When life doesn't go as planned

I've been putting off sharing this for a long time, because I wasn't ready to talk about it. Maybe I wasn't ready to acknowledge it. I've been in a rough spot for a long time, and it's been difficult to process through my emotions. I finally feel like I'm in a place where I can and want to talk about it, so here goes.

Michael and I have been trying to start a family for over a year, and it hasn't happened for us yet.

I never, ever thought we'd be here. When we didn't get pregnant in the first couple months, after doing some research online the statistics brought reassurance and I was sure we'd be pregnant within six months of trying. Six months came and went, and so did seven, eight, nine... and before I knew it, I was looking back at one whole year of trying and failing to get pregnant.

It was time to acknowledge the scary word that describes what we were possibly dealing with: infertility.

We started going to a fertility specialist in February, after my normal doctor referred us there. We've done testing and so far our diagnosis is unexplained infertility. There have not been any devastating discoveries, which I am so thankful for, but there is not really any problem to solve either. We're just kind of stuck, trying to figure out what the next steps are without jumping into majorly expensive treatments until we know more. Even though this process is moving fast and it hasn't been a whole lot of time since we've started testing, it still seems like it's taking forever.

I will be honest - the past year has been the hardest of my life. I have wanted to be a mom for a long time, before Michael was ready even, and I had no idea that once we started trying this would be the road we would go down. I've read others describe this same phenomenon in their struggle with infertility, but it's truly one of those things that you never think will happen to you. I'm not saying all of this to gather up guests for a pity party, or to say that what we're going through is worse than the struggles of others. Lord knows there are many more terrible things that we could be going through, and I am so grateful for our health and the way God takes care of us. But it does feel like a loss of sorts, even though it's not finite. There is still that possibility that it will happen for us, and it probably will eventually, I just don't know when that is and that's the hardest part.

So that's where we are. Hoping, praying, waiting for some answers... hoping, praying, waiting for our family to grow.