Merry Christmas!

Something "jumped off the pages" as I was reading a devotion this morning and struck me in a deep, hurting and confused place. It was this; "I have held back nothing in my provision for you." I just want to write it over and over. I want to say it out loud. It makes my eyes well up and somehow, in this moment it helps make sense of everything I have ever been through or will go through up ahead. 

Simple truth.

I have felt cheated and short changed, but He has given me His all. 

I have felt hollow and deprived, but He has held back nothing. 

Where then is the disconnect between what I often feel, the things I believe I am entitled to, the way I thought things would go and the truth about my life? There is mystery involved, that I am sure of, but what if the miraculous healing didn't come because His provision, His best, was found in the valley? What if the baby isn't here yet because His provision is found in the waiting? His best in the story unfolding right now, in this day. What He holds in His hand is the best gift to open, even if it's not what I've been asking for. That's hard. Life sometimes is. But today I am comforted meditating on the truth that my God isn't heaven watching as I flounder, or dangling my dreams in front of me like a carrot. He's the conducter signaling every hymn and ho, in perfect time, navigating me through the lulls, walking me up the highs and catching me when I fall down low. 

So I can stop wishing things were different in my life, wondering what could have been, or why trials have come my way. Because 'He who did not spare His own son but gave Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things? Rom. 8:32

Merry Christmas!! 

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Processing

The last two days I have experienced such a wide and varying degrees of emotions. At my best I am hopeful and my gaze is strong as I look out on the unseen adventure that awaits us. Another journey, a new road, a different baby. I keep telling the Lord that I really liked the old story, the one that just seeped through my fingertips like sand. I tell him that the road I took was hard and long and that I expected something on the other side of it. My hands are empty Lord, but I will keep holding them out until you fill them. I tell him that I loved the old embryo, The One (reading this post wrecks me), that specific set of chromosomes, the person he was going to be. But we don’t get to choose the things that are out of our control. If we’re being honest with ourselves, it’s all out of our hands, even the things we grip so tightly our knuckles turn white.

My house feels a little emptier somehow and that room we call “the baby room” feels a little bigger. What the heck am I going to fill this place up with so it doesn’t look so…so barren?

I want to fill up my days with meaningful things, but it’s hard for me to find what those are right now. Processing is a process.

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Still Good

Today was supposed to be the day our little embryo, our one, was transferred into our dear friend and gestational carrier. Yesterday we got the call that our embryo did not survive the unthawing process.  We were shocked, speechless, confused, heart-broken. All we could do was cry. We were so expectant, so full of faith for this. Every detail was in place, contracts have been made, we have exhausted our savings and nearly maxed out our credit card. I’ve endured countless pokes, prods, and a major surgery, all for this day, all to become a mother. And instead of rejoicing in a new life, today I grieve. I cry for my husband who desperately wants to be a father, for a dream that seems so out of reach, and for the death of an idea, a picture of the way we believed so unflinchingly life would go. But it didn’t. What do you do when there are no answers to all your questions and God doesn’t come through the way you thought He would? Trying to make sense of the last few years, everything we have gone through is fruitless, I’m learning that. So I have to keep coming back to what I do know. God is still good. I am crushed, but not without hope.

We are still processing this news, and trying to sort out our emotions, which is basically like a full time job. Things can get dark pretty quick up in my brain right now if I don’t keep tabs on it and continually replete my soul with truth.

Where do we go from here? We are essentially back at square one. Jessi is now across the country from me without our embryo, which makes the potential for her carrying for us in the future a very, very complicated, if not impossible scenario, and I would have to begin the egg retrieval process all over again. This is daunting for me, but we have zero peace about giving up here. We will keep fighting for this dream as long as God puts the fight in us. There are so many unknowns in our future, and sometimes this feels impossible, financially & emotionally. BUT GOD. That’s all we have right now, and that’s enough, it’s gotta be.

I know there are so many of you that are so invested in this journey of ours, financially, spiritually, and emotionally, and I cry for you too. I really don’t have words for what your love & support has meant to us.

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Getting close!

Community is everything. I’ve always known that but have learned to appreciate it even more since being void of true community for almost three years in New York City, where people are basically laying on top of each other. It seems almost daily now that I run into at least one person who gives me the gift of their joy and anticipation for our baby. It fuels me and reminds me how sacred and special this journey of ours is. I anticipated feeling excited, but right now it feels like more than that. I somehow feel like I won the lottery. Is that insane? I will always wish that I could have carried this pregnancy, but I know there is something so beautiful and perfect about this life and the way it’s being created.

And now we wait. 8 days from now Jessi (who I’ll introduce to you soon) will be getting the IVF, and a few weeks from then we will know if we have a pregnancy. The thought of it is almost to much to handle, I could explode inside. I day dream of all the special moments, sharing the news with our friends and family, the look on their faces, announcing it to the world…gender reveals and baby showers….sigh…..

