Thankful for poop on the floor!

I'm a fairly happy person and tend to be very optimistic. When in the depths of our infertility struggle though, I was dark. Life felt dark and lonely and crushing. It felt like a place you may never recover from. Those feelings can be brought back up for me, and while some might think it a curse and something to move on from, I find it to be a blessing. It's impossible not to empathize with someone in pain when you can feel those feelings. My prayer in my losses was and is always for God to bring good from it, for me to find the Beauty through the Suffering.

This morning I cleaned poop off the floor that did not, in fact, come from my dogs, yep, that means a tiny little human took off his diaper and pooped in the corner (we won't even discuss what this means for his refusal to wear big boy underwear lately). While doing this I thought about the years I cried on my bathroom floor begging for the things that made other people insane. I thought about a friend who is experiencing her third loss and my heart hurt for her deeper than words can say.

I'm certainly not this enlightened always, but this morning as I scrubbed up poop, I thanked God for giving me a crazy, wild, stubborn, hilarious, and devastatingly cute boy to poop on the floor! That ache that can devour you when you're in the trenches of dreaming for a child returned briefly to remind me how very blessed I am to live this life, to be mommy to these two amazing kiddos! I also now understand that crazy making that kids bring with them, and some days it wins, but overall my gratitude is much much much greater!

Please know if you're drowning in the sorrow of infertility that God can and will make something beautiful from it in time. Also know that your feelings are valid, normal, and real, no matter how ugly, how dark, how sad, or how terrible they seem! Feel them, live them, and find someone you can share them with that won't judge or try to fix it. (If you don't have anyone...contact me, I'll be happy to support you!)

"Pain has a way of clipping our wings and keeping us from being able to fly, and if left unresolved you can almost forget that you were ever created to fly in the first place." Wm. Paul Young