God enters through the wound

Enough sitting on this post.  Time to press publish...

So it's been weeks since the IF retreat, and I've sort of been waiting for a big epiphany to hit me or some kind of mental breakthrough in how I see infertility or understand it.  But there hasn't been any big epiphany, at least up until this point.  Maybe something will hit me sometime down the road, but for now, my main reaction is that I'm happy I attended the retreat.

It was a nice-sized group--just under twenty people.  A handful of us wives came alone; others attended as a couple.

The best way I could describe the retreat is if you think of infertility like a wound, the wound was open, exposed, and raw the entire weekend.  Because the environment was so safe--everyone had personal experience living with IF--there was no need to try to put on a brave face or stuff your feelings down so others don't see.  There's really never (well, rarely) a chance to be so open and honest with your emotions and your pain in regular life, unless you have a very understanding or sympathetic friend, and even then it's limited because, let's face it, even the best of friends can't handle constant pain and sorrow from you all the time.  Perhaps I'm just speaking from my personal experience though.

A side story...

My most understanding friend whom I see only a couple times a year always asks me sincerely how I'm doing--meaning she wants to hear about IF and my struggles with it.  The last time I saw her, she let me share my pain with her for a while.  Just when I thought she might be starting to grasp (a little) of how deep IF pain is, she changed the topic, indicating she had reached her tolerance level of depressing topics.  I wasn't intending to go on much longer about IF, but it did surprise me that she essentially cut me off.  I realized it's not really accepted in polite company that you dwell on sad things for too long.  You can be a little sad, but not a lot sad, or if you're going to be a lot sad, you had better keep it short.  (Obviously you can do that with your husband, but I'm talking in a public setting.)

Back to the retreat...

These were strategically placed around the room. 
And they were passed around frequently.

I was not in a particularly emotionally vulnerable time in my cycle, but tears were just below the surface at all times, and it did not take much to start them flowing.  And flow they did.  Flood might be a better word.  I have not cried so much in a short period of time in a while.  Sometimes I cried because the intensity of the pain of IF would just hit me in waves.  Even though I think about IF often, I don't necessarily dwell on it for hours at a time...but the retreat kept IF in the center of my thoughts for much longer than I'm used to (hence the frequent tears).  Other times I cried when hearing another woman's IF story, realizing how deeply she was hurting.  I am the queen of sympathetic crying.  What was so nice was that I didn't feel embarrassed to be crying like I would if I were anywhere else besides home.  I think most of the ladies cried at some point during the retreat, but I tried hard to keep my gaze on the speaker and not the attendees (although it was easy to see out of the corner of my eye when a box of tissues was handed to another person).

One of the best parts about the retreat was the fellowship.  A small group of us ladies stayed up chatting until 4 a.m. and if we didn't need to be up a few hours later, we probably would have talked longer.  I figured I could sleep when I was back home, but I would only get to see other (real-life!) IFers for a short while, and I wanted to make the most of it.

The weekend was definitely not all serious.  I haven't laughed so much in a long time.

To me these represent the tension I face with IF:  hoping for that
miracle child knowing God could heal our infertility if He chose to
vs. knowing that true satisfaction and joy in this life comes from
God alone and trying to find contentment in that no matter what
happens with our IF.

One of my favorite parts of the weekend was a panel discussion with four couples who had different outcomes from their initial infertility:  one remained childless, one adopted an infant, one had two biological children, and one adopted through foster care.  So often adoption is presented as the solution to IF (usually by people who are not IF); I was glad the theme of the weekend was not, "Just adopt."  While it was great to hear from the couples who adopted (or had biological children), I was most interested to listen to the childless couple.  They were probably close in age to my parents.  This was the first time they were sharing their story publicly.  It was very emotional for them.  They brought up things they had long buried or maybe had never voiced aloud.  It really reaffirmed for me how deep the pain of IF is--that even though they had done meaningful work and ministry throughout their adult lives and had a loving marriage, the pain from IF never goes away. 