The really crazy part is I don’t feel antsy or rushed for any part of this, which is sooo not my vibe normally. I thought I would be consumed with the days and hours in between me and transfer day and then later, the pregnancy test…but I don’t. I feel such a peace and an ease about the timing and flow of what is unraveling. I’m just kicking my feet up now and watching God turn the pages of our story, savoring every word, cause by now, I know how fast things go.

Thank you for being in my life <3

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The Moms Club

To be 29 and childless is no easy feat. Not necessarily because I thought I would have a kid or two by now, although I did, and not because infertility sucks, although it does, but mostly because I don’t know where I fit in a world full of moms. I don’t belong to the “mom’s club.”

These are the prime baby breeding and rearing years. It seems every woman in my age range either has a baby in her belly or one on her hip (or both), and everywhere I go, whether it be the park for a jog, church, or the gym, I end up on the outskirts of a conversation about #momlife, one that I can’t relate to and know nothing about. I mean you can't get a group of women together without them inevitably trailing off into birth stories and breast feeding. I don’t covet there moments, or envy their days. I know motherhood will grace my life at the perfect time, and meanwhile I am soaking up every bit of spontaneity, adventure, and SLEEP that mark my days. Life is good and I’m having fun. But…I don’t fit in, and know one likes not fitting in.

I’m an anomaly. I feel like I’ve transported back to some awkward stage of adolescent development, stumbling to find what table to sit at in the cafeteria. Somewhere to glide in and settle, thrive and feel at ease.

While I am still perusing meaningful relationships and community, I am finding peace in the possibility that maybe I won’t find my niche in this season, my posse, my people. Maybe I’ll grow a little stronger in my identity and get comfortable with being in a different stage of life than most of my friends and women I know, confortable with not fitting in.

Motherhood will undoubtedly open up a whole new realm of friendship possibilities for me. I’ll get invited to stuff I never did before, schedule play dates, and plan outings with friends around feedings and naptime. Maybe I’ll even post a pic of some dishes in the sink and toys scattered around the house with #reallife, or a selfie of me holding my baby silhouetted by a mound of freshly washed clothes and say…”the laundry can wait,” and all the other iconic mom things that seem so weird to me now.  I don’t know…maybe.

To all my mom friends that still make an effort to include me in their world, thank you. For talking to me about other things besides #momlife, and asking me questions about my own, thank you. I am so grateful. 

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Catching Up!

I don’t know that I have ever been so happy to see a season breathe its last breath- so I could finally take one. I blessed the airplane for taking us away and I blessed the sky for supporting its wings, and I just about kissed the ground beneath my feet as we stepped into the terminal of the Sacramento airport, with cat in tow.

I was exhausted and I wanted to brush my teeth and the recycled cabin air had parched my skin but I smiled ear to ear as we walked along side the other travelers to retrieve our luggage squealing “we're home! We’re home!”

At that time I didn’t know if California was our home or just the place that housed our dearest loves and oldest memories, but I knew where home was no longer; Staten Island, New York, and that was enough for me.

The air smelled of new and we were buzzing.

These last two months here in my hometown have been SO good. My skin has been drunk off UV rays, my heart full of love, and a peace NYC did not afford me has settled over my soul. There have been bumps, days of missing my husband who is off training in S. Carolina, an unexpectedly emotional Mother’s Day, and family tension that thousands of miles and selective hearing has guarded me from these last few years, but I’m enamored with this place of my youth. I am settling into the comfort and familiarity here, the streets flooded with memories, and the ease that comes with life in a small town.

Getting the call that the Coast Guard was sending us to San Francisco confirmed what I already knew in my heart, we were moving home. Ryan and I chatted for as long as the time difference between us afforded, about all the things we wanted to do and see. We could have a backyard, get a dog, go to family BBQ’s, take day trips to Santa Cruz and spend weekends in Yosemite. We could plant some roots.

The last few months we spent in New York, our lives were submerged in fertility related matters. I did nothing else. Surgery and pokes a prods, hormones, and well-worn paths to and from the fertility clinic. We were swimming upstream hard and fast being pushed by a promise, great love, and a primal instinct to reproduce. And when I wasn’t going I was thinking. Because I am not a visionary, thinking about our baby and connecting what I was going through emotionally and physically to an actual human being known only to God, was difficult for me. But I had to try. Otherwise I would lose sight of why I was voluntarily subjecting myself to so much pain, and it just felt like pain, not a sacrifice. I would have moments of bitterness thinking of the people who, out of ignorance, have said to me, well at least you don’t have to go through pregnancy, as if because I didn’t bear a rounded tummy under my shirt or endure the sting of labor that I was made exempt from the pangs of bringing a child fourth. My body and heart have endured much and I would choose a pregnancy over what I had experienced any day of the week, but I didn’t get to choose. Not that. I do get to choose to constantly keep my eye on the prize, a baby to mother and sweet redemption. To respond with grace to those who speak out of turn, and to remain faithful and expectant as we wait.

