Guest Post: A Little Love For a Room That I Hate

I was so happy when I got an email from Emily over at House in the Heights asking if she could be a guest blogger on my page.  Emily is battling infertility and while most of her close family and friends know about their struggle, she hasn't really opened up about it publicly. I loved her post and I am sure you all will too!

A Little Love For a Room That I Hate....

Heyyyy!! (Imagine that in a sing-song voice, because that's TOTALLY how I say it). I'm Emily, and I blog over at House in the Heights.  Primarily, I write about home decor, DIY, and things that I find generally fabulous. However, there's one part of my home (and my life) that is decidedly un-fabulous, and that is our spare bedroom aka The Nursery That Wasn't.

Yeah. Underneath all that talk of fulfillment through recipes, my love of pop-culture, and making our home beautiful (and I DO find those things incredibly fulfilling!) lies a girl whose been dying to have a family of her own for years.  More than three years, to be more accurate, and we've tried it all except the big one.  IVF. Coming early 2014. I think.  It's kind of scary to commit to that.  And although I haven't been writing about my infertility throughout the past three-plus years, I've been doing a lot of reading.  Because you are my people that GET IT, and listening to the journeys, celebrating the victories, and mourning the losses of people like many of you who are willing to publicly write about such a private struggle is what really keeps me from feeling so completely alone.  So if sharing this post helps someone else who is feeling lost, then I've made the right decision.

I could write for days about the details of our journey, but I'll just sum it up into a string of words that you, my people, will understand.  Annovulation, miscarriage, PCOS, Clomid, Metformin, Lupron, Follistim, Ovidrel, IUI's, BFN's, chemical pregnancy. And let's not forget failure, grief, envy, depression, and bitterness.  Or hope. Because there's always hope.

So anyway, spending the last three-plus years in perpetual 'I'll be pregnant any day now' mode has resulted in The Nursery That Wasn't.  There's no freaking way I'm putting time, energy or money (Hello?  Do you KNOW what fertility meds and treatments cost when they aren't covered by insurance? I do.) into making that room anything other than a nursery when 'I'll be pregnant any day now'.  So instead, we did nothing to that room.  No paint, no purchasing furniture or accessories, nothing. I've basically punished it for not being a nursery by refusing to allow it to be anything else. We just put all our mismatched stuff in there and allowed it to function as my husbands closet, since I dominate the master bedroom closet space. With the exception of vacuuming and dusting, I can literally not go into that room for weeks at a time.  I hate it in there.

Terrible picture, but would YOU want to spend time in here?!

But lately, I've been thinking about starting to move this room closer to the nursery it someday hopes to become.  I even painted the walls a pale gray, and did a striped accent wall (if you want details on that, its coming soon at House in the Heights...stay tuned!)  I have an old desk that I'm planning to re-purpose into a changing table.  I'm learning to accept that I may not be able control if and when I get pregnant, but I can control what this room looks like.  I can control the fact that when our baby arrives, whenever and however that may be, it will have a stylish place in our home.  And right now, not feeling so out of control feels good.

Besides....maybe if I build it, they will come??