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Reality and a Dream

Last week was a hard week. I posted on Tuesday that I was going to be excited, and look forward to all the good things coming. Then the next day, the reality set in and it took a couple of days to get my head unstuck again. I became so overwhelmed. During that time, my mom asked again to start a fundraiser for us, and I knew it was in progress. But it was a super hard reality. The situation we’re in has been quite overwhelming at times, but now we were coming to the realization that we may not be able to financially make it all happen. Reid and I both have good jobs, and we have lived a pretty good lifestyle. I started feeling guilty for going on trips and making big purchases for our house… if I had known and we had saved that money instead, maybe we wouldn’t have my mom asking for money on our behalf. It was a crappy feeling. To top that off, I sometimes feel like our situation isn’t that “big of a deal”… it sounds ridiculous, because I know it is a big deal. But someone always has it worse. Which doesn’t make our situation any easier, but there are plenty of people in this world going through hard times. Are we really deserving of people’s hard earned money? 

Within the same day, I went from that line of thinking to having a gigantic pity party for myself. The infertility and pregnancy losses that we’ve dealt with are hard enough… now we add a liver transplant on top of that. There is literally not a single person that I know that is dealing with the same struggles. With the infertility, I found a lot of comfort in being involved in a support group. And as amazing as those couples are, I now feel like I’m an outsider again with a unique set of circumstances that no one quite understands. They’re talking about doing their next IVF cycle, adoption, or starting the surrogacy process. I’m over here talking about freezing my husband’s sperm and hopefully creating some embryos to freeze until after he’s had his transplant. Our fertility process is on hold, and I won’t be showing up to a meeting any time soon sharing pregnancy news. It just all hit me. And I got stuck for a day or two. And then my mom launched the fundraiser. And generous contributions started pouring in.   

Last night I had a dream… when I woke up, it gave me such a sense of relief that I had to email it to myself so I wouldn’t forget and I could share it with you all. In the dream, we were at a support group meeting hosted by one of the infertility bloggers I follow. We expected not to know anyone else there, but then in walk all sorts of family and friends. Most of which were only there to support us. Some were there because they were dealing with issues of their own, and I just cried when I saw them because I had no idea they were going through a hard time and it made me so sad to see them hurt. When I woke up I realized that’s what this process has been like for me. Some days I feel alone, and then I look up and see all of the support pouring in around me. It’s an unreal feeling. And while I know not any one person can completely understand what we’re going through, just knowing that they are trying helps tremendously. I can’t express our gratitude enough for all the support we’ve received, both financially and emotionally. I hope to spend the rest of my life focusing on that extreme gratitude that I feel and doing what I can to help others. The saying “it takes a village” is absolutely true. Thank you for being in our village.


“It’s not what we have in life, but who we have in our life that matters.”
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