abc family

Wild Patience

A few months ago, a well-meaning but boneheaded person who is thankfully no longer part of my daily life sat me down for a chat.  “Arwen,” he said, “do you trust God?”

“Uh, um,” I stuttered, because of course I do trust God, a lot of the time, and I know how important it is to trust Him, but can I truthfully say “I trust Him” without the reservation that I don't do it perfectly?  I can't.

My reply was cut off; this person wasn't really interested in my answer.  He just wanted to tell me how important it is to trust God, and proceeded to do so with a lecture that lasted upward of twenty minutes.  He trusts God, I learned, and it has served him very well to do so. He recounted several instances, all of them financial, when he thought he was going to be in a scrape and then everything turned out fine at the last minute.

Which, great.  I personally have found that God is always faithful, and always provides, although not always in the way I expect him to do it.  So this person's point – that God is good – was well taken. I agree with him. 

Except, it turned out, that was not his point.  His point was rather convoluted, but I finally figured it was something along these lines: I'm suffering because I don't trust God enough.  If I was trusting him properly, I would not be in this pain.

This is a common idea.  Various people, generally with good intentions, have told me this before, many of them through the Internet.  I have always found it very frustrating. From a theological point of view (and it should be considered from a theological point of view because it's a theological idea) it's one of the most bizarre things I've heard.  Bizarre because it's simply not true, and because I would have thought that would be self-evident.

Of all the people who have ever walked the earth, who trusted God the best?  The man Jesus, followed by his mother Mary.  The one who turned his life over to God after the Last Supper, and the one who turned her womb over to God at the Annunciation.  The one who prayed “not my will but thine be done,” and the one who answered “let it be done unto me according to thy word.”

Yet how did this perfect trust keep them from suffering?  It did not.  On that first Good Friday so many years ago he suffered and she suffered with him, more than any human creature before or since.  His suffering is the archetype for all suffering throughout eternity; her suffering is an example of perfect faith.  How can we look at them, and hear “take up your cross and follow me” and still believe that we are meant to trust so that we may not suffer?

I've found that a lot of people think the pain of infertility is self-inflicted.  “Just relax.” “You're worrying too much.”  “If you just stop caring so much, it will happen.”  These are not words of comfort; they are a kind of conceit for which I can find no appropriate description.

As someone who is there, I can attest that the pain of an empty womb is not self-inflicted; it is an objective wrong and I hurt because I know this.  As a woman I know instinctively what my body should do, and my body is not doing that. The grief and bewilderment I feel as a result of this are unlike anything else I've experienced.

The tragedy of a fruitless womb is as old as the wind, as old as man himself.  It's primal.  Recognizing that and weeping over it is natural.  More than that, it is justice. True tragedy demands true grief.  A refusal to grieve on my part would be nothing but an act of flagrant denial, and I am certain it would save me no pain in the end.

But I am not only grief, for just as it would be denial to refuse to grieve, I would be denying the truth if I did not recognize that the One who allows me to carry this burden has dominion over all things.  A virgin conceived by the power of his Spirit; anything is possible.  Hope, even more than grief, is my constant companion.

Bryan and I have been waiting for more than two years.  We'd be eager to go ahead with adoption or treatment, but we realize that we do not have the power to give ourselves a family.  No matter how they come to us, our children will be a gift from God.  Recognizing that, we are committed to discerning his will before we move ahead with anything.  So we pray, constantly. We pray together every night; we pray separately throughout the day. I pray with tears and songs and silent questions; Bryan is at the office so his prayer is probably always silent.  But we pray all the time, and so far we have gotten the same message: wait.  Adoption and licit treatment are good things in themselves, but they are not for us, not right now.

So we are in this place of waiting. It's a somewhat surreal place, a place where hope and grief come like clockwork every month.  It's a place where we learn, often very slowly, the paradox of life on earth: because of the fallenness of our world and the eternal goodness of our creator, sorrow and joy invariably come together, and we do not have the power to take one without the other.

I cannot complain about being here.  I know that the one who brought me here is trustworthy, and most of the time my heart echoes what my mind knows; I am working hard to trust with my heart all of the time.  I'd be lying if I said that just waiting was an easy place to be, but I'm more peaceful than I've been in a long time.  Grief that in the past has bordered threateningly on despair has become clean grief, free of bitterness.  Joy is fuller here as well.

