Hello Dear Readers!
Shout out to my little brother - his birthday is St. Patrick’s Day and he will officially be joining the 35 and over club! Woo Hoo!! I used to loathe the color green, except for the month of March, when I would pull out my 1-2 green items just to celebrate my brother. Now, I adore greens - so much so that in my Indy home I painted my kitchen cabinets a beautiful olive green - which my husband hated - but to this day I still love them.
I feel like what I have chosen to share has been from so many different pieces of my life - but I guess that is how it goes - my life is a beautiful complex mess of all the things and I go with my gut on what to share from month to month. The common theme is always mending parts of myself. This month is all about dreaming. Having a dream can be an exciting and anxiety inducing experience wrapped into one. I was blessed with a wonderful imagination growing up and although I still feel connected to that part of myself, getting older does steal a lot of that magic away.
I could day dream for an entire day when I was little - I was Anne of Green Gables, the only girl baseball player in The Sandlot (no there wasn’t one, I improvised), Kat in Casper, and a myriad of other characters from my favorite books and movies. I am proud of my imagination and although I do not dream about the same things, I do still dream. I get excited about new and infinite possibilities and bringing my imagination to life. There was a time though only a few years ago that I stopped dreaming. I was so stuck and I did not even realize it.
Fertility Fears
From the end of 2018 through to the end of 2020, my husband was tackling most of the fertility steps, it was discovered that his counts were aggressively low sadly labeling him infertile. He tackled surgeries, medications, lifestyle and dietary changes without complaint. I am so grateful for all of the steps he took to give us a chance at a family. Sadly, even after everything, it did not help our chances of getting pregnant, so we moved on to the next phase - IUI’s.
I was extremely nervous because it meant a lot of appointments, procedures, medications, and shots for me. Lots of messing with my hormones and cycle, which I was not thrilled about, but seriously who is. Most of my nervousness was due to being a medical weenie, I have been very lucky to have had little to no medical interventions in my life, so I felt very ill-equipped for the fast paced and intense world of fertility.
We picked a fertility specialist for me and off we went, straight into IUI’s. Within 4 months I had completed 3 IUI cycles, and all resulted in negative pregnancy tests. That is something no one tells you, how truly devastating pregnancy tests are. I am glad we have them but that wait is brutal, and for us, the aftermath was grief stricken. Going into this process the only thing I begged God for was to prevent me from having to go through the full IVF process. Our specialist mentioned at the beginning of treatment he only allows 4 IUI’s before moving on to IVF, so once our 4th IUI failed, I was inconsolable. I remember sitting in his office preparing my fragile heart to hear the worst news I could imagine at that time.
Well, he actually gave us the option for 2 more rounds of IUI, which we decided to do after I took a month off to allow myself to process everything that was happening and rest a while. I was so exhausted, bereaved, and terrified for the next two IUI’s. This decision point in April of 2021, led straight into a weekend long Brainspotting training. The speciality topic I had signed up for was Expansion Brainspotting.
Expansion Brainspotting
For anyone who may have done a little digging into my professional life, I am a Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) and a Certified Brainspotting Practitioner1. I have used this tool to support my clients and my own healing expeditions since 2018. It is one of the main reasons I have been blessed to not just make it through the multiple battles in my life, but to have purpose and passion to meet others in these same battles in their lives.
I signed up for Lisa Larsons’ Expansion training - which is essentially exploring infinite possibility, not just healing from what has happened, but building neural pathways to expand into whatever you want to be possible. This three day intensive was in April and with all the fertility processes going on, I felt like it was not the best timing. Mainly, I knew that with training, you do practicums, and that means showing up with your own wounds and processing them. Yipee. (When I tell clients the work I ask them to do in therapy is the hardest work I could ever ask of them, I mean it, and I know because I ask myself to do the exact same work).
