Our Weekend

So much to say.  Last week when I went to the chiropractor, he told me that my uterus finally felt “strong” and that my pelvis was still aligned properly.  🙂  Very good news.  I hope this will increase our chances of having biological children one day.  I’m also thinking about seeing an acupuncturist who specializes in infertility later this summer.  Have any of you had success with an acupuncturist before?

This past weekend my sister and brother-in-law came to visit from New Orleans where he is a seminary student (they are not Catholic).  It was such a great visit!  I’ve sorely missed my sister.  I wish we lived closer, but I guess that’s part of growing up.  Anyway, their visit was incredibly short, so we had a packed schedule this weekend.  They arrived Friday morning, and our husbands and our dad took us out shooting.  It was my first time ever shooting a gun, and the experience reminded me that I desperately need to schedule an eye exam.  Haha.  It was fun, though.

Saturday morning we had quite an adventure!  We sometimes go to the Soulard Farmer’s Market in downtown St. Louis, but we decided while my sister was in town we’d try out a smaller farmer’s market in Tower Grove Park, because they have several food trucks that sell breakfast foods on Saturday mornings.  It was our first time going, so we weren’t sure where to go, and this park is fairly large.  As soon as pulled in through the main gates of the park, we saw tons of white tents set up, so we parked and headed over.  It was the strangest farmer’s market I’d ever been to.  We saw tons of tie-dye shirts, tarot card readers, dream interpreters, a drum circle, and an interesting piece of jewelry–a necklace that attaches to nipple rings.  The nipple ring necklace was what finally made us wonder if we were in the right place.  Turns out we were walking through the “Pagan Picnic.”  Haha.  We escaped as quickly as we could and ran to the car to drive further through the park until we found the real farmer’s market!

Anyway, I was sad to say goodbye to my sister this morning.  We never get enough time together.  But, I had places to go today, too.  Choi and I met with the sacristan of the church we’ve been visiting to take a tour of the church and learn how we can get more involved in the life of the parish.  We are so blessed to have a church that only offers the Traditional Latin Mass, and it is full of young families–and diverse families at that.  It’s so funny how we found this church.  We used to drive by it every Sunday when we were in high school, because we took Choi’s mom to the Vietnamese markets on Sunday afternoons (in case you haven’t been reading my blog for a long time, my husband and I have been together since I was 14 and he was 15).  We always thought it was a beautiful church–the Gothic architecture is amazing!  In fact, we liked the outside of the church building so much that we stopped by when we were having our engagement photos done years ago to take a few pictures on the steps outside the church.  Fast forward many years, and about a month and a half ago as we were driving by this same gorgeous church on the way to our church, my husband mentioned how he would really like to go to mass there sometime since we’ve always wondered what the inside of the church looks like.  We decided to be spontaneous and made a quick turn so we could go to mass there that day.  We didn’t even know this church only offered the Traditional Latin Mass (which we fell in love with the first time we experienced it last spring when we were still living in Alabama) until we went that day.  We felt right at home from the get go, and we haven’t been able to stop going since.  It feels like we’ve had a long relationship with this church despite the fact that we’ve only been attending mass there for a month.  We’ve driven by this church regularly for so many years and even have pictures of it from long ago, so it’s sort of been in our lives without us really realizing it!  It’s such a cool part of our story, I guess.  We can’t wait to get involved there.

This church offers so much for children; I hope with all my heart that we will one day have children to add to their numbers.

My Easter Weekend in Pics

Happy Easter to you all!  I hope you had a wonderful weekend.

My sister and her husband flew in for the weekend, so we had such a great time these past few days.  I thought a picture post would be appropriate.

Friday morning, my parents picked my sister and brother-in-law up from the airport and we met them at Soulard Farmer’s Market.  We finally had sunshine and warmer temps, so it was a lot of fun to walk through and pick up some fresh fruits and vegetables–in particular, strawberries, which are now coming into season.

We also bought a roll of bacon for our dog, Xanh.  He LOVED it!  In fact, he frequently barks in the direction of where I hid it with the hope that we will give him another strip.

Saturday morning, I made the most delicious pancakes!  They were vegan whole wheat coconut pancakes topped with freshly sliced strawberries and a strawberry banana puree.  Mmm.

