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seasons of infertility, years later

9 Comments

“Oh, honey!” She shrieked as she came running towards us, nightgown flapping. “Look at you!”

I smiled, the meager smile of a large pregnant woman, bracing herself to hear the usual round of “you’re due when?!” or “you’re sure it’s not twins?” Be nice, I admonished myself. She’s a sweet neighbor. Let the comments be.

But it was the first decent day we’d had in weeks, cool enough that I could finally take my son for a spin in the stroller without my head spinning from the heat. I just wanted an escape, half an hour to myself in the cool breeze and quiet.

She practically skidded to a halt in front of me. “You look beautiful,” she declared in a breathless tone, the wonder in her voice filling the air like we were in some holy cathedral.

“Oh, honey. Pregnant women are so beautiful. It’s just amazing, you know? Amazing! One time my sister-in-law invited me to go along to the ultrasound, and I just cried and cried – I mean, fingernails! And eyelashes! I was so excited! Everything is growing in there – it’s just incredible. Incredible!”

I smiled back, a wide and genuine smile. How could I have forgotten her story – what I meant to her, welled up in her, reminded her of as I waddled past her front door?

“Thank you,” I said. “You’re so kind – I feel huge these days and uncomfortable in all this heat. But you’re right. It really is a miracle.”

“Oh, honey,” she lifted up her eyes. “It is. I was never able to have children of my own, but I did day care for about 100 years and I got to be pregnant with all those mamas…every time I just cried for joy with them. What a miracle! So beautiful!”

I thought back to other walks past her house, in other seasons and years. When she first referred to her beautiful garden as “therapy.” When she delighted at my first rounding belly. When she laughed that if she had been able to have babies, she’d still be pregnant at 60.

Above that bulging, kicking baby inside me, my heart welled up. Empathy and hormones and reminder of the sheer blessedness of my discomfort.

I thought about what must have been her years of pain and longing, watching those pregnant mothers around her bloom and swell, gathering her day care children into her lap where no baby of her own ever grew. I marveled at her pure joy in my own blessing, the utter lack of resentment or jealousy or bitterness that the gift was never hers.

What grace, what acceptance to come to a place where you can rejoice in others’ journey down a road you were never let to travel.

“Can I touch your belly?” she squeaked, ready to lunge.

I forgot all about my usual aversions to the invasion of personal space. “Of course,” I replied.

She reached out her hands, eyes closed, face glowing with joy in the sunlight. She held my sides with the reverence reserved for a sacred vessel.

“Oh, honey,” she breathed in as she took her hands away. “You are just beautiful.”

No, I thought. You are.

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Claire says

    17 July 2011 at 9:25 am

    Thank you. I needed that.

    Reply
  2. Amy B says

    17 July 2011 at 11:31 pm

    Brings tears to my eyes! What a beautiful soul!

    Reply
  3. SUZANNE says

    18 July 2011 at 5:09 pm

    I loved being pregnant the one time I was able to do so. No IVF, no chemicals, just God saying I only get one. I realized read this, that many mothers who see me approaching, all smiles and cooing, may think I’m on the attack. I truly just want to celebrate with them. I embarrass my son this way, but to have a baby smile at me makes my day. God bless you, your children, and your neighbor.

    Reply
  4. priest's wife says

    18 July 2011 at 7:37 pm

    beautiful!

    Reply
  5. genevieve says

    18 July 2011 at 10:13 pm

    i love reading your posts- thanks for being such a wonderful mother!

    Reply
  6. Lizzy says

    20 July 2011 at 12:44 pm

    Ahh, Roomie!! You made me cry. What a story.

    Reply
  7. Lynn Arnsdorf says

    27 December 2013 at 12:04 pm

    This made me cry

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. uncommon birth day thanks « mothering spirit says:
    23 August 2012 at 3:56 am

    […] neighbor who greeted me with shrieks of delight every time she saw me waddling through the neighborhood that […]

    Reply
  2. dear couple in the pew: i see you {on infertility & invisibility} « mothering spirit says:
    25 August 2014 at 7:45 am

    […] And we never forget what it feels like to grieve, to cry, to curse, to pray every Sunday, every day, again and again, for the one chance that will change everything. Or for the strength to accept a life that looks different from what we hoped. […]

    Reply

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I’m Laura Kelly Fanucci. Mother, writer, wonderer. This space is where I explore mothering through writing. It’s where I celebrate how God shows up in the chaos of raising children. It’s where I love to build community with readers like you. Read More…

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thismessygrace

thismessygrace
If our daughters had lived, we never would have pl If our daughters had lived, we never would have planted this garden. 

There are pockets of beauty in my life today that could not have existed if they had survived.

Acknowledging this does not mean I accept their loss. Or that I wouldn’t trade it all to have them here instead.

But the grieving know this strange, stubborn, saving truth: that goodness can grow in the gaping holes left by the ones we love.

I don’t know any simple ways to make sense of the hard times in which we’re living. As a porous soul, I feel it all and it breaks my heart, even as I cling to what I know is true.

But loving and losing my girls has taught me that life is both heart-breaking and resilient, that surviving is more complicated than we suspect, that most people are walking around shattered beneath the surface.

