Mother’s Day is here again, and it’s feeling a bit more heavy this year than it has the last several years. My emotions have been a little bit all over the place this year.
And to pile it on, while organizing this week I also recently discovered a box I had forgotten about: my IVF box.
It’s a box I haven’t opened since I got pregnant. It’s a box I haven’t thrown away either. Even though it had two sharps containers filled to the brim with used needles and plenty of other packaged needles, expired medicine, alcohol swabs, pills, bandages, etc.
We all have emotional baggage from things we’ve been through, and apparently I had all mine sitting in a box in physical form.
I jumped head first into all the mom things as soon as I had Scarlett that I don’t often get triggered by the infertility pain that’s still there under the surface. But opening that box hit me like a ton of bricks. It all came screaming back to me. The pain. The longing. The disappointment. The schedules. The bruises. The hoping. The hopelessness.
The weight of it felt so heavy I just sat there and bawled. For almost 30 minutes.
And then I looked up into the somewhat sad and confused face of my 3-year-old daughter who’s compassionate blue eyes remind me daily what a miracle it is to have my own DNA staring back at me. I don’t think I’ll ever get over it. Nor do I want to.
Thanks to Daniel Tiger and the “Wish” book, she understands the concept that I actually now hear from her own lips quite often: “it’s hard to wait.” So I explained my tears as best as I could in that moment, and I actually think she somewhat understood.
It’s crazy because as I sat there in my sobbing mess of joy mixed with grief, I realized that the reason that I hadn’t opened the box is because when I got pregnant, I was so ready to close it all up and put it behind me and run straight into motherhood as fast as I could.
Yet, I never threw it away because I still couldn’t quite let it all go.
Our infertility struggle was a hard, hard time of life. So why wouldn’t I just want to throw it all in the trash and say: “Good riddance, you were awful, goodbye?!”
Here’s my guess: I think that sometimes letting go of deep seasons of pain, no matter how far into healing we are, can feel as though we’re erasing the impact that it had on us.
Throwing away that box feels like I’m communicating to the world and even myself that all those years of pain didn’t even happen. That I don’t care about them anymore. Which couldn’t be further from the truth. If that’s the narrative I’m following, then throwing all of that away almost seems wrong.
So instead I just drag around the “baggage.” House to house. Closet to closet. Because I can’t bear to part with it.
And then I heard a different narrative. Impressed on my heart most likely from the Lord himself. One that was actually more true about the situation. This narrative said:
“Karissa, YES, those years were hard. Yes that pain was real. All those shots were very real. The procedures were real. You’ll never forget it. The Lord won’t either–he witnessed every painful second of it with you. Those hard but precious years are preserved deep in the crevices of your expanding heart….they no longer need to be buried in your closet as well. You will forever remember that those years were significant and you don’t need a box of used needles prove it.”
So….I’m getting rid of this box. Not without both sad and joyful tears of course. But I’m trusting what I now believe is true for all of us: letting go won’t erase or minimalize the magnitude of what we went through. It will actually set us free. And it will continue to remind us that while our pain and tragedy has completely shaped who we are today, we are not the sum of what we’ve been through. We are not our tragedy. We are not our trauma. And sometimes the best way to honor what we went through is to let it go and fully embrace what’s in front of us.
Like those pretty blue eyes staring at me.