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Set backs

I wonder if you ever find yourself trying to workout how you ended up back somewhere that you thought you’d left behind for good? I mean emotional and spiritually as well as physically.

As the result of one life change event I find myself wondering how I’m back here. By back here I mean experiencing deep and painful longer for a baby in my womb and in our lives. I also find myself back to comfort eating and having lost the belief that I am worth the effort.

Losing a very wanted baby back in September at 10 weeks pregnant has left such a huge hole in my heart. That grief has tapped into emotions and experiences that we faced when we spent 3 years and 3 months trying for our first baby. Although we have only briefly (so far) been in this situation we find our selves longing for a baby and I find myself feeling the weight of infertility on my shoulders again – despite the fact that at the moment that is not our situation.

The feelings of helplessness, despair, grief, longing, hopelessness, loneliness, jealousy, overwhelmed and sadness flooded back in with the grief of our lost baby and the hope of his life that went with him.

Losing Toby, who’s name means God is good, has not removed the desire to have a baby, it has amplified it. Just because I can’t have THAT baby does not mean that I do not desire to have A baby. Not that a baby will replace Toby and all those lost dreams and the place he would have had in our family and our hearts because there will always be a hole for him. BUT we chose to have Toby because we felt our family was missing one more member, felt we had love to give another baby and so that feeling remains.

3 years of infertility were accompanied by 3 years of comfort eating and dieting in vicious circles of failure and backward steps. In the years since we had our first and second babies I felt God speak to me about how I was worth the effort that it takes to lose weight. Worth the investment. Worth the time. Worth it. I felt that God showed me that was the problem. I never believed I was worth the constant investment that losing weight would take.

When pondering life with God through fasting I found that God spoke to me and revealed something more.

In experiencing infertility and now in experience grief of a miscarriage I find myself having to ask God to get me through each day, because each day feels like a mountain bigger than I can climb alone, sometimes bigger than I want to climb full stop.

In wanting a baby both during infertility and now I find myself committing to petitioning God to give us the desires of our hearts.

In having children I find myself praying that God will protect them, help them to grow, help me to care for them well and make wise decisions.

In a world a throw away marriage I ask God to protect mine, with some baggage from the past to make this feel harder.

God revealed to me that I feel that as I’m already asking so much of God which all feels so important I don’t want to waste His love and grace on something that is just for me. I don’t want Him to be with me and help me to lose weight if it may mean that one of the other things I’m asking for will fall through the gaps.

And YES I can see how proud that statement is, that I think that I can influence God’s actions in such a way, but it is just the truth of the thought process and to be honest I am at a loss on how I will move forward.

It’s so hard to feel like you’ve gone backwards in emotions. It’s so hard to see the progress but feel those past feelings. Emotions are hard.

I don’t have the answers. I’m full of uncertainty and confusion. But I hope that I can help you somehow to feel normal?!

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Unformed and raw….

 

I keep thinking that I want to write out my emotions. I keep feeling like I want to share. And then I decide I’m too raw, I’m too weak, it’s too fresh and that people don’t want to read or hear feelings from that place. I recognise how those thoughts won’t be well formed or even linear because that entirely how my thoughts are. There’s this overwhelming fog that stops some level of process and function. Not so much that you can’t focus but so much that you don’t feel you always makes sense. Why would I put that down on paper?

But the reality is that maybe I need to do this for me, for our baby, for our family and for those who walk alongside us or others.

Our baby was ‘only’ 10 weeks gestation. We never even got to see that baby. We didn’t know if it was a girl or a boy, although in my head he was totally a boy because it is what I know. But what hits me so hard is how much love my heart has for our little one. I am flooded by this feeling of love I will never get to share with its recipient. Flooded with a sorrow that a part of family will always be missing. Devastated that a part of my heart will always be broken. When the sonographer confirmed our baby was gone a part of my heart shattered and though I am assured and understand that the rawness of that reality will go, the brokenness of that reality will always remain.

At 10 weeks gestation our baby was just a quarter of an ounce heavy and only around 4cm long. Such a tiny speck but the baby had our DNA and all of it’s arms and legs and a heart. At 10 weeks they were our baby as much as when they would have been 10 weeks post natal.

I fight the feeling to lessen the reality of this babies life. I fight the feeling people will think we are ‘over reacting’ in our grief since we had not met them, or seen them or held them. I fight those feelings because this baby was every bit our baby as Zachary and Solomon and every bit a part of our family and my heart.

I grieve the love we never got to give them and the fights they never got to have with their big brothers.

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The heart knowledge 

Have you seen the film frozen? Brace yourself but I haven’t… it’s worse because we own it but haven’t actually watched it! 🤦🏼‍♀️  I do however feeel like I’ve seen it given how many of the songs I know and how much of the storyline I know!

