Hello old friend...

Infertility has been kicking me around again and this time I am having a hard time pulling out of it. I'm spent a few days trying for find some encouragement. This what I have found so far.

Patricia Irwin Johnson: "As with any wound, it heals with a scar which can be reopened at an unexpected time. Infertility's scars remain on the soul long after the wounds have healed.

Silber & Dorner: “Infertility is grief experience, although traditionally it has not been viewed as such. Infertility is a loss–it is a loss of the imaginary child (the child the couple imagines would have been born to them). They will go through all the normal stages of grieving for this loss, just as if they had lost a child through death. However, society does not relate to or understand the loss of infertility because it is invisible.”

Barbara Eck Manning: "My infertility resides in my heart as an old friend. I do not hear from it for weeks at a time, and then, a moment, a thought, a baby announcement or some such thing, and I will feel the tug - maybe even be sad or shed a few tears. And I think, 'There's my old friend.' It will always be a part of me."Al Berk & J. Shapiro:“Grief is...a natural reaction to the feelings of helplessness when a couple realizes that pregnancy will never occur. This grief over the loss of life’s goals–the pregnancy experience and having children–is particularly difficult because our society does not recognize such a loss with rituals or other processes that could allow the couple to work through the time of grief.”

One friend sent me a great quote by Sister Julie Beck, "I know of many couples who desire to have children and aren’t given that blessing. Their challenge is the challenge of not having children, and we need to be listening and supportive and encouraging toward them. And I also believe that the desire to have children in the single sisters and in these couples probably won’t go away if they’re righteous, because that is a God-given desire. It speaks to their very natures and the training they received in the heavens. So that longing will not go away. But the Lord will bless them."

Elder Oaks even goes on to add, "And that longing will weigh in the final judgment. One of the most comforting passages in all of scripture for me is in the 137th section of the Doctrine and Covenants, verse 9, where we’re told that the Lord will judge us according to our works and according to the desires of our hearts."