A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world- John 16:21

My anguish has an expiration date, our child’s birthday.

In California it’s different. No doctor’s appointments or fertility injections, no scheduling visits with lawyers or muddling with state surrogacy laws. Here my mind is busied with work and school and lunch plans, and I just get to be me for a while, not in pursuit of anything, just content and present, and its been really nice. The scar across my pelvis reminds me that it was real, that it all actually happened in that far away land, and that in a lab, what feels like a million miles away, our future baby rests.

For all of you that have checked in these last few months inquiring about where we are in this journey, thank you for thinking of us :) I have been silent on this space for a while, partly because there is not much new to report and mostly because I’ve been busy swimming :) The timeline on when our gestational carrier will get the IVF (which is our next and most exciting step so far) is still a little fuzzy, and I don’t want to speak prematurely about this, so let’s just say things will be getting real around here kinda soon :)

Thanks for catching up with us. Please don’t stop praying for our baby's birthday!

xx Christina 

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The ONE

It has taken me way too long to update here. I like to write while emotions are fresh and raw in an effort capture the memory in its purest form…in case I want to visit it again someday, but I’ve been in a writers slump. I‘m feeling a bit stale now and not particularly inspired to divulge, but maintaining this space is so important to me. And the Beethoven playing through my ear buds is helping a little.

Where to begin…

On March 27^th, after 2 weeks of daily injections through my bruised abdomen, several monitoring appointments, and a few hormone induced meltdowns, I had my egg retrieval procedure. Day’s prior, a vaginal ultrasound and a good look at my ovaries revealed I was not responding to the medication as we had all hoped. There were 3 follicles, only one of which looked big enough to harvest at the time. Ryan had to work, so I braved that appointment alone, and when my less that optimistic doctor and nurse left the room so I could get dressed. I wept. I knew that about 70% of eggs retrieved would actually fertilize and from there, only 50% of fertilized eggs would survive to the blastocyst stage-which is the stage of development necessary for proper implantation. I’m no mathematician…but when I held up those statistics to the ONE egg I was carrying, it was clear, the odds were against us.

I pulled myself together and walked out into the icy air, and as I approached my car I heard three words in my spirit, loud and clear: Against all odds…

That is all I heard, but that was all I needed. I knew then that we would have a child.

When I surveyed my life and the events that had brought me to this place- the parking lot where I stood, how I had fought tooth and nail to get there with the deep deep conviction that we were meant to bring fourth a child, I knew that it was not by chance that I was standing there, in God knows where New Jersey, bearing the burden of the news I had just received. I knew that against all odds, Gods promises would be made true. A child would be born from this ONE.

Throughout that week, there were moments where my confidence faded, and in those times I grieved at a depth that was unknown to me. It was so intense it scared me. I didn’t allow myself to fully give into it because I wasn’t sure I could find my way back…so in the safety of my husbands arms I travailed for an allotted time, then did my best to gather up the pieces of myself that had fallen apart.


Friends spoke words that I clung to that week and that brought me great comfort. One of my dearest said " We don't serve a God of excess or a God of want, He gives us EXACTLY what we need." If ONE is all we get, I have to believe one is all we need-no room for error or mistake, nothing to fall back on-just faith in a perfect plan.

The night before the retrieval I got the sweetest vision. I saw both myself and a friend who would be going through a similar procedure the same day in our hospital beds, but the room we were in looked like a tabernacle, a Holy place.  It felt like something was being consecrated, and there was such a feeling of reverence in the room-like something sacred was taking place.

I woke up a few hours before my appointment riddled with anxiety, I paced around the house praying and listening to the song that had carried me though that week over and over. My anxiety was so bad it was putting my stomach in painful knots that could have doubled me over if I had let it. I realized then the overwhelming amount pressure I had put on myself to succeed at this- at making embryos. I can’t get pregnant so this was my job; this was the part I was supposed to be great at. But I wasn’t, not according to the statistics. I felt like if this failed, I failed, and that I would disappoint everyone. My friends, family, my HUSBAND. Oh my sweet husband… the thought of it crucified me. The reality is, it wasn’t true. No one was putting pressure on me, especially not him, but the pounding in my chest was real and I made an intension to release myself from the silly expectation to “succeed” at something I had no control over.

The moment I woke up from the procedure I looked around. The room looked nothing like a tabernacle and it didn't feel like anything sacred had just taken place. I summonsed my nurse and anxiously asked, “How did it go??” She touched my knee and said, “we only got one egg…but it only takes ONE.”

The waiting was gruesome. We would get our first call the next day to find out if the egg fertilized, the first big hurdle, and then a second call 5 days later to find out if the embryo survived to blastocyst stage.

Call one: "Your egg has been fertilized."

Call two: "Your embryo looks good and has made it to blastocyst!"

The odds were against us…

 but we made it here, the three of us. 


We have high hopes for you little embryo. 

The song of my season

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