Winding down after a pretty nice weekend. Mikey and I started a little “get our lazy butts off the couch” program of walking after breakfast on Saturday. We did a mile and a half on Saturday and another 3/4ths of a mile on Sunday (we ran short on time and had to get on the train). We also went to church, went to visit my dad (and finally saw this movie) and today braved the tourists to see this exhibit and this movie.

The exhibit was amazing. And it inadvertenly had the added bonus of changing our meal plans to vegetarian because the details of some of the exhibits reminded us of several cuts of meat. It was all facinating until we reached a doorway with a warning sign. It was a room where they were going to show fetal development and common birth defects. We looked at each other, held hands, each with a question in our eyes. “Can you?” “Yes, you?” “Yes.”

We began at the beginning, 5 weeks, looking at the tiny blob and knowing that we never got to that point. We saw the birth defects and sighed. I saw the 32 week old fetus and immediately thought of the Manly Nephew, born at that time and how skinny and small he was. But the exhibit that affected me the most was the one that made me think of my IVP sisters who had to suffer this cruelty: they had an exhibit of an ectopic pregnancy.

As we walked away and I reflected, I thought  about the shift in my thinking and feeling. I always felt that in my connection with the infertility world there was always the delicate balance between self-centeredness and empathy. We reach out to each other because we know each other’s pain, we know that thoughts we can’t tell the outside world, we have no secrets. Intermixed with these connections are the emotions that come from the circumstances that separate us: those who have achieve pregnancy and those who do not, those who suffer loss and death from those who do not, those who have the resources and those that don’t and on and on. I have always marveled that in this community we can reach out to others to cheer or to weep with them and then we can be wrapped up in our pain and the shittiness of our particular circumstances. Its not an easy balance and more times than I care to admit I have leaned towards self-centeredness.

Today, while I stared at the two exhibits I found my heart and my thoughts turn less inwards and more on my IVP sisters. I prayed that none of you in the TTC world have to experience this loss. And I felt freed. And for that I am truly grateful.