The rest of Saturday was spent cooking.  At least for my mom and me, anyway.  My hubby and dad watched college basketball, and my sister and her husband were visiting his family.  But I was in the kitchen ALL day!  I love cooking, so it was fun, but 2 days of cooking (because we couldn’t get it all done the day before Easter) was exhausting.  There is something really special about spending a day in the kitchen with your mom, though.  And I am really proud of my new vegan wild rice pilaf that I made.  It was filled with dried and fresh fruits and nuts.  It was a big hit this Easter!  This was my first time contributing dishes to a holiday meal, because this is the first time since I’ve been an adult that I’ve lived near my family.  I only took a picture of the pilaf, though, because it was just too pretty and colorful not to!

My birthday is actually about a week away, but since my sister was in town, she asked if we could celebrate my birthday this weekend.  So Saturday night we went out to Local Harvest Cafe, a restaurant in St. Louis that uses mostly local, organic foods.  They have several vegan and/or vegetarian options in addition to options for the average omnivore.  None of us had ever been, and I thought it would be the perfect place for us to go since we all eat different things.  I ordered vegan mushroom linguine with spinach.  It was GOOD!  And, of course, the conversation was the best part.  There is nothing better than sitting around a table having a meal with a group of loved ones.

Easter mass Sunday morning was beautiful!  Then, we had a small family lunch.  Things are kind of weird right now with all of the “kids” having kids, so holidays aren’t as big as they once were.  This year it was just my immediate family and my grandmother, but it was a wonderful time.

(We had to put Xanh in some pictures.  He’s just as much family to us as anyone.  🙂 )

I hope your Easter was blessed and that you were able to spend it with people you love.

 

Sowing in Tears; Reaping with Shouts of Joy

I’m sure my regular readers have noticed that I’m not writing as frequently as I normally do.  It’s just that I don’t have much to say these days.  I have a lot on my mind, but for some reason I have been unable to fully express my thoughts and emotions.  Let me do a quick recap for you on the past 2 years of my life.  My husband, Choi, and I started trying to conceive using the natural family planning method we had been using to avoid pregnancy called the Creighton Model.  We quickly noticed something was “off” in my charts.  I never really had symptoms of fertility, so I decided to start using ovulation predictor kits along with my charting, and sure enough, I wasn’t ovulating.  After 6 months of never getting a positive surge, I went to see my OB-GYN.  She did an exam and ran some tests and decided to put me on Clomid.  While the Clomid did make me ovulate, it also gave me awful side effects and caused me to stop producing fertile mucus, which naturally decreased my chances of conceiving.  Despite our setbacks, we did miraculously conceive a baby last March, but I miscarried mere weeks later.  After 6 months on Clomid and a few other tests, my doctor referred me to a Reproductive Endocrinologist.  Long story short, after much monitoring and some new medications, I still wasn’t pregnant and we still weren’t sure exactly what was wrong.  My RE finally discovered I produce antisperm antibodies, which means my immune system attacks sperm before they can pass through the cervix.  So, the RE told us our best chances (in fact, one of the nurses said our *only chances) of getting pregnant would be through IUI.  We had a few failed cycles of IUI, the last being back in November, so we have now moved on to trying alternative medicines.  I started consuming maca root powder on a daily basis a few months ago, and it has helped me ovulate regularly without any medications.  Now I am on a search for a way to correct my antisperm antibodies problem.  (To be continued…)

Anyway, in the midst of all this, we started praying that God would show us what our next step in life should be.  We got so caught up in the devastation of infertility that we started to neglect the calling we believe God had for us.  I have known I would help Vietnamese people since I was just 12 years old (at that time, I had never even met a Vietnamese person nor did I know a thing about the U.S. being part of a war there).  I met my husband, who is from Vietnam, when I was 14, and we have been best friends and partners in life ever since.  He, too, wanted to return to his homeland to help the people there.  In fact, he always thought he would return to the village his family lives in.  The same year we started trying to conceive, we were in the preliminary stages of planning our move to Vietnam.  We were praying about when we would move, we were researching the needs in the village we had planned to move to, and we had even made some phone calls and were saving the money for our journey overseas.  But God never opened a door for us to go.  Our hearts were already weak from our struggle with infertility and our deep desire to become parents, but this was too much.  It truly shattered us.  So we spent 6 months praying about what God wanted us to do.  Where were we to go?  What were we to do?  Surely God had not changed a calling he had placed on my heart at such a young age.  What did He want from us?

