Pregnancy Woes and Dying to Self

Dear Reader,
Suffering has been on my mind a lot lately. I have to confess for purely personal reasons right now. I am just shy of 16 weeks pregnant. A very exciting, confusing, and exhausting time. Pregnancy brings out every possible emotion. It's like being on a roller coaster ride every single day. I must confess that the past 2.5 months have been a deep struggle for me. Some of it too personal to share on here, but one of the biggest struggles is that I have been violently ill for about 10 weeks and counting. I have thrown up every single day except for one or two. I am not just talking your routine morning sickness (the biggest joke ever), I am talking full on stomach flu like sickness. I have spent weeks stuck inside of my house because public restrooms make me throw up even more because they are so nasty and because I am afraid of getting sick on some store floor. Every time I go into one it reminds me of my Dad's line on socialize medicine. "You want to see what socialized health care will look like then go into a public restroom." I am a Veteran so I know socialized medicine quite well, but I digress.
The point is that as a recent Confessor told me, "Joy in this life can come with a Cross." Another more recent Confessor, a wonderful godly Franciscan Friar at my soon-to-be graduate school, Franciscan University, told me that I must accept that I may not get better until the baby is born and that I must stop hardening my heart. Powerful words from two godly men. So let's unpack these statements. First, joy does come with a Cross at times. We may not understand why, but God is always working for good. This is hard to remember when we are bent over a toilet or mourning a loss. I try to remember to offer it up in a form of redemptive suffering, but I must admit that at times I just can't even think about it. I am too caught up in physical pain and psychological despair. Frankly, I am too caught up in myself. This is always a big mistake!
Focusing too much on ourselves is a one way ticket on the selfish train where we are the focus 24-7. I don't know about you but I can't stand thinking about myself all of the time. It is boring and self-defeating. Yes, it is hard to focus on others when we are suffering. It is hard to take care of others when we ourselves are very ill. There is nothing that says that I have to be Wonderwoman. However, when I agreed to marry my husband I promised to take care of him even if it means only getting one load of laundry in. Yes, being sick every single day is a burden and it is a Cross, my Cross, but that doesn't mean that I get to live my life focused on myself. It means that I must accept this Cross and make do. Yes, I HAVE TO ACCEPT IT! Just repeating that back to myself. I may be sick every single day until my child is born in July. I pray that isn't the case, but it may happen. Can I change it? No. So I must take the joy with the Cross.
When I was at Bible Study this past week one of the women made an interesting observation about our human desire for God to take away our suffering. She said, "that we should really be praying for God to give us the strength to bear our suffering." That stopped me short. Here I was asking for intercession from St. Gerard, St. Gianna Molla, and Our Lady to ask Our Lord to end my sickness when I should have been asking for help to deal with it. Why? Because we don't know the reason for our suffering and because it may not go away. Should I despair and cry out in anguish, or pray for the Lord's strength in my dark hour? I need to focus on the latter. Worse days than these will come and I need strength now.
Pregnancy is a wonderful gift. Children are such a gift from God. Perhaps God is already teaching me that I do not come first and that I must now "die to self" in becoming a mother, and a wife (which comes first). Something that this fiercely independent woman struggles with every day. A hard lesson that I am learning with my current best friend, the toilet.

Sincerely,
Your Fellow Traveler