This is a story of hope, at times crushed, at others felt and known. Of waiting, long and hard. Of fear and submission. Of bitterness and surprising joy. Of grief and grace. It’s a story of God’s goodness not despite my frailty, but in the very weft and warp of my weakness.
After four years of being unable to fall pregnant then a miscarriage, my husband and I were bestowed a beautiful daughter. I thought perhaps the days of infertility were behind me but as I write, my precious girl is all pigtails and independence. I’m staring at her fourth birthday and she remains the only little one in our house. I’ve had other miscarriages and long periods of “radio-silence” so when she says she’d like to be the big sister, I can barely hold back the tears to respond. This is the hardest story I’ve ever told but I still think the lessons associated with miscarriage and infertility are worth naming aloud.
There’s been collateral damage. I’ve been bitter. I’ve been very hard to love. I’ve been depressed and a drag and I’ve been a crummy friend, a physically present but mentally absent mother, a sad wife. There have been relationships lost along the way as my husband and I have hunkered down and worked on just keeping our heads above water. It’s been hard to serve the household of the Lord with joy.
I am often perplexed. Friends and strangers tote about a bunch of mini’s: one, two and then another. And another. While I know technically how it happens, I still wonder at the how of it. How did she manage to fall pregnant and keep that baby and grow it and birth it and feed it and do it all again only months later? Others have managed to start and finish up their family in the time it’s taken me to even fall pregnant.
Beyond the cavernous sadness of a quiet house or an only child, is a more perilous battle, a wrestling with the deceiver himself. I grapple with thoughts out-of-kilter with what I know to be true about God. “I’m being punished for faithlessness.” “If I were more pious, he would reward me with a child.” “If I had a child, then I would be happy.” “I deserve a child.” “God is messing with me.” “Her abundant blessing compared with my empty arms is a sick joke.” “My Lord and Father doesn’t care for me.” And here is sin: invasive, insistent, repetitive, destructive, deceptive, ugly.
C. S. Lewis says “pain insists upon being attended to,” and I can attest that in the deluge, the Lord and I have had some very full and frank conversations. It is painful to learn a lesson that is a sloughing-off of sin. It can be even more painful to re-learn a lesson where callouses have formed and hardened. Just when I thought the Lord had taught me true reliance on Him as we waited years for our daughter, He has made me wait again. And not just wait, but encounter the crushing blow of miscarriage. I thought I knew God didn’t owe me anything, but in secondary infertility, I still felt that I was entitled to another child, that it is right and best my daughter have a sibling. And so I have had to lay my finitude and frailty before the Father again. Perhaps the returning of this lesson is the learning of it – the Lord’s hard, gracious provision to me. As the years stretch away and my body fails and ages, pride is stripped away. I see now (again!), nothing I have is my doing. Foolish girl, you have everything you don’t deserve! As I swallow this bitter, beautiful pill, I sense bitterness and hardness falling away. I am still sad, but softer somehow. I can smile and forgive and cuddle other people’s babies.
Still, trying to cope and just be ok is exhausting. Hiding my grief, from my daughter, occasionally my husband—even from myself—is tiring. And some days I know I’m not fooling anyone. It’s futile to spend my days trying to think my way out of grief or to dwell on the unanswered and mysterious. In Christ’s graciousness, there are moments he allows me to do exactly what I’m meant to do as his child, which is sink into him and his truth. I gained everything through Jesus at the cross (Phil. 3:8), I have every spiritual blessing in Christ (Eph. 1:3), his grace is sufficient for me (2 Cor. 12:9), my Father knows me (Psalm 139) and he is sufficient (Phil. 4:19), Jesus bears my burden (Matt. 11:30), the Lord sees my tears and they are not forgotten (Ps. 56:8). Inevitably, these truths ebb and flow in my sadness. There are times I know these things to be real but they seem distant like a sweet but indistinct tune wafting in from an adjacent room. At other times, they are deliciously close and technicolour—balm for a sore soul. I look forward to the time I know and feel these truths unfiltered by sin and time and space and in the presence of the One who invented them and bought them and keeps them.
Until then, the Spirit helps me pray these truths into my bloodstream and I rest in Christ’s “unchanging grace” far beyond my tiny brain and broken heart. The Lord’s promise to *be God* to me in the storm is the only anchor that will hold. Then a rather strange thing happens. It becomes possible to walk about every day with an enormous, seeming incongruity inside me: I can completely trust the Lord and his providence, I can love the Lord and have deep assurance in His being for me and for His glory and still be terribly, profoundly sad. It doesn’t make sense and I won’t reconcile those things this side of glory. Yet Christ enters that strange space and I know he is with me in the depths.
Image: Sarah Hopkins (flickr)