Much to our surprise, we had a vision of us opening a non-profit in St. Louis that would offer help to both Vietnamese immigrants in the U.S. as well as to street children in Vietnam (which is where we had planned on focusing our efforts if we had moved to Vietnam).  In fact, I kept having dreams about this ministry, and it was all we could think about for months.  Neither of us had ever imagined in a million years that we would ever move back to the St. Louis area.  Our hearts were in Vietnam.  But, a door opened, and that door led us to the Midwest.  Choi had a kind of temporary job to go to when we arrived in Illinois (we moved in with my parents who live just across the river from St. Louis, which was also supposed to be temporary), so we really thought the time was right, God was going to take care of us, and He was going to do great things through us.  Unfortunately, AFTER we arrived in Illinois, the place we thought Choi would be working at while he looked for a more permanent job fell through–business was slower than usual for this time of year, so they couldn’t afford to have him work there.  We were definitely shocked, but we were so certain that we had done the right thing in moving here that we believed he would find a new job quickly.  But he didn’t.  We have now been without an income for almost 5 months.  Our savings are almost completely gone, the job outlook remains bleak, and we are getting very worried.

Here’s the confusion: We prayed so long about this move and truly believed in our hearts that this was the right thing to do.  We had a vision!  What happened to that???  Was that not from God?  Was that our dream?  How can that be since we never wanted to stay in the U.S.?  It must have been from God.  But if that’s the case, then why hasn’t He provided Choi with a good job?  What have we done wrong to deserve all the suffering we have endured over the last year and a half?  No baby, no job, no home of our own, no purpose in life at all.

This is why I haven’t been writing much lately.  I am in such a state of sadness and confusion that I don’t know what to say.  And without an income, nothing exciting really goes on in our lives anymore.  My parents live way out from the city, so we can’t go out together, we can’t go out and make new friends, we can’t even do volunteer work, because just driving back and forth to get to my in-law’s house, the grocery store, our church, etc. uses so much of our gas and our savings have evaporated so fast that we don’t want to go anywhere unless we absolutely have to.  The most exciting thing we do is ride bikes together with our dog running alongside us 2 times a day.  Not to mention, this is supposed to be a blog about my journey through infertility, and right now, that’s the least of my worries.  Of course I cry all the time, desperately wishing I could be a mother (and yes, I often suffer from facebook jealousy), but at this point, I cry more for an income than for a baby.  How can we expect a baby when God won’t even provide my husband with a job?!  It’s so discouraging.  It’s like we’re going backwards rather than forward in life.

All that to say, this weekend God did speak to me.  I still don’t understand why He brought us here without providing a job, and I am still unsure if we are doing the right thing or not, but I do believe He gave me a message of hope this weekend.  Friday morning, I woke up thinking about the Israelites.  Man, there journey to the Promised Land was filled with struggle.  They often wondered where God was and why He wasn’t making things easier for them, yet in the end, it all worked out.  God’s chosen people did eventually reach the Promised Land, and despite a very tumultuous history, God continued to care for His people.  Later that morning, I got an email from my mom.  She wrote, “I was reading Exodus 17 where the people were thirsty because there was no water.  They were experiencing a great need – they had a very REAL problem – but they were right where God had led them.  You are here now and believe you and Choi are following the path God put you on – and that is probably the case.  The fact that you are having problems right now doesn’t mean you aren’t right smack in the middle of God’s will for you.  God must have a plan to deliver you, so hold on tight.”  I decided to look up the passage for myself:

From the desert of Sin the whole Israelite community journeyed by stages, as the LORD directed, and encamped at Rephidim. Here there was no water for the people to drink.  They quarreled, therefore, with Moses and said, “Give us water to drink.” Moses replied, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you put the LORD to a test?”

Here, then, in their thirst for water, the people grumbled against Moses, saying, “Why did you ever make us leave Egypt? Was it just to have us die here of thirst with our children and our livestock?”  …..  The place was called Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled there and tested the LORD, saying, “Is the LORD in our midst or not?”

