When Hope Grows Up: Part 1 

Hope With a Catch

Of course I don’t believe hope needs to die but good God do I wish people would take their rainbows and fairy dust hope and stop shoving it down our throats.

Sometimes it is hard, the struggle is real and the dark, fucking dark.

Hope is flung around as a weapon, a badge and a reprieve, especially in the infertility, pregnancy loss and recovery worlds. It is a word used to inspire others but oftentimes comes with a significant catch. The catch is that it oftentimes only comes attached to the stories that worked out, got the ending we all want or are considered successful.

When hope is the message of these happy ending stories it can feel like a weapon being discharged on our soul for those of us who it did not work out for. The ones who have defined our own happy ending but the ending that many do not be consider the happy one.

So are we shit out of hope?

Or only invisible?

You know my story by now: tried to be a mom, paid a lot of money to be a mom, it did not work and we live a childfree not by choice life.

It is sad. It makes you sad and makes you really want to take away my pain by offering a not so simple solution, such as “why don’t you just adopt?”

Stories like mine do not go viral, they do not get shared and sometimes hardly acknowledged by our society.

Because we don’t think there is hope in not getting what we dreamed of; and we only want to read, hear and feel the stories full of happy hope.

And yet, every single day there is hope in my life; hope in many different things and people and it was only found in letting my old definition of hope die.

When hope grows up we refuse to be invisible.

~~~

Tomorrow we’ll talk active acceptance versus never giving up.

“I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.” ~ T.S. Eliot