Infertility & Sin Nature

CD 24, 11 DPO

I'm a horrible, horrible person.  Inside, where no one sees.  On the outside, I'm far from perfect but I certainly seem to have it together in a social and moral sense.  College grad, virgin bride, devoted wife, home owner, librarian, (less than)urban homesteader, upstanding citizen, regular church goer.  I even sing in the choir.

But today, I wished something on a friend (or maybe more accurately, frenemy) that the normal, rational part of me would never wish on a soul, not even Mr. Adolf Hitler himself.  I had better start from the beginning:

This morning, I woke up to an old friend's copious newborn pictures plastering facebook.  Her tagging and commenting showed that she had found a vigor for facebook that I've never known her to have in the past.  Her baby was due less than a month before Elizabeth and it would be an understatement to say that those pictures stung, particularly in comparison to the picture I posted last week of my daughter's headstone.

To say that this friend had been lest than chaste (despite putting up her perfect Christian front), would be quite the understatement.  By the time her little oops happened though, she had at least found a serious relationship with her man and they rushed up a wedding and off they marched merrily into the sunset.  She announced her pregnancy right away, never having to fear that things might not go according to plan (or un-plan, in her case).  When Elizabeth passed, she never so much as called or emailed despite the fact that just a few weeks before we had been swapping stories from the trenches.  My guess is she was just so glad it wasn't her and that she had just crossed that precious line of viability.  Then this morning, she (who updated her status barely once a month) was on facebook for over an hour, making sure that no one could possibly miss her pictures and her joy.

Something inside me snapped.  I wanted to know why such an incredible gift had been given to her, who had done positively everything out of order while I, who have worked my ass off to keep my life in line, have had so very much taken from me in the last few years.  Part of me was waiting for God to wake up and declare that He had made a terrible mistake and given her what He had intended for me, and visa versa.  Then my (self-) righteous anger kicked in and in the back of my head i began to fester and part of me honestly wished, not only for what she had, but for her to know the intense pain and suffering of what has been taken from me.

And that, ladies and gents is sin at work.  I felt better than someone else, and in doing so became worse than her.  Grace is not given out only to the worthy and we should be thanking our lucky stars it isn't, because none of us have earned it.  I sure as hell didn't today.

It is also infertility at work.  Rational, caring me would never have thought something like that.  But infertility often stifles that part of me and sometimes I swear it's taken part of my soul.  I know it's taken big chunks out of my heart.

Here I am, messed up, outside and in.