In the end, God did provide the people with water from an unlikely source–He commanded Moses to strike a rock and water came out from it “in abundance” for them.  I definitely relate to the Israelites.  I have been asking, “Is the LORD in our midst or not?”  In fact, just last week I told my husband that it seems like God is playing a sick joke on us.  Miscarriage, infertility, no income, no friends (at least not in our new home yet).  After our miscarriage, people kept telling us, ‘Don’t worry!  God will give you another child.’  I’m still waiting for that to happen.  Then, when I was diagnosed with infertility, people kept saying that if we had enough faith, God would give us a child.  I don’t know how much more faith we could have had when we went against what we thought we would do for years and instead moved to St. Louis with no guarantees.  Yet, things have gotten worse, not better.  Now we have no kids AND no income!  And no friends to hang out with.  😦

I know we can relate to the Israelites, but I just hope our story will end as well as theirs did.  I pray that God will gives us the “water” we’ve been praying for and that He will use us to fulfill the vision He put on our hearts.  The Psalm from this morning’s mass (which I also randomly came across Friday after reading about the Israelites needing water) says, “Restore our fortunes, O LORD, like the watercourses in the Negeb!  May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy!  He that goes forth weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, bringing his sheaves with him.”  When the Israelites did finally arrive in the Promised Land, times were hard.  They were still struggling amid depressing circumstances, but they prayed and hoped that God would once again bless them, and He did.  May the same be true for us.  If history teaches us anything, then it’s that God loves to be the prince in shining armor who rushes in at our weakest moments to lift us up.  Right now I am sowing in tears, but I trust that eventually (even though it may not be anytime soon), I will reap with shouts of joy.  And I cannot wait for that day to come!  Good will surely come from this time of hardship, and when it does, I will be shouting for joy everywhere I go.

A New Beginning?

We may be at the start of a new beginning!  We’ll see soon enough, I suppose.  After almost 3 months of applying for 30-40 jobs a week (no exaggeration here) and not receiving a single response, my hubby finally has a job interview tomorrow morning!!  It’s just a preliminary interview, but an interview nonetheless.  It’s crazy, because he’s been searching for a job so hard and we have felt incredibly discouraged that he hadn’t heard back from anyone, and then last night, we decided to start a novena for him to find employment, and he received an email offering him a preliminary interview at a St. Louis company first thing this morning.  Our hopes are high!  Please pray for us.

I also purchased a package of maca root powder today.  I know I posted about trying maca root for my infertility a long time ago, but I just now got around to buying it.  If you didn’t get a chance to read that post to know about maca root and how it is used to treat infertility, you can read about it here.

I did a little more research on it before actually buying some to see which brands seem to work best.  From what I can tell, all of the research showing maca root increases fertility used gelatinized maca root powder in their studies, so even though it’s more expensive than the capsules, I bought the powder (and it has to be gelatinized, because that’s the kind that’s had the starches removed).  I bought USDA Organic Navitas gelatinized maca powder from Whole Foods.  The guy at Whole Foods told me he takes maca root powder to increase his energy, and this is the brand he likes best because it works well and is not as expensive as the other brands they offer.  It cost me about $30, and the package says it contains 90 servings; however, a serving is 1 tsp, and my reading suggests that if using maca powder to increase fertility, one should take 1 Tbsp a day, so I’m guessing this package will last me about one month.  Most people add the powder to smoothies or beverages, or in yogurt or cereal/granola.  I just hope it doesn’t taste too bad.

I’ll keep you updated on my experiences with the maca root powder.  I don’t know what I’m really expecting to happen since I produce antisperm antibodies–I mean, I haven’t read anywhere that maca root cures that problem–but, if it really balances hormones as well as studies show and as well as people on the internet tell me it does, then hopefully it will at least help me to ovulate without medication.  That would definitely be a step in the right direction.

Also, please remember to pray for my husband, Choi, tomorrow as he goes in for this preliminary interview–we REALLY need him to get this job!  I’ll keep you posted.

The New Year

If this week is a foreshadowing of things to come in 2013, then this may be a much better year than 2012.  I have had such a good week!  Monday, December 31, was my husband and my wedding anniversary.  Even though we are without an income right now, someone was kind enough to give us a gift card so we could go out for dinner to celebrate.  We were able to relax all day and then head out for our dinner date.  I made che thai (a Vietnamese dessert) for us to enjoy when we got home as we waited for midnight to roll around.  It was just the two of us, and we cherished every minute of it.