And I have the consolation of not being forced to walk this path alone.  Foolish people like the man at the beginning of this post are few and far between in my life.  I have a husband whose goodness and love I cannot even begin to recount, and I can always find shelter in his arms.  I have a father who constantly encourages me on what he has called my own via Dolorosa, and who wrote to me once, “You are never out of your Heavenly Father's heart; you are rarely out of mine (I have to sleep sometime).”  I have a mother whose support of me is unswerving; I know that she is thinking with love of her “Punkin” even as she reads these words.  I have sisters and brothers who don't always know what to say, but who love me with earnest sincerity through all of it, and who have found innocent hope when I could not find it; perhaps the constancy of their hope was a tool in helping me regain mine.

At the beginning of this year, I committed to holding on to my softness, and I think the venture has gone well.  I believe I am now the softest person in the entire world.  If I continue in this state until our hopes are fulfilled, I feel sure that the joy of that moment will overwhelm me utterly. What an amazing prospect.  How could I hope for anything less?

This wilderness is the hardest place I have ever been, but through it life has become more meaningful than I imagined it could.  Surely my presence here is no accident, and if it is no accident, I am ordained for it, and I would ask for nothing less than the path for which I am ordained.  Through my grief and through my hope, that truth is always with me.

Surfacing

Tuesday morning I pulled myself out of bed and into the shower. Michael had driven to the chapel to cover our adoration slot – 8 to 9 am – and since we had only one car to get us both to work, I had to be ready to go when he got back. I stepped out of the shower and felt the tears coming, pushing themselves up from my chest until I slumped my shoulders and gave in, hugging myself and sinking onto the top of the toilet, not even toweling my hair. The water from it streamed down my back, and normally I hate that, but I was oblivious. This was a storm of tears. These tears would not stop coming no matter how many deep, slow breaths I took. 

Somehow I unearthed jeans and a t-shirt and pulled them on, irrationally determined to be ready to go to work even though there was no way I could go like this. I found my Bible and opened it to the book of Job, to God’s answer to Job’s lament. It helped some, helped fill up a little bit of those empty places inside of me. But the tears kept coming, and when Michael came home I was curled up on the couch, staring out the window and sobbing.

He held me and we prayed together and I fell asleep on that couch, exhausted from the storm. Neither of us went to work that day. When I woke from my nap we went to Noodles and Company for lunch and ate outside, where my sunglasses hid the tears that kept threatening my cheeks from the relative safety of my eyes. The rest of the day blurred by: a movie, grocery shopping with my sister, a game of dominoes. There may have been food in there, although I don’t remember being particularly interested in it. Tears kept coming whenever I let them.

The hardest thing about Tuesday, for me and for my poor husband, was that I couldn’t name exactly what was wrong. Generally when I’m upset, I ponder until I can pinpoint the problem, and then we can do something about it, or discuss it, or pray that we will be able to endure it peacefully. But on Tuesday everything just felt big and heavy and sad – so overwhelming that I was at a loss to find any solution. I could hardly think. 

I’d planned not to work on Wednesday, to take the time for prayer and reflection. It was a surprisingly good day. I went to noon Mass at my alma mater, taking some time in the chapel beforehand, writing in my prayer journal. I felt peace stealing in very slowly, clearing my head, clearing my soul. I could think again, and think I did – while puttering about my house, while playing Text Twist (current high score: 807,080 and that game’s still going). I thought a lot that day, I felt like myself again.

The dealership dropped off our new car on Wednesday. Michael and I had an errand to run, and beforehand we took our new ride to dinner at Arby’s. Over greasy but delicious food I told him what I’d realized that day.

Infertility is something uncontrollable. There are fertility treatments, sure, but those don’t guarantee conception. Nothing guarantees conception. Adoption gives more certainty of having a child at the end of the ordeal, and we can decide to adopt, but there are still many, many factors outside our control. For someone like me, who suffers from perfectionism, not having the ability to control this part of my life is very, very hard. Over the past months I’ve been working so hard to come to peace with this and to trust God. That’s a good thing, but unfortunately I’d also started to treat other parts of my life as if they were like infertility – in a certain sense, outside my control. And in some of those other areas, that’s simply not true.

