Four Years of Marriage with an Infertility Curveball

Four years of marriage with an infertility curveball. Last week my husband and I celebrated our fourth anniversary.  When we got married, we had no idea that the curveball of infertility was coming our way. Life doesn’t look quite like we pictured it would back then, but life is good. We have each other and feel blessed to be facing this challenge together with faith that one day we’ll overcome it and our family will grow. I’m so grateful to have Shawn by my side through thick and thin, forever and ever!

Even though we wouldn’t have chosen to still be childless at this point in our marriage, we have accomplished some good things that are worth celebrating, and I think it’s important for us to remember those things. So, during the last four years:

• Both of us graduated with bachelor’s degrees from college.
• We became debt-free for a couple years (with my husband in graduate school now, we’re not completely debt free anymore but we stay out of debt as much as we can and hope to get back to being debt free soon after he graduates).
• We both worked in our fields of education for a few years after graduating and learned a lot from having that work experience.
• We’ve taken several opportunities to serve and teach in our church congregation, with teens, children, and adults.
• We’ve gone on some fun trips together, nowhere too exotic yet, but we enjoy traveling and exploring new places together and hope to travel & see more of the world together in the future.
• We’ve gotten to know each other’s strengths and weaknesses much better, and have learned to love, support, and communicate better than we did at the beginning of our marriage and are continually working to grow closer together, especially through our struggle with infertility.

Good and bad, easy and hard, pleasure and pain, sweet and bitter, play and work, happiness and heartache, we will continue to face it all together because we choose each other first, forever. My favorite quote about love says: “Love is a possibility that becomes a choice. A choice you keep making, over and over.  Day after day.  Year after year.  Time after time.” I sure feel lucky that this guy chose me!

P.S. That quote comes from one of my favorite books, “Golden” by Cameron Dokey (affiliate link).  It’s a short & sweet retelling of the Rapunzel fairytale but the lessons it teaches about love are exquisitely beautiful!  You should read it!