Then, on New Year’s day, we went over to my in-laws (who are rarely off work) to spend some time with them.  It just so happened that my husband’s grandmother was there, and we haven’t seen her in over a year.  We spent the evening relaxing by a fire and watching a movie with my parents at their house.

Today was also a fun day!  We went on a tour of the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis.  It is BREATHTAKING!  Any of you who live in or are planning on visiting St. Louis must get a tour of this church.  It doesn’t matter what your religious affiliation or beliefs are–the beauty and magnitude of the artwork and architecture in this church will blow your mind!  And the best part is it’s FREE!

Life definitely isn’t perfect right now, but I’m doing my best to stay calm, seek God, and trust that things will start looking up soon.  I have received so much encouragement from all of you.  Thank you.  It also helps that this month I am not using an ovulation predictor and stressing over whether or not I ovulate.  I never ovulate without medication (it’s only happened one time), so I don’t even know why I stress myself out peeing on sticks all the time anyway.  I am upset every month that I don’t ovulate despite the fact that deep down I know that will be the end result.  No reason to torture myself.  Besides, so many people get pregnant as soon as they stop trying, so we’ll just see if that really works.  😉

I hope you have had a great start to the new year.  May 2013 be filled with many blessings for us all.

Anger

I am so full of anger today.  I keep trying to push down my feelings and accept that things are the way they are, but it’s so hard not to be upset.  Why do I keep seeing couples I know get married, get pregnant almost immediately after, and then their lives seem to go on like a beautiful fairytale?  Why didn’t this happen for us?  Why have things been so difficult for us?  When we first got married, God seemed to really bless us.  We were overwhelmed with gracious gifts, had good jobs, and were filled with hopes for our future.  But then, not long into our marriage when we decided to try to conceive our first child, our nightmare began.  Months of not ovulating, lots of painful and/or humiliating tests, more bad news than I could have ever dreamed of, a devastating miscarriage, and a complete loss of hope.  Why me?  I know to ask that question makes me seem selfish and spiritually immature, but I don’t care.  That’s honestly the question on my heart and I just want an answer!  What I have done in my life that is so bad I have to go through this?  Some people tell me this is God’s plan for me, but if that’s the case, why does He want me to suffer?  Am I doing something wrong?  Am I missing something?  Because if I am, I would like to know so I could do the right thing.  Even if God didn’t want me to have any children, I think I could be more content if I only knew why, and if I could know what purpose He does have for me instead.  I’m just SO mad right now.  Especially since I have seen a gazillion people on Facebook posting pregnancy announcements this Christmas season.  Why can’t that be me?????

To make things worse, my husband and I prayed for months about where God wanted to take us next.  We had planned on moving to Vietnam in 2012, but every door we saw slammed closed in our faces.  We were truly at a loss.  That had been our plan for so long, and we really believed that’s what God wanted for us, but nothing ever worked out.  After much prayer, we felt led to come to the place we never thought we would return to.  We had mixed feelings about it, but we felt so strongly that this was the right thing that we moved to the St. Louis area (where our families live) without any prospects.  We had faith that if we followed God without asking questions, then He would surely provide for us.  I suppose He has provided our needs, because we are currently staying with my parents, but it’s been a couple of months now and not a single application has yielded a return call or an interview.  We have no income, no friends, no network, nothing.  It’s so incredibly frustrating, because we thought we were doing the right thing.  It feels like we followed God here and then He abandoned us.

I know it’s wrong to be angry with God, and I really wish I was so far along spiritually that I continued to trust God through anything, but sadly, I’m not.  I’m trying really hard–I promise I am–but I feel so weighed down.  They say God never gives you more than you can handle.  God must think much more of me than I think of myself, because I feel totally and completely overwhelmed.  All I could say to God at church this morning was, “God have mercy on me.  Help my unbelief!  I’m drowning here.  Please help me.”

Have you ever felt abandoned by God?  What did you do to keep your head up?  What eased your anger and frustration during that dark time in your life?