One part of their story really touched me.  They attended a Marriage Encounter (ME) weekend years after they knew they would never have children, and it was during that weekend that they were first able to really talk to each other about their emotions surrounding their IF.  That was the same way it happened for DH and me.  I remember before going to the ME, I would try to explain how I was feeling to DH, but I felt like I wasn't getting through to him--like he saw my feelings as some typical female over-the-top emotional (over)reaction.  But it was through the dialogues of that ME weekend that allowed us to break through whatever communication barrier we had before so that he could finally hear and understand where I was coming from. 

(Side note about ME:  When we were engaged, it was recommended to us that we attend a ME weekend after four years of marriage because at that point (sometime between four and seven years of marriage), the chemicals of attraction change.  Before that point, spouses would get a natural "high" (lovey-dovey feeling?) just by being in the same room with each other; after that point, the only way to get that "high" is through physical touch between the spouses.  Often couples will reach this point and feel like they "fell out of love" because they don't have the same warm, fuzzy feelings toward each other.  So the antidote was to attend a ME weekend to learn new tools of communicating and relating to each other to combat the change in feelings that would be coming soon.  It was recommended not to go earlier in marriage because you get the most benefit from the ME weekend by having plenty of marriage experience to draw on (at least four years).  I definitely see how that was true.  Newlyweds just wouldn't have much concrete to talk about--they would be discussing hypotheticals of how they would react in certain situations.  Neither of us really enjoyed the weekend or the style of communication that was taught, but for the major breakthrough we had about IF and our very different emotional reactions to it (if only because we were forced to discuss the subject (of our choosing) for a defined period of time) the entire weekend was worth it.)

Back to the retreat...

These are some of the things I took from the retreat:

• Marriage is all about self-gift.  Self-gift is the most important first step in our relationship with God and with others.
  
• Whenever we face suffering, we're told to "offer it up."  Sometimes instead we'd rather hear, "Yeah, that suffering is awful."  But offer it up doesn't mean suck it up and deal with it.  It has profound theological meaning (to unite the suffering with Christ on the cross) but sometimes you don't realize its significance until later.
  
• St. Henry II and his wife St. Cunigunde were childless, so they could be a good patron saint couple for IF couples.  (It's hard to find a saint who was permanently infertile.)  Most likely their childlessness is due to a vow of celibacy in their marriage...  BUT...according to the super accurate and always trustworthy wikip.edia, historians may have mistakenly assumed that their lack of children meant celibacy, implying that there's a chance they could have been infertile!  (I stopped reading after the wik.ipedia entry so maybe there's a better source out there, but with multiple spellings of Cunigunde, I wasn't up for the searches.)
  
• The (hard but necessary) question to ask is:  "Lord, how else (besides children) do you want to bless the world (not just me)?"
  
• God enters through the wound.
  
• Grace flows through wounds.  Look at the crucifix.
  
• Suffering always does something.  It's not a void.  It forms us.  It shapes us.  It teaches us.
  
• "Infertility is my stigmata." -RD  (It is a physical reminder of Christ's suffering.)
  
• God exults us when it would bring about our sanctification.  He humbles us when it would bring about our sanctification.

Aside from the wonderful theological truths that were discussed, I think the most significant mark the retreat left on me was that it acknowledged that infertility is really, really painful.  That probably sounds too simple or obvious.  Subconsciously I already knew that, but I needed someone else to affirm it.  (Not that the blogs don't affirm it--they do--I just needed it in person for some reason.)  When every discussion about my infertility with an IRL friend results in downplaying the pain or having the friend liken it to "just another of life's disappointments, like not getting the job you want, etc.", I start to wonder if I really am overreacting or over-doing my sadness.  But no, I'm not.  IF really does hurt that much.  And there are others feeling the same way.  Oh, how I wish we all lived closer and could hang out more often.  Live fellowship with other IFers is so great.  :)