Holding Your Plans Loosely: When Fertility and Charting don't go as Planned

Daria wrote a beautiful reflection on what it means to surrender to the Lord, particularly in the time of facing secondary infertility. I’d like to focus on what it means to hold your plans loosely in a broader sense, especially since so many of us face this on a regular basis.

We all have plans. Plans for what the day looks like, perhaps plans for dinner, or at least that you definitely NEED a cup of coffee, even if that means drinking it cold (my husband disagrees, but as long as I have caffeine that’s fine by me).

So what does that have to do with your fertility and charting? Well, I think if we’re all honest, we have plane, or at least expectations for what our fertility and charts look like. Perfect window of fertility, infertility, or maybe you have abnormalities that you’ve come to expect but another one comes you feel like you just can’t (my sympathy to you whatever this looks like. Sometimes NFP and charting just isn’t fun at times). When those plans or expectations aren’t met, we’re left sad, worried, upset, or otherwise.

I want to start by saying that your desires are good. The desire to have infertility healed, to not experience hardships with avoiding a pregnancy, to have a chart that completely checks out. That is all good and wonderful. I’d be concerned if you wanted complications. Unfortunately, as you’ve probably experienced, like my husband’s sadness at cold coffee (obviously to a much greater extent) that plans don’t go exactly as we’d like. Infertility takes longer than you’d hope for. You have to have more labwork and imaging tested that you aren’t sure whether insurance will cover or not.  Your chart this cycle has some abnormal bleeding (here’s to another count of three), or whatever the case may be just isn’t working the way we planned on.

It’s good to recognize that when certain plans don’t go as expected, often the end goal stays the same. In the case of infertility, the goal is still to heal whatever the condition prohibiting children is and to actually have children, even if the way there feels like a long winding path. For avoiding a pregnancy, it’s learning the ins and outs of charting to successfully to avoid, even when it means abstaining for extra days (yes, even when it’s difficult).

Some good things that can come from it: you learn WAY more about your body than you thought you’d ever know, you learn how to connect with your spouse in ways that deepen your love and friendship through abstaining, and in case you’re a single lady learning to chart like I was: the tools you’ll learn and depths of your body you will hopefully unveil will serve you well and hopefully make you feel compassion towards yourself, and empower you with the knowledge that you know. Even if your best laid plans feel like they are ruined, remember the end that is in sight, and even if takes some navigating to get there, there is good in the struggle (even when it doesn’t feel like it) and at the other end is good to be found.

Some things that may help in your struggle. If you have a death grip of control (overemphasis here perhaps) and anything that diverges from your thoughts and plans is hard to let go of, this process will be more difficult (speaking from experience here). Sometimes this comes from a feeling of not feeling safe without control, other times it might stem from a need to do something so that you aren’t left disappointed. Explore the reasoning with curiosity. It’s important to realize too: if when we try to control, we are merely giving ourselves an illusion, and actually having real control over a particular situation isn’t reality anyway. RIP.

If you're in the thick of the struggle and have forgotten the end goal, it's important to look up and remember why you're doing what you are in the first place. Avoiding to let your body heal, take care of the children you already have, etc. Going to an endless amount of appointments and disappointing pregnancy tests to hopeefully heal and have a child some day. Going to lots of appointments, follow ups, and the rest to figure out what is going on with your chart to heal any abnormalitlies. It can be a struggle at times, or a long time. But it is worth it. Hold your plans loosely and rememeber that even in the most difficult places: you are seen, loved, and known by the God who created you. Reach out to your FertilityCare Practitioner today to help!