Hope this Christmas

Life has been hard.  We have struggled with infertility for a year and a half, and then we prayerfully decided to move to the St. Louis area to be with our families once again.  In doing so, we took a huge leap of faith that we are now reconsidering in many ways.  You see, my husband, Choi, is qualified to teach English as a Second Language (ESL), and St. Louis has lots of immigrants, so before making our decision to move final, we searched for ESL jobs in the area and there were TONS!  We felt very confident he would get a great teaching job and we would be happy.  However, finding a new job takes time, so while we waited for that excellent teaching job, our plan was for him to work at a nail salon, which he is licensed to do as he did nails through college and up to now (he is a typical Vietnamese person–LOL).  Nail jobs are usually quite easy to find, so we weren’t worried at all.  But, to our absolute shock, we have been here for almost 2 months and he still hasn’t even found a job as a nail tech!  We are really struggling, both financially and spiritually.  Fortunately, we are staying with my parents right now, because we figured it would be much less stressful to search for a new home after the holidays; however, now it seems we will be staying here longer than we ever anticipated.  And our money is running out so fast!  We have so many bills to pay with student loans and health insurance, etc.  Not to mention, we made a choice to pay for fertility treatments, which are not cheap.  You see, we had so much faith in those treatments that we were willing to spend almost all our savings on them.  When we did IUI, we had so much hope that it would work that we didn’t even blink before handing over the cash.  Of course, my insurance covered part of the treatments, but definitely not all (and copays add up pretty quickly, too).  We spent all that money because we truly believed we would get pregnant as a result, yet here we are still barren.

Despite our stress and our losses, today I am reminded that we should never lose hope in God, even when we can’t see Him through the fog, for God is a miracle worker.  May we remember His greatest miracle on this night, which was Him sending His Son into the world through a virgin–the Blessed Mary.  It is because of His Son, Jesus, that we have hope, and I pray that my hope and yours is renewed this Christmas season.  May God fill all our hearts with peace and joy as we remember God’s greatest gift to the world.  Merry Christmas to each of you!

“Home”

Being “home” has been an interesting adjustment.  We lived away in Birmingham for almost 5 years, and things are very different here in the metro-east St. Louis area than they once were.  We really have no friends here–only acquaintances.  People have changed.  We have changed.  There are subdivisions where there were once fields, roads where there were once trees.  Many businesses and restaurants no longer exist, yet many others are now open in their places.  Even though we have come “home,” it kind of feels like we are in a new place starting life all over again, which definitely has its pros and cons.

We are so thankful to live near family again.  We had AMAZING friends in Birmingham, but nothing beats family.  It’s also nice to talk to people we haven’t seen in years despite the fact that we don’t really know them anymore.  However, this has it’s down side, too.  The worst part of being here has been people nosing around wanting to know about our family planning plans.  I’m guessing about 90% of the people I’ve run into from our past have asked me if we moved back here because I’m pregnant.  When I say no, they ask if we are going to have children soon.  I know they don’t mean anything by these questions–it’s simply curiosity.  But for me, it’s a constant reminder of the saddest thing that’s ever happened to me.  I can feel the sting in my eyes as soon as I hear the words start coming out of their mouths.  What do I tell them?  I was pregnant once and miscarried?  We’ve been trying to conceive for a year and half?  The doctors say our chances of conceiving naturally is slim?  We’ve tried all kinds of medicines as well as IUI and none of it worked to get me pregnant?  We desperately want children but may never be able to have them?  We want to adopt and can’t afford it right now?

I know our year and a half of trying to conceive doesn’t even compare to these couples who have been trying for say 10 years, but the pain is very real.  I get so frustrated when friends of mine tell me they are trying to conceive and they start crying saying it’s already been 2 months and they still aren’t pregnant.  (Believe it or not, I’ve had this conversation with 3 people already.)  When trying to conceive, every negative pregnancy test is heart-breaking, but I do miss those early months when I still believed I would get pregnant the next month.  I still had tons of hope then.  But that was before I was diagnosed with infertility.  That was before we learned I produce an antibody to sperm.  Now my hope dwindles.  Now I’m in a life crisis almost, because I’ve always imagined myself having lots of children and now that’s not happening.  I went to college and still imagined myself one day being a hard-working wife and mother at home, yet here I am childless and people keep asking what I plan on doing.  Everyone wants to know my career path, and even though we do feel called to start a non-profit and are hoping to start working toward that now that we are living near St. Louis again, I am now having to question my purpose in life.  That may sound dramatic to some of you, but like I said before, we wanted to have a big family, and we always thought we would have a baby by now and I would be a stay-at-home mom.  We had a plan for how that would work into our non-profit and everything.  But now that we have no children, I don’t know what to do with myself.  I never wanted a job (or career, you may call it) to define my life, yet that’s how society works these days. Call us old-fashioned, but Choi and I always planned for him to support us financially, for me to take care of the home and children, and for our entire family to fulfill God’s calling on our lives to help street children in Vietnam.  You know how they say life never turns out the way you expect it to?  That couldn’t be more true in my case.  We have no baby, we are in the United States, and we are not working with children of any kind.  God is still in control and He still has a great plan for us, but it’s definitely not what we expected.  We aren’t sure if God will ever bless us with children, but we do hope and pray everyday that He will, whether it be through adoption or natural conception.  And we still feel called to work with street children, but God has shown us a new way to attain that goal that is much different than we originally foresaw.

