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Struggling with Faith: How Infertility Permanently Affected What I Believe (pt. 2)

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[ If you missed part 1, you can go back and read it here! ]

It’s not like I had never questioned parts of my faith before – my faith had evolved slowly over the years, and certain events in my life had definitely made an impact on what I believed. But I had never gotten to the point where faith felt so pointless… and it scared me because I wondered, “is this the moment where I’m going to give up on God?”

I grew up being so afraid of any shred of doubt (because doubt meant that you were a “bad” Christian, and also that maybe you were probably going to hell.) I’m embarrassed to say I was well into my adult years before I realized that “faith” and “doubt” were not opposites. I can’t remember where I heard it, but recently someone told me “faith without any doubt is just knowledge.”

I wish doubt had been talked about more when I was younger. I wish doubt hadn’t been so vilified, but that it had been normalized as an essential part of everyone’s spiritual journey. But growing up, it seemed like everyone at church never questioned anything. “The Bible says it, so I believe it.” Honestly, never questioning what you believe is super unhealthy.

So, to continue my story, it was January of 2023 – we had just given up all hopes of getting pregnant, and I was still reeling from feeling like God had deceived me.

And I was super angry. Also probably depressed, but mostly I just felt livid at God… and kind of at everyone and everything in general.

Why had God ignored my prayers, but seemed to answer everyone else’s? Was my faith too weak? Was I not worthy? Was there some reason why God didn’t want me to have another child? I felt like I was owed an explanation.

Many people I talked to offered pieces of advice (some good, some bad). There were people who told me that God would answer my prayer “in His perfect timing.” One person told me if God had “put the desire for another child in my heart,” then He would surely grant it to me eventually.

I wanted so desperately to believe that “everything happens for a reason,” but honestly I just felt like I couldn’t anymore. For my friends who had suffered miscarriages or stillborn babies, had that happened “for a reason?” Did all the pain and injustice in the world really happen “for a reason?”

Sometimes, I think shit just happens.

And I think that God is just as sad about it as we are. I think God sits with us in our suffering and grief, and deeply cares for each one of us.

But at the time, it just felt like God had forgotten about me.

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Struggling with Faith: How Infertility Permanently Affected What I Believe (pt. 1)

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I had been so focused on writing about and processing my infertility journey, that I realized I haven’t written much about my faith in a while. But my faith was directly impacted by infertility, and that was just one more reason that infertility was so hard. I didn’t expect a faith crisis in the middle of trying to get pregnant for three years – it hadn’t happened to me before, and it was a surprising and scary thing to also be dealing with in addition to the grief of not being able to have another child.

You’ll notice I said infertility permanently affected my faith – it did not completely destroy it. But more on that later…

There’s so much to say, I am not even sure where to start as I want to describe my journey of faith over the last few years… Part of me thinks I should start at the beginning (a “very good place to start” as Julie Andrews might say.)

I will try not to bore you with the details, but I do think some background information on how faith came into my life will be helpful as a comparison for where I am now. (Obviously you, the reader, have the ability to skip over parts you’re not interested in!)

My Faith Background

The first time I went to church, I was only a week old (so my mother tells me). And I’ve pretty much gone to church regularly ever since then. I grew up in a conservative church, a small *Church of Christ that in it’s heyday had about 300 members. I went to church on Sunday mornings, Sunday nights, and also Wednesday nights.

I didn’t realize how conservative my church was, because it was just normal to me. I loved going to church. Most of my friends were from church, most of my social activities revolved around church, and also my personality as a Type-A-rule-follower meant that I kind of thrived in an environment where obeying rules made me feel like a good person.

I got through high school still being a “good Christian.” I never tried drugs or alcohol, I didn’t go to parties because I didn’t want to be faced with “peer pressure” (also I just don’t think I was popular enough to get invited to many parties), and I wasn’t having sex – I did have a long-term boyfriend that I met at church and I assumed we would one day get married, but I was still determined to be a virgin on my wedding day, because that’s what “good Christians” did.

My faith was so black and white back then. It’s changed a lot over the years, and I have had to unlearn some of the damaging things I was either explicitly or implicitly taught in my youth. Despite going through some periods of deconstruction, I never felt that I totally lost my faith or gave up on God. At least until January of 2023 – that was when I experienced a true crisis of faith.

The Faith Crisis Moment

I am not going to rehash my entire experience of infertility – if you are interested, you can go back and read some of my previous posts… To summarize them, we had been trying to have a second child for a year and a half, and it was awful and horrible and I was obsessed and depressed over it, and I finally decided at the end of 2021 that I had had enough. It wasn’t worth it to go through this torture. I needed to move on and try to begin the process of emotional healing.

In January of 2022, I went through our house and found all of the baby items I had saved – toys, clothes, play mats, etc – and I moved them all to the garage because I wanted them gone. I needed closure.

The very next day, the fertility specialist we had been going to called and said our test results had changed, and that now, inexplicably, things looked good. If we wanted to get pregnant, “now was the time to try!”

I was so pissed.

I had a heart-to-heart with God and I told him, “look, don’t mess with me. I was ready to move on from this, but now it seems like we’ve got a sign that we should keep trying. I am going to be so mad at you if we give this another go and it ends up being all for nothing. Please don’t put me through that.”

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5 Years After Postpartum Depression

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It’s 5 years out from the day I went to the emergency room for postpartum depression. 

July 26th will always be a significant date to me for that reason. In years past, it was always a day that filled me with guilt and shame. A day that reminded me of my ultimate failure as a mother. 

The lie that “I’m not a good mother” still tries to creep in every so often, especially today, but I’m getting better at recognizing it for what it is: a lie. 

5 years ago what I needed was to get help. I needed to go to the psych hospital and recover until I could be safe enough to be on my own. I gave up a week of my life with my baby so I could spend the rest of my life being the mother he needed me to be. It was the right decision. 

I’m thankful to my husband for having the courage to make the difficult decision to take me to the ER. It was scary and stressful, and I wasn’t in any state of mind to be at all helpful. I’m thankful for his background in mental health and for his experience with crisis work. I’m thankful he didn’t wait and hope I would get better on my own. 

I’m thankful for the person I’ve become because of this experience. I’m thankful for the opportunity to practice vulnerability with people, to share my story with others, and to make meaning out of suffering. 

I’m grateful for my postpartum depression being a wake up call to my obsession with perfection. I appreciate how this experience humbled me, how it helped me to realize that I’m not in control of everything, and how I learned that doing my best is oftentimes better than doing something perfectly. And everyone’s “best” looks different.

I’m grateful to be in a healthy place emotionally about this experience. I really feel like I hit a turning point last year, 4 years after the event. Honestly, I think it took about 3-4 years to really fully recover mentally from the depression. Healing is such a long process. 

I’ve said before that going through this made me a stronger person, but I am only stronger because I recognize my weaknesses and my shortcomings. And because I accept them. I accept myself.  

I’m grateful to have been writing on Threads of Anxiety for four years now, and look forward to more years in the future. 

Thanks for reading.