After I go through a painful time in my life, I like to reflect upon what I learned from the experience. This helps me to make lemonade out of life's lemons, and it helps me to stop viewing certain times in my life as "bad." As long as I am learning from my experiences, there is value in them, even those that really hurt like my infertility years.

One lesson I got out of my infertility years is the power of endurance. When each milestone rolled around, whether it was a birthday, Christmas, or Mother's Day, I would think to myself that I had to be a mother by this time next year or I would die. However, those milestones rolled around the next year and the year after that without my dying. No matter how great the challenge, I faced it head on until I held my baby in my arms.

It took a lot of endurance to survive all that I put my body through to try to conceive. It took additional endurance to make it through the process of adopting my son. By the time I held my son in my arms, I knew that I had the ability to endure great obstacles and be okay. That was quite a gift after years of disappointment.

I have been through difficulties since becoming a mother, and I rarely questioned whether I could endure them. Because of my infertility years, I knew that I was tough. I knew that I could fight my way through the pain, no matter how long it lasted. Now that I am on the other side of that marathon as well, I face life with confidence because I know that I cannot be broken. If infertility and the adoption process did not break me, then nothing can.

I would never have chosen to learn endurance in this manner. Other than people who actually enjoy running marathons, I do not know many people who choose to make themselves push their way through obstacles that most people would not even try to face. But my desire to be a mother was strong enough to keep me going. There were times that it would have been easier to throw in the towel and accept a childless life, but that was never an option for me. Once I took that option off the table, I never saw another choice other than to keep on pushing through until I was finally a mother.

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Photo Credit: Lynda Bernhardt