This isn’t a completely random thought it’s linked to the continuance of the topic nagging, maybe I shall call it God nagging?! But I’ll get to that in a second – just thought I should confess my lack of Frozen viewing with you before I continue!

We established I have the head knowledge for a renewing of my mind just not the feeling, the heart knowledge.

It’s something that feels too big for me to find the solution to. In fact I think this is often the point that I get to in the topic when it crops up. Knowing what I need to know but not feeling it and not knowing how to move forward to feel it.

As I ran this afternoon I listened to a talk on love and came back to a statement about really struggle with.

Susie who was speaking said: “The secret to loving people and doing relationships well is being loved my God” She then quoted Tim Keller: “Before love is a behaviour, love is an experience. We have to be captured by that love, shattered by that love and only then can it empower us to love”.

What I struggle with in this statement is that I don’t feel that I know I am loved and worth the effort etc BUT I do feel that I know how to love others. Seriously my brain really struggles because the statement when it comes up time and time again makes me doubt my love for others. Either I am loving wrong or am loving from the wrong place. OR I have felt loved by God at times and that’s enough to enable me to love people well? OR loving people would be easier if I lived loved? You’ll be sensing my confusing on the subject I suspect!!

I don’t know that answer.

I read a Proverbs 31 Ministries devotional this morning that touched on this subject. The writer was communicating on Galations 5:1 and how we are free because of Christ and that we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be burdened by things because of that.

THIS is where the Frozen reference will start to make some sense. As I read the devotional it talked about how we slip into habits of pain or frustration and that even once the pain is gone we continue to feel it. God has taken away the ‘issues’ in life by dying on the cross for us but we often limp around as if we are still holding them. We need to let go of the past and walk without the limp.

I’m pretty sure that my past is what puts up all the road blocks to me living loved and knowing and experiencing just how loved I am. I’m pretty that I need to Let It Go as the song would say because that is what the bible calls me to do.

Nothing complicated or anything!!!!! I just need to let go of things and learn to live loved…..

Just don’t know how to get past a life time of past and move forward without the baggage holding on and holding me down.

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Bottling it

Don’t you wish you could bottle some emotions? I don’t mean bottle them up and ignore them, I can already do that. What I mean is how good would it be to bottle up an emotion to be able to go back to and remind yourself exactly how something feels?

I think it’s so much easier to remember how a negative emotions feels than a positive one. Maybe that’s my personality? Or my outlook on life?

I’ve been pondering how useful it would be to be able to just open a bottle and remember exactly how somethings feels as a top up to willpower.

Willpower is such a fallible thing. You can have huge amounts of it in one moment and then none in seconds. Willpower is a finite thing to be fair. If you use it all up without replenishing it then it fails.

In a moment of achievement you feel like you can achieve anything and everything. Like that positive feeling will carry you through even when it’s tough.

Problem being it doesn’t stay. That positive moment fades and the willpower takes a life battering and all of a sudden you’re striving to just cope let alone win.

For me it’s food. Seems to always be food. I find myself wondering if it’ll always be food that I fight with.

[^^^ that thought just there is what I’m talking about when I talk about losing the high of achievement or the willpower runs low. The negative ‘I-will-always-be-this-way-woe-is-me’ thought.]

I lost 4lb last week after an amazing week of discipline and high willpower. 4lb took me to 11.8lb away from my first proper target minus 5.5 stone. And 4.8lb away from a mini target. In that moment I have the confidence to feel like I could achieve anything. Less than a stone away from a big milestone – I could easily do that in like a week?! (No one said I was being realistic – ha!)

But 6 days later I find myself battling myself with little willpower. All the things I found easy last week are hard this week. I’m hungry, but I know I’m not actually hungry. I’m finding it hard to be disciplined. I’m finding it hard to have a positive mental attitude. And because of that my willpower is battered and so I’m giving in, being dejected. Frustrated once again.

What bugs me is I can reason with myself I can do this. I can reason with myself that I’m worth the effort. That the food won’t help. That I don’t need it. That I was so pleased last week when I did well and achieved. But with that thought in my head I still eat the food…. WHY? Makes me cross with myself and the world around me.

So thats why I want to bottle that emotion of ‘I-can-achieve-anything-ever’ and just pop it open and REALLY feel it. Really remember how well I can do.

What also bugs me is as I think about this topic and as I work through the thought processes I KNOW there is another way of dealing with this all with God’s help. The problem is that I’ve never really worked out how to do this whole God and weight loss thing. I don’t know how to turn to him in the moments of weakness and depleted willpower and say ‘God you gotta help me’.

If I could work out how to do that then maybe that would be a little like bottling up the emotion to tap into but perhaps even better.