compare pain because pain is pain. It also taught me to look past the “I’m fine,” facade because at the end of the day, one thing is true.
Made To Nurture
Nurture – noun
the process of caring for and encouraging the growth or development of someone or something.
As long as I’ve been married, home has been my happy place and doing things to take care of my family is the work that I love… but I’ve always gone back to “I have to do something else because I don’t have kids”. For some reason, nurturing equals kids in my brain as I think it does for lots of other people. It took several years of infertility to even grasp the mentality that just my husband and I are a family. It took years after that to reach the idea that that family, consisting of him, me and the cat, are worthy of nurturing.