I haven’t been talking about my job much these past months, partly because it’s boring to talk about, and partly because: do I really need something else to complain about here? But without going into too much detail, I can tell you that it was dragging me down. For countless reasons, in countless ways. I worked hard not to bring my personal life to work, but it had become impossible for me to avoid bringing my work life home, it upset me that much. It was awful. But I had somehow convinced myself that it was absolutely necessary to keep this job (for several reasons, not the least of them being that we were using a large percentage of the money I earned for our adoption fund) and so I felt trapped. 

Now, just four days past that mindset, I can see how nutty I was being. On Wednesday I couldn’t quite see, but I realized something during my reflection that day. I’d been suffering through each week at my job with the hope that in another year or so I’d be able to quit and life would be better, but shouldn’t I work on making life bearable now? Of course! Being childless is hard enough – why let other things that are actually within my control make me more miserable? 

We decided that it would be a good idea for me to quit my job. I was surprised at how relieved I felt after making the decision. I hadn’t realized how much it was dragging me down. I handed in my resignation in a brief but comfortable meeting with my boss. I think he’d been expecting it. It’s a good job, it’s just not the right job for me right now. It doesn’t fit. 

I’ve been feeling a lot better since I became unemployed. I’ve still got reflections about what caused Tuesday’s meltdown, and about depression and about where my life is right now. Reflections are always forthcoming. But for now, I’m tired, so I’m going to bed. I just wanted to let you all know that I’m fine, that I’m feeling better, that life goes on. One foot in front of the other always seems to do the trick, and even though on Tuesday I felt like I could never be relieved of that deep sadness, I found that I could. And I was. Thank heaven for that.

Don't read if you're already feeling sad

Well, the car was going to cost $5400 to fix, and since the Blue Book value is only $1500, that was a no go.  We're getting a new car, actually a used car, but it'll be new to us.  It's a 2001 Alero, midnight blue.  I've always liked the look of the Aleros, so I guess I'm glad to be getting it.

But I'm sad that I totalled my car, and not even primarily because I was attached to it.  No, because paying for the new car is going to set us back several months in our adoption savings.  I think you can probably understand why I cried when I found that out.

I haven't been posting here very much lately.  I loved all your suggestions for things to post about, and I've stored them away in my mind, but I can't find the energy to actually follow through on the writing.  Just living, just getting through the days, is taking all the emotional energy I have right now.

The normal me, introspective to an almost scary degree, would have by now figured out why, exactly, I'm so drained.  I'd be lying if I said I haven't considered possible reasons.  I'm just too tired to pick one, or maybe I can't figure out the one reason because it's actually all the reasons.  At any given time, the thing that is making me cry, the thing that is making me feel like tomorrow will be impossible to survive - that's the reason.

It's been more than two years now since we first started trying to conceive, more than two years of slowly realizing, month by month, that life is harder than we ever expected it to be. 

Michael Card's Maranatha has always been one of my favorite songs, but I've never been able to embrace the sentiment myself.  I've always felt that it would be a tragedy for time to end now, when so many of the joys of my life are clearly still to come.  One moment a few nights ago, I suddenly understood in one blazing flash, and that little word, maranatha, crept its way into my heart, where it has lodged itself firmly.

And of course it occurs to me, as things always do, that perhaps this is part of what I'm meant to learn from this whole experience: that this life is not, and should never be, our final hope.  It's something that I know in theory, but for the first time in my twenty-three years I'm starting to know it with all of me.

That doesn't mean I don't still have hope that these rough, hard days will give way to smoother, richer ones.  If I didn't have that hope, I'm not sure I'd be able to crawl out of bed in the morning.  The energy to dream actively is gone, but underneath those dreams are still there.

And don't get me wrong - I'm grateful to be learning and growing.  Mostly, though, I'm just putting one foot in front of the other, just waiting for this time to be over.  Because this is harder than anything I ever imagined.

Out of a lonely night

Michael’s in DC. Rosie and Anthony came and had dinner with me, but now they’re gone. I’m alone here.

