The Bad Place

Have you seen the show The Good Place? It's one of my favorites.

A group of people die and are told they're in paradise... only to find out they were being subtly tortured the whole time and they're actually in "the bad place."

That's how I feel sometimes. People talk about enjoying life and counting your blessings, but I feel like life just sucks and if you think it doesn't it's just because your "torture"/trials haven't happened yet.

Honestly, I can't really imagine a better, more personally-tailored way to torture me than what happened.

I have loved kids since I was a kid. I was reading some of my childhood diary entries recently and I was obsessed with my cute baby cousins and cute babies at church. I loved babysitting as soon as I was old enough to do it, and eventually decided to study teaching because I love kids.

Even though I got my teaching degree, I never planned on using it. I always, since I was a child, wanted to be a stay at home mom. It's the only thing I've ever wanted to do.

And then what happens?

I got married a little later then I planned to, which was fine.

We started trying to have kids and it didn't happen right away, which wasn't ideal but was fine at first.

Years passed, and it got harder and harder. We found out we needed to do IVF, which was very hard to accept but after waiting so long I was happy to have any hope, and I was able to accept it. I could get through it, it was fine.

We did IVF and I got pregnant. I had a miscarriage within a week. It was devastating, but it was fine because we could do IVF again soon.

We did IVF again and I got pregnant. I was nauseous all the time well past the first trimester, but it was fine... I didn't care that I was sick as long as our baby was fine.

We had our 20 week ultrasound and everything looked perfect. I let myself fully believe that I was having a baby for the first time. I started baby shopping and it was so fun. We thought about names all the time. I was researching baby and parenting stuff all the time. We had a fun little gender reveal party. It was bliss after 4 years of waiting.

The bliss only lasted for one week, and it was not fine.

My water broke and my baby died and it was not fine.

He would have had a (small) chance at surviving if it had happened just DAYS later, which was not fine.

I had to give birth to a dead baby, hold his lifeless body and watch my husband talk to his son for the first and last time, and I'm not fine with that.

I had to be involved in planning a baby funeral, which was not fine.

A month later we got to go on a trip and I was feeling the first grain of hope that life wouldn't always be terrible for the first time... and I find out at that moment, when I finally feel a tiny bit happy again, that another one of my cousins who is close to a decade younger than me is pregnant (with twins, no less) after a short time of infertility.

What better way to torture me? I really felt in that moment not only that God doesn't care about me, but that he must hate me.

I have cried every single day since my baby died. I still cry when I see pregnant women in public. I'm still too sad to choose the tombstone. It's hard to get out of bed, everything seems pointless. I'm worried that even if I have children, I can never be happy because I'll never have my whole family together in this life. I'm not fine.