There Is No Solution

At some point, you start to feel like banging your head against a wall.

You do everything right. You take the medication, you lose weight and keep it off. You start training to walk a half-marathon. But your jacked up ovaries and your broken body still don’t work.

You turn yourself into a human pin cushion, blood draws every other day for a month in the hopes of getting answers. But no real answers come.

No matter how hard you pray or how much courage you have, you cannot will the answers to come. You cannot reason your way out of subfertility.

I remembered that yesterday when doing my daily reflection, and I dedicate these words to all my sisters who know exactly what they mean.

“Stop trying to think out a solution for the moment: there isn’t one. One day there may be; God will then show it to you. In the meantime, accept it all as being the big thing for God and his Church that he asks of you – that, and the depression too. You will find the relief of merely accepting, instead of struggling, wonderful; and I include in this, accepting anything in yourself, during the crisis, which seems to you a failure or fault…

During the war I was simply terrified by air raids, and it was my lot to be in every one that happened in London…I tried to build up my courage by reason and prayer, etc. Then one day I realized quite suddenly: As long as I try not to be afraid I shall be worse, and I shall show it one day and break; what God is asking of me, to do for suffering humanity, is to be afraid, to accept it and put up with it, as one has to put up with pain. I am not going to get out of any of the suffering…and that is what I’ve got to do for the world — offer that to God, because it is that and nothing else which he asks of me.”  -Caryll Houselander