Silence hasn’t always had the power to reduce me to tears. Sometimes it still doesn’t. But tonight’s silence does. Not hard, painful tears, but lonely, aching tears. The kind of tears that come from emptiness.

I was sad last week, too. Several times on the way home from work, I found myself suddenly crying. My job is fine; I enjoy the people I work with and the work I do, but it wears me out emotionally. I tried to figure out why I’m so worn, when in the past I’ve had worse jobs that didn’t make me feel like this. But I realized that it’s not the job that’s making me sad. It’s just that this is never where I expected my life to be right now. We’ve been married almost three years. We could have had two children by now, and we were always open to that. We certainly expected to have at least one.

I always kind of assumed I’d marry young, and when I did, I guess I just assumed that the rest of things would go as I’d planned, too. We stopped using NFP to avoid conception in the summer of 2003, as soon as we had an income. Even though I had two years of school still left, we knew that although it would be tight, we had the means to provide for a child, and we felt like we were being called to seek parenthood.

I wanted to finish college, and I knew it would be hard with a baby, but I somehow wasn’t bothered. Our decision brought me a lot of joy. It was absolutely right. The cynical side of me wants to sneer at the hopeful, innocent girl I was then – daring to think such a decision would even matter! – but the raw, honest me knows that it was important. I can’t explain how, but it was. Even though we’ve been waiting all this time, even though we don’t have children, we would be less now if we hadn’t said “yes” then.

I sometimes think about what that “yes” really meant. Clearly it didn’t bring us directly to the hardships, or the joy, of parenthood. It did open us up to suffering of infertility. God knew he wasn’t going to bring us children in these past two years, and yet he called us to give him that “yes.” It confuses me, especially when I think of how hopeful we were then, eager and a little scared, but ready for what lay ahead.

And knowing what he did – knowing that seeking conception would lead to not to parenthood, but to infertility – God still asked us to obey him. We were ready for a child. But were we ready for this?

In many ways, infertility has strengthened our marriage. I trust my husband more, I love him more, than I ever have before. I feel close to him because I am close to him. I hid a lot of me from him in the early days of our relationship, but he knows those parts of me now. There’s a lot of security in that. And I know him much better than I ever did.

But life – life and I are on shaky footing. I used to think I knew it well, could anticipate its curves and its valleys. Now I realize how little control I have. I’ve made little mental boxes, I’ve seen causes and effects and imagined that I could read from them. I’ve thought that life could make sense according to my rules. How wrong, how utterly wrong.

That discovery has shaken the foundations of my world, the foundations that I’ve spent twenty-two years building for myself. And yet, as they’re ripped up, I discover that underneath, there’s sand. Finding that sand, finding that all the boxes and walls I’ve made in my life really amount to nothing, is utterly terrifying.

These tears that come so easily and so often, the grief and bewilderment that sometimes hit me so hard, are proof of that terror. Sometimes at night I cry in Michael’s arms, and I can feel that he has no idea where this devastation comes from. I’ve no idea myself, much of the time. I’m just scared. Scared, period.

And yet… sometimes there are glimmers of something that promises to fill my emptiness. A few weeks ago I had an especially good hour in the chapel and came away with one word: surrender.

Imagine if there was a plan. Imagine if these barren years are not pointless years, even though they feel like that much of the time. In “The Hound of Heaven” there’s a line, God speaking to the fugitive: “All which I took from thee I did but take, / Not for thy harms, / But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms.” And to that I, like Job, have nothing to say but a tiny “oh.”

The idea that getting what I want is not the best thing for me – mostly I am not ready for that thought. My heels are digging in and my fists are clenched. Wisdom and patience in the face of adversity are not my strong suit. Yet, when I forget myself I can acknowledge that I want my walls to be built, not by myself, but by my God. I want no shifting sand under me, but Rock.

When those walls are being torn down, when that sand is being blown away, when I am being sifted, I hate it. It is hard, and I feel empty, and I feel like it’s ridiculous for Him to ask me to make it through this. It’s too much to ask.

It's too much, but I have no choice. I have no power to give myself the thing I desire. Perhaps one day I will be grateful for that fact, grateful that I was given no choice to turn from a fire that might be making me the person I was meant to be. But on nights like this, the virtue that would seek that fire is far from me. I’m here, and I have nothing to give, nothing but my brokenness and emptiness. And a tiny, weak prayer that the grace to surrender will be given to me, because I don’t have it right now.

