bump #50: guest post from husband

Brensbabybump has been my little outlet for our infertility woes of the last year or so. It's a safe place for me to vent about our struggle to conceive and, usually, try to find some humor in the suckiness. But lately I've been having a tough time getting my thoughts together. This has been a strange season, can I get an amen? And while it's always easy for me to post silly outfit pictures and other meaningless babble on my other blog, I've been neglecting this little space. So I thought for this momentous (?) 50th bump post, I would have my husband, Andrew who does write for a living after all, write about his perspective on our bump-less state.

*He's getting his doctorate in literature so if you see any grammatical errors on his part he owes me $5!

According to several medical professionals, I shouldn’t be here right now.  When I was born, I was breach with my head up near my mom’s rib cage.  If I hadn’t have been a C-section, I probably wouldn’t have made it.  Shortly after I was a born, a doctor told my mom that I had some sort of weird newborn disease and that I probably wouldn’t live very long (thankfully, he was wrong).  Fast forward four years and one sister later, and yet another doctor tells my mom after an exam that she has a septuated uterus and if she had gone to him before she had kids that he would have told her that having a baby would have been impossible for her.

Needless to say, I am acutely and personally aware that getting pregnant, let alone delivering a healthy baby, is a miracle.  I realize that calling birth a miracle is a cliché of epic proportions, one that can be easily dispelled by looking at the rapidly rising world population or watching a birthing video (which I’ve managed to avoid thus far, unless you count that one scene in Knocked Up *shudder*).  However, as a would-be father, I sometimes find that this tired cliché can be an unexpected source of strength.  Why do I think this?  Because I am proof positive that miracles can and do happen.

Brenda and I have been trying to get pregnant since just after we moved to Texas, and I’ll admit that when we first started, I wasn’t totally convinced we were ready.  Focusing on the three years of PhD classes, exams, and school-induced poverty, I could not help but think that we were rushing into something and that we’d always have more time to worry about kids later.  A very big part of me wishes I could go back in time and smack my three-years-ago self in his comically over-sized head.  I had no idea that nearly three years and several thousand dollars later we would still be childless with no inkling of what is actually wrong with us.  I thought time was an endless resource for us; turns out, it was (and still is) our enemy.

In spite of the uncertainty of our infertility journey and the instability of our lives in general as I finish my PhD and wonder if I will in fact have a job waiting when I graduate, I am absolutely, 100% convinced that Brenda and I will be parents, some way or another.  Why?  Because ever since I was a little kid, I’ve known that I want to be a father.   Even when I’ve wondered if the timing is right for us, I’ve never doubted that I want to have kids.  I know Brenda has said similar things on this blog before, but I don’t believe that God puts desires like these into our hearts just to disappoint us like Lucy with the football in “Peanuts.”  God gave us the desire to be parents because we will be parents.  The waiting may be the proverbial hardest part (now I’ve just Tom Petty’d myself), but one thing I’ve tried to remember throughout our wait is that God has not forgotten us and that his capacity for miracles has not been exhausted.  I am able to write this post because of a series of pretty huge miracles.  I know that however we are able to start our family it will be because of God’s miraculous love for us.  It may be hard to trust in that promise sometimes, but God’s faithfulness is not limited by our lack of it.  Thank God for that!