Our Adoption Video...only seventeen months later :)

I've been thinking a lot lately about the concept of 'before' and 'after.'

Especially when dealing with bad news.

I will never forget the few moments before I got the call about my Dad suffering his stroke. I was happily packing up my stuff and getting ready to walk out the door to go to work. DH was walking up the street returning from a run.

The phone rang and it was my sister. We often talked on our respective drives into work so I hastily grabbed it and said--without saying hello--"I'm not in the car yet I'll call you right back."

No, she managed to say before I hung up.

Dad had a stroke.

And then--after.

That was the dividing line between his life and our life before and after. Nothing was the same after and it was never, ever better, only worse, slowly, slowly worse. And now he is gone.

I think about those dividing lines so often that I create them in my imagination. Example: the other day I had just finished speaking with my sister on the phone and it was only about an hour later and she was calling again. I was just stepping into the shower so I didn't answer. But the entire shower I wondered if she was calling over and over and I couldn't hear and what it if was another one of those calls diving time into before and after?

(note: she just wanted to ask me about something related to Target. Whew.)

Most of the time the big traumas of our lives are sudden and there is a before and after.

But not with infertility (in most cases).

Infertility chips away at you slowly, until you are just a pile of wood chips.
And by you, I mean me.

Somehow I found myself flying halfway across the country, twice, spending obscene amounts of money. Somehow I found myself going through five full in vitro cycles when I swore I would never even do one. Somehow I found myself lying in a dark room full of needles in my ears and scalp and stomach and toes. Somehow I found myself choking down disgusting herbs. Somehow I found myself obsessively researching and reading and researching and reading and emailing doctors and wanting to try different crazy protocols and injecting and injecting and injecting hormones hormones hormones into my sad, tired belly.

Somehow.

Because I could not see the forest for the trees.

Oh the forest--becoming a mother!--she was gone to me. All I could see were those damned trees.

I speak for myself only here, but there is a lot of shame in all that I did.

I wanted to be a mother.
There are many ways to become a mother.
None are necessarily easy, and no doubt none are better than any other.
Because all that matters in the end--all that ever, ever, ever should matter--is the love you can give to a child.

My forest, my beautiful forest, you were right there the whole time weren't you?