Today

Infertility has beaten me up more than anything else, ever, but most of the time, by the grace of God, I can keep my head up.  My life is still full of blessings, and most of the time I'm thinking of how good life is, rather than of how hard infertility is. 

Crying jags are not entirely uncommon, but I can save them for the privacy of my home, for the refuge of my husband's arms.  The occasional off-hand comment makes tears fill my eyes abruptly, so I have to blink hard to keep them from spilling, and can't speak for a while for fear of bursting into tears.  But I think that's hardly noticeable.

Things set me off rarely.  Seeing a happy little family hardly ever upsets me; I'm generally happy that they have a baby rather than sad that I don't.  When people ask me if we are "going to have kids" I'm momentarily confused, and frustrated by the implication (that you can simply decide to have kids, and then have them) but I can say "we hope so" without getting upset. 

But one time at rehearsal a few months ago, when the cast was goofing off, my director reminded us jokingly that we could stay there all night, but he had kids to get home to, and I was suddenly so overwhelmingly sad that I wanted to lie down and become one with the floor, if that could actually work.  And a few weeks ago I mentioned to the secretary at work that I'd really like to have kids and she told me not to do that, because I have a nice body and she wouldn't want me to ruin it.  I don't normally speak sharply to anyone who's not family, but when I told her "Don't ever say anything like that to me again.  Ever." I was surprised at the depth and force in my voice, the shock and anger that rose to the surface so easily.  (I think she felt horrible, by the way, and after she found out about our infertility she apologized very nicely.)

Most of the time I'm okay.  But once a month, and it doesn't seem to be cycle-related, I get fragile.  Little things, things that would normally not bother me, hit and stick painfully.  For no reason at all I am suddenly sensitive to everything.  The most innocent song lyrics start the tears streaming down my face, driving home from work seems an insurmountably wearying task, and the only thing I want to do is crawl in bed with a book and a cup of strong tea.  Being home helps, being with my darling husband helps, but I can still feel my heart sinking toward my stomach, my shoulders curling in to protect me from that crazy, hard world out there.

In a day or two I'll be better, shoulders squared to face whatever comes my way, excited about our future family and ready to work on building it.  I'll be philosophical about the difficulties, thankful that it's true that good can be brought out of suffering, and looking for that good.  But today, today the broken edges of these little dreams of mine are sharp, and I am raw.  In this whole wild journey, it is the todays, the lost days, that are the hardest.

Suggestions?

One of my friends, who had been trying to get pregnant about as long as Michael and I, found out today that her seven-week pregnancy is not viable.  I'm not going to share any details of her situation here, but if you are a pray-er, please send up some prayers for her, and if you're not, please send some positive vibes her way.  She needs them right now.

I've never miscarried myself, and this is the first of my real-life friends who has ever experienced this.  When she told me about it today, I found myself completely unsure what to say.  The best I could come up with was "I don't understand why God lets things like this happen," which didn't seem to upset her, but I wanted to offer more comfort.

Here's my question for you all: If you've experienced miscarriage, what were the most comforting things people said, and the least?  Were there any occasions when people clearly weren't trying to be preachy but still managed to hurt you anyway?  Please give me suggestions - I need help!

Emotional brick wall

I was hoping to stay involved in the discussion that I invited when I posted yesterday. But when I got up this morning, I found that I do not have the emotional energy.

Yesterday I was running on adrenaline, and a little bit of denial. I started my period yesterday morning, so I needed something to distract me from it. The debate served that purpose. At any other time I would have been able to stay more detached, but yesterday I put my whole self into my arguments, and I ignored my feelings about the start of another cycle. I normally work through them in writing, but this month I guess I thought I could avoid it by throwing myself wholeheartedly into something else.

Well, I was wrong. This morning, it’s as if I am up against an emotional brick wall. So I’m giving myself time off today. I’m skipping class this afternoon, getting into bed with a book and a cup of tea, and letting myself cry until I feel whole again.

