Bitterness of Soul

"In bitterness of soul, Hannah wept much and prayed to the Lord." 1 Samuel 1:10

"As month after month, then year after year, passed without the blessing of a living child in our home, my soul learned the foul taste of bitterness.  My angry, festering heart ached constantly.  That Hannah "wept much" seems to be a terribly inadequate description for the torrent of tears that accompanied me through years of longing and loss." - Jennifer Saake, Hannah's Hope

     Unfortunately bitterness is an emotion that always parallels infertility trials.  Months and years of trying to conceive accompanied by the emotional roller coaster of hopes rising only to be crushed.  Procedures get more expensive, more invasive, more painful.  For others, adoption failures also gather in emotional and financial expense.  Yet all around us, there are reminders of what we don't have.  Families and motherhood are such a normal, inescapable part of life, you don't realize the constant burn of these daily reminders until you've dealt with infertility. The worst is that I long to be normal.  To celebrate pregnancies and births with people I care about.  But their joy only deepens my pain. It then further causes me to distance myself from those that I need the most.

     Then you can add the normal events of life to the feeling of "why me?"  I fight the daily bitter anger toward people I feel don't deserve the blessing of motherhood.  The relative who is unmarried and a drug addict.  The teenager that doesn't want an inconvienince, so she aborts her child.  These seemingly unfair situations cause pain so deep I've cried out resentfully to God in my anger.

     How do I deal with this bitterness?  I need to turn it over to God.  And I am trying, but it is a daily struggle.  I've been thinking of the blessings I've been given, and trying to see lives from others' shoes.  The women who don't have the love of someone like Randy, that don't know Christ - maybe God is using children to bring them to Him.  Maybe the child will be the blessing that turns their lives around.  We all have these feelings of anger sometimes.  I just feel I need help in trying to overcome it.  I need the help of you - my friends and family who care about me and are reading this blog.  I don't want this pain to rule my life.  I don't think it will heal completely anytime soon, but with God's help - and the help of you - I want to learn to manage it.  I think this pain will always be part of me, but it's not going to define me.