Have any of you ever been in my shoes?  Have you ever had a curve ball thrown into your plans for your life?  Have you ever found yourself unable to conceive and unsure of where to go from there?  I’d love to hear your stories and what you did to move forward with peace.

We’re Home!

After 10 hours in a car with a dog and a moving truck ahead of us towing one vehicle, we finally made it back to our new old home.  It’s wonderful to be back near family, but we do miss our Birmingham friends…a lot.

With the craziness of packing and unpacking, we haven’t had a chance to properly grieve the disappointment of this IUI cycle, but we are really hoping next week we can get in a new groove and start creating a regular routine for ourselves (and our poor puppy who is very stressed from the move).  Thanks to all of you who have been praying for us during this time.  Have a wonderful weekend!

Impatient

One word to describe me this week: impatient.  I don’t know what has gotten into me, but I have been incredibly impatient lately.  I’m going to chalk it up to stress (although that’s really no excuse).  We are moving to the St. Louis area in just over 2 weeks, so we’re trying to reserve a moving truck and collect boxes and plan for packing, etc.  We are waiting for our insemination day to come, and we feel torn over whether or not this is the right thing to do.  Are we being selfish?  I mean, we are planning to start the adoption process as soon as we settle into our own house, regardless of the outcome of this insemination.  So is this a waste of money?  A waste of time?  Are we trying to force God’s hand?  We don’t want to look back on this and wonder “what if,” but at the same time, we don’t want to look back and say, “All that money spent, all that stress, all those tears–they were for nothing.”  Sigh…  This has been such a difficult decision, and I don’t think we’ll feel completely confident in our decision regardless of what we do.  On top of that, I’ve been dealing with the insurance company again, and I am now thinking insurance companies are from the devil (no offense to any of you who work for an insurance company).  I won’t even get into all of that.

If I’m honest with myself, I know the reason for my impatience.  I am fed up with infertility.  Choi and I are both feeling the weight of this burden, and we are exhausted.  I just want to be done with this.

Errr.  My patience has become very limited, and I hate that.  No one is happy when their temper is short; that’s definitely not the way I want to be.  Sometimes we just need to sit down, take a few deep breaths, and realize that the stress of today will not last forever.  That’s why I am so looking forward to next weekend!  We are going to New Orleans to visit my sister and her husband who recently moved there.  It will be the weekend after our insemination, and the weekend before we move, so it couldn’t come at a better time.  I think this trip is just what we need to relax and gain our sanity back.  Only 7 more days…

 

Teach me, my Lord, to be sweet and gentle in all the events of my life, in disappointments, in the thoughtlessness of others, in the insincerity of those I trusted, in the unfaithfulness of those on whom I relied. Let me forget myself so that I may enjoy the happiness of others. Let me always hide my little pains and heartaches so that I may be the only one to suffer from them. Teach me to profit by the suffering that comes across my path. Let me so use it that it may mellow me, not harden or embitter me; that it may make me patient, not irritable; that it may make me broad in my forgiveness, not narrow or proud or overbearing. May no one be less good for having come within my influence; no one less pure, less true, less kind, less noble, for having been a fellow traveler with me on our journey towards eternal life. As I meet with one cross after another, let me whisper a word of love to You. May my life be lived in the supernatural, full of power for good, and strong in its purpose of sanctity. Amen.  (By Anonymous)