What is Meant to Be

I go through life hoping, dreaming, and wishing for the future.  I make plans.  I paint pictures in my head of what I want my life to be.  I make decisions and take actions with the promise of bringing my pictures into reality.  But the pictures are just rough sketches - notions of a life.  I hope and (naively) think that the pictures will someday be true.  That everything will work out just the way I envision.

I never painted a picture of a life with a chronic illness.  In the fall of 2006 when my diabetes began to manifest and I was blind to the symptoms I had a picture in my head of starting a family with my husband.  Today I don't have that picture, I have diabetes. For a long time I wondered how I got this disease and questioned why me.  What complex interplay of biology and environment triggered the attack on my pancreas and landed me here?

Was it simply meant to be?

Over these five years I have accepted this disease as part of me and something I cannot change but can learn to live with.  Diabetes is a given, a fact of my life.  But I'm left wondering what else is or isn't meant to be in my life?

I still have a picture in my head of having children of my own.  I've been meticulous in managing my diabetes for that possibility but biology has not pitched in to make my pictures a reality.  Having spent the past year coaxing my body into doing what it is supposed to do naturally via artificial means - the poking and prodding of advanced reproductive technologies, the hyper-stimulation, retrieval, culturing, and transfer of embryos - I'm left with empty promises and disappointment.  As I slip further into so-called advanced maternal age I wonder why not me? 

Is it simply not meant to be?