I still remember the room I was in, where I was sitting, what I was looking at, and how I was feeling as I headed into that virtual training. As we went into our practicum time with another practitioner over zoom, she asked me what I wanted to be possible…. In that moment, I hit a huge space of resistance. I was stuck. Extremely stuck. Stuck living in this moment without the ability to expand into what I wanted to be possible for my life. I realized in that moment that I was going through the motions of fertility treatments because I desperately wanted a family but I had not allowed myself to move into the possibilities of life as a family. Life with a little one. I stopped dreaming, imagining, and exploring. Which always has been a big part of my life, until this moment. The very thing we were working so hard to accomplish, I would not even allow myself to imagine it happening.
So in this zoom room, with this complete stranger, I shared exactly what I was experiencing, all of it… She was wonderful and we were able to break down the process into one expansive possibility - I wanted to expand into the possibility of going camping with my own little one. That may seem small and inconsequential, but it was the tiny hole that burst open the floodgates for me to process all that was happening at that point in my life. This was the moment where I began to dream about my little one being a real part of our lives. I was honestly surprised by the experience and how little I was afraid. Fear truly is a liar.
That training was exactly what I needed to make it through the next year and a half of treatments and you guessed it - IVF. In the end, I did have to go through IVF to have my little one. I am honestly so grateful that I did expansion training when I did, I needed it. I needed to dare to dream, to step into a possibility that I was not so sure was going to happen, so I could get through the next 18 months. So I could get to that beautiful phone call from the team of nurses celebrating with me that I was pregnant. That dream of camping with my little one sustained me for so long and then I forgot all about it. Mom brain… Until one day, a few months after Cooper was born.
Camping - well…. Glamping
Camping has been a solid part of me and my husbands relationship since we were dating. His college graduation present from me was our first tent - that lasted us 8 years before we upgraded. I guess that is one of the reasons I chose to expand on camping, In processing I realized that it was a safe dream to hold. I knew that even if we could not have children, we would continue to love camping. We would absolutely grieve for the rest of our lives not having children, but we could also love and dream in other ways in our life.
Now, let’s fast forward to the summer of 2023 - after Cooper was born we packed up our travel trailer - ET Tow Home (sneak peek of him above)- and we headed out to the lake. One afternoon, I was washing the dishes and periodically looking out the window when my whole brain and body lit up with pure joy and gratitude. In that moment, I remembered that day in expansion training and the dream I softly tucked away in my brain. I said to myself, “this is exactly what you wanted my dear, and you got it.” I got exactly what I dreamed of, hoped for, and prayed for. I was living the moment I dared to dream…
DARE to DREAM
In that Brainspotting experience, I realized that preventing myself from dreaming about having a little one was not going to stop the grief. It was not going to stop the disappointment, the anger, the guilt, or any other difficult emotion or experience I was going to have. Stopping myself from having infinite possibilities and trusting in God’s decisions, was not going to stop any of those things from happening. The fact was, if IVF failed and we were not able to have a baby; I would be disappointed, angry, bereaved, and a whole host of other things.
That lesson was exactly what I needed and will continue to need throughout my life. Living in fear and not in faith was only standing in my way of a beautiful moment God had planned for me. Thankfully, I did get to experience it and I pray to have more moments as I move forward with more faith and less fear.
What I Cling To
I chose this verse because it is an ultimate truth I cling to. That no matter what happens or does not happen, God is with me and He has plans for me, plans for good. Whether I was going to be blessed with a little one or not, this verse helped me as we prepared for our last chance to have a biological child. Honestly, it really helped me prepare for the transfer to fail and know that God would take care of us.
On My Playlist
He Still Does (Miracles) - Hawk Nelson
Alone - Hollyn, TRU
Move - MercyMe
Reason - Unspoken
What You Want - Tenth Avenue North
Soar - Meredith Andrews
The Broken Beautiful - Ellie Holcomb
Good Life - The Young Escape
Good Good Father - Chris Tomlin
joy. - for KING & COUNTRY
Journal Time
What does "expansion" mean to you?
What is one "expansive possibility" you'd like to explore in your own life right now?
What fears or anxieties have held you back from pursuing your dreams? How can you challenge those fears?
Can you identify a moment when you realized you were living a dream you had once dared to imagine? What was that like for you?
Sometimes, it helps to slow down and be in this moment, what are you grateful for in your life right now?
Until next time dear readers!
~ Jenna
If you want to learn more about Brainspotting - check out this to get started:
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