The truth is, the debate about abortion doesn’t have to be concluded by me, today. It will go on for a long time to come. It’s going on right now in the comments section of yesterday’s post. I want it to keep going. I’m happy with how civil everyone is being toward one another. I’ll keep monitoring, and I’ll delete any posts that are personal attacks, but other than that, I hope the talking and the thinking keeps happening. Pax.

Nope.

I have no creative way to say it this month.  Not pregnant.  No baby growing over here.  Zip.  Zilch.  Nada.  Bring on the margaritas. 

(Yes, it is possible that my cavalier attitude is a ruse.)

Lurkers, I need your love more than ever now.

And I pray.

One of the songs that has shaped who I am is by Michael Card, my absolute favorite musician. It’s a very simple song, but it has consoled me through many hard situations in my life. This morning in the shower, I sang the chorus as a prayer.

Could it be you make your presence known so often by your absence?

Today, that absence was expressed in the absence of a second little pink line on the pregnancy test I took right after I woke up. It was expressed in the arrival of my period, just minutes after the negative.  I am devastated, but in the dashing of my hopes, I find my salvation. I am reminded, again and again, that I have nothing, that I am nothing, without Him. This infertility is a challenge to my practice of my faith, but through it my convictions are deepened. I have never been more sure of His presence than I am in this time of suffering.

Could it be that questions tell us more than answers ever do?

My tears come quietly, but in my heart I am screaming, “Why, God? Why?” My question is my answer, for as I ask it I understand that any concrete answer would be inadequate. The person I need to be in order to understand His reasons is a future version of me, a stronger, better person. I have said before, and I truly believe, that I am being refined. This fire may not make sense right now, but I have real hope that someday it will. Until then, my questions tell me more than mysterious answers ever could.

Could it be that you would really rather die than live without us?

This line always puts suffering in perspective for me. I turn the question around, and ask it of myself, “Would you rather die than live without Him?” And if my answer is yes, then that is all I need. No earthly joy, including that of parenthood, would ever really be enough.

Could it be the only answer that means anything is you?

Of course.

It never goes away, does it?

I want to write a serious post, a post I've been thinking about for a long time, but these are not serious-post conditions, people.  I'm in bad shape over here.  Stuffy head, headaches, sniffling, sneezing, nosebleeds, and overall ickyness and tiredness.  Plus, it's day 29, and my period hasn't started yet.  My cycles are normally 25-28 days, but I get a 30-day cycle every couple of years.  Why does it have to be this month, though?  I wanted to get the crying over with before my head got any more stuffed up.  Too late now.

I can't lie and say that I'm not hoping, a little, that this isn't another 30-day cycle, but something else entirely...  I can't even say it.  I can barely whisper it to myself.  I feel like saying it, or posting it, will just make it that much harder when it turns out to not be true.

At the end of this past August, about a year after we first started trying to conceive, I started my period and melted into a breakdown you wouldn't believe.  (Actually, you probably would believe it.  You've been there.)  I had stopped working for the summer, so I had whole days in which to cry big, jagged sobs which wracked my body.  One morning in the middle of this I had to drive over from our apartment to our new house so that I could meet the guys who were coming to install new carpet.  On the way over I bought a bagel to give my face something to do, and frantically wiped the tears from my cheeks, hoping that I'd be able to appear semi-normal to the carpet guys.  I managed it by keeping my sunglasses on the entire time.  (Hey, it was a bright day, okay?  I'm sure they totally fell for it.) 

I remember sitting cross-legged on our bed, folding laundry in martyr-like silence and letting the tears stream down, not even trying to stop them.  My cheeks were wet, my lips were wet, my legs, bared by gym shorts, were wet.  I screamed at Bryan when he came into the room to see how I was doing.  "Do you think I'm doing this to myself?  Do you think I'm forcing this misery?"  I can still taste the grief of those days, acidic and salty, nose stuffed and chest aching, whole body exhausted from the repetitive assault of the sobs. 

Sharing with Bryan has helped.  Blogging has helped.  But I'd be lying if I didn't admit that, every month, the ghost of August's hysteria is with me.  I might cry for only a couple minutes now, clinging fiercely to my husband, but I am still that girl, the girl who lost it just a few months ago.  The pain is still just as deep.  And really, I can't imagine that the pain of infertility could ever be any less.