Sometimes I can catch a glimpse of it, searing as sunlight: the grief in someone’s eyes behind their anger, the burden sagging their shoulders, the past that’s poisoning their present. Few things have transformed my life more than learning to recognize pain in others.

Grief is a long letting go of a life you thought you’d have. Most of us are carrying more of it than we realize—or remember when we’re dealing with each other (especially when we’re tearing each other down).

Go gentle today. Practicing compassion and generosity of spirit will crack open more of the world and its confounding struggles. You might lose the satisfying clarity you clung to before life broke your heart in complicated ways, but you will find more of God in the messy, maddening middle.

I have learned this much from the garden I never planned to plant, from a version of life I never dreamed.
Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated from Notre Dame. Now we’re thick in the midst of life-with-kids, celebrating middle school & preschool & everything in between. 
 
Since June is a month for graduations & celebrations, I’m delighted to help you celebrate with @grottonetwork .

Grotto Network shares stories about life, work, faith, relationships, and more. Check out their videos, podcast, and articles to help you reflect on where you are in your journey.
 
Grotto Network has generously given 2-$100 gift cards to Bloomin’ Brands Restaurants (Outback, Carrabba’s, Bonefish Grill & more) to help you celebrate this month with friends & family! It’s a huge giveaway, because we all need to savor and celebrate whatever joy we can find these days.
 
To enter the giveaway, follow @grottonetwork and @thismessygrace and leave a comment below about what you’re celebrating this month. Tag a friend for extra entries (up to 3).
 
Rules: Open to the U.S. only. Entries will be accepted until 6/11/22 at 11:59 pm CT. The 2 winners will be chosen at random and announced on 6/12/22. Per Instagram rules, this promotion is in no way sponsored, administered, or associated with Instagram, Inc. By entering, entrants confirm that they are 13+ years of age, release Instagram of responsibility, and agree to Instagram's terms of use.
“How did you do this?” I want to ask her. “H “How did you do this?” I want to ask her. “How did you let your heart break a thousand times?”

I want to call my mother and ask her impossible questions, to probe her heart that held five children and let each of us go in the hardest ways. But I know what she will say, “It’s hard. But you’re doing a beautiful job.” She can’t give words to the deepest yearnings and groanings. None of us can.

I wish I could ask my grandmothers, each of them gone for decades now, each of them matriarchs who raised big broods of their own. I never got to know them as an adult, but I have heaps of questions: How did you do it? How did you not lose yourself or your way? Or did you, and that was precisely the point?

I want a whole book of answers to impossible questions, and none exists. So I send my thoughts to the mothers of faith whose short stories, mere snippets on pages, have sparked small lights to guide me along. To Sarah and Ruth, Hagar and Rachel, Mary and Elizabeth. Every unnamed anguish the holy ones carried, every treasure of love they held in their heart.

Is it any coincidence that birth often brings both cries and screams, laughter and joy?

We hold it all within us. We cannot give words to the enormity of what it means to mother.

I sit outside a coffee shop two blocks from my children’s school on a sunny afternoon, the last day of the year. I wipe away tears for the natural nostalgia, but I also feel the gutting grief welling up from my own wounds of motherhood to know a deeper truth: marking milestones with love and longing is nothing compared to the gaping loss of not having your child here to break your heart in a thousand tiny ways.

So I resolve again, a hundred times again, to let this vulnerability become the strength that keeps me fighting for all children to have what I want for my own: life, love, health, safety, support, opportunity, community, hope. This is how parenting asks us to change. To let the particulars of our lives stretch us to love more widely.

I once thought “to mother” meant to have and to hold.

Now I know it also means to let go.
Many of you asked me to save these suggestions I s Many of you asked me to save these suggestions I shared after the school shooting in Uvalde.

Remember: we can’t do everything, but we can each do something.

Just because we can’t eradicate evil overnight doesn’t mean we can’t take small strong steps toward change.

Any work for justice and peace is long and hard. But we can build this work into our daily lives in concrete ways.

Look at the children in your life. What would you do to keep them safe and alive?

Start there. Let your life and love lead you.
When women meet, the world changes. Today is the When women meet, the world changes.

Today is the Feast of the Visitation. A day when we remember the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth.

Two women pregnant with new life, blooming with prophetic power.
Two mothers called to change the world.

What would happen if we gathered together like this today?
How could the world change if we made Mary’s song our own?

“He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.”
(Luke 1:51-53)

Imagine if we stayed in this holy space—not for a moment’s meeting, but for months together—to gestate the dreams God was waiting to birth through us.

Imagine if we let ourselves be filled with the Holy Spirit to shout out with loud cries.
Imagine if we lifted our souls with prayers of justice and joy.

Imagine if we gave each other strength and service, courage and compassion, as we kept asking how to answer God’s call in our ordinary lives.

When women meet, the world changes.

If you want to know how to fight for justice for your children, for your people, for this world, look to the Visitation.

The mothers will show us the way. They already have.

(Image from the “Windsock Visitation” by Br. Mickey McGrath, OSFS, commissioned for the Monastery of the Visitation in north Minneapolis.)
Here’s what I wish I would have heard preached t Here’s what I wish I would have heard preached today on the Ascension.

Right now is a time to be prophetic and pastoral, a time for each of us to ask how God is calling us to act.
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