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baby kicks & infertility blogs

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When the baby was first born, I could spend hours just staring at his brand-new self. I marveled at his movements. Jerky leg kicks. Graceful arm stretches. Twists and turns, quick and sudden. Even now, two months later, his muscles are still learning how to move, figuring out what it will mean to reach and roll.

Once in a while I’ll be cuddling him on my chest, and he’ll drag an elbow or foot across my stomach, and I’ll think, “Hey! I remember that – from the other side.” Newborn movement is womb-like, an embodied reminder of how we spend our first months of life flipping and kicking in safe, snug darkness as we grow.

Eventually babies grow out of the froggy legs and balled fists, but it takes a while to leave behind the gestures and postures of the womb. Even as adults we revert back to the fetal position to sleep or self-soothe when scared. It takes time and effort to overcome the habits bred into our instincts, and some of them we never lose.

It’s been nearly three years since our season of infertility ended. I have a beautiful, grinning, wild reminder of that fact running around my house every day. And yet sometimes I plop down in front of the computer at the end of the day for some idle-Interneting, and I find my fingers instinctively dragging the cursor to click on this blog. Or this one. Or this one. And lately I’ve been asking myself why.

Why, when my life is so far from those days of infertility, do I return to the stories and the sorrow of those who are still there? The women who yearn to be mothers. Or the lucky ones who have “crossed over” to parenthood through adoption or pregnancy. Why do their stories still speak to me?

It takes a long time to break our habits or turn our hearts. Finding other women who shared my sadness and frustration and fears during the months in which we were trying to conceive was a lifesaver. I didn’t feel alone. I didn’t feel desperate. I didn’t feel abandoned.

The power of sharing stories and finding soulmates cannot be underestimated. Even across the invisible Internet, we can connect and reach out, find friends and companions to share the path we journey on. Back then, it was other women who were struggling with infertility and their faith. Today it is other mothers of young children. Instinctively I search them out for insights and answers to the concerns of today.

Like the baby’s womblike moves and motions, my habits send me back again. I haven’t been able to let their stories go, because it’s important for me to remember that season of my life. The challenges and the grief, the unknowing and the doubting, the hoping and the praying. We are our journeys. And I never want to forget that part of my story that forever shaped our family’s beginning.

I’m sure my fingers won’t always gravitate towards the blogs that tell their stories. Just like I know my baby won’t always curl his little fingers around my thumb or instinctively turn his head when I graze his cheek. Over time, we slowly grow out of our old habits and the wombs that once held us safe.

But remembering where we came from is important, to help us move forward with gratitude and mindfulness.

For me, it is gratitude for the gift of two wild and precious boys. And mindfulness of those who still wait, hope, and pray.

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  1. Allyouwhohope says

    27 October 2011 at 3:21 pm

    Beautiful! My husband and I were just reflecting today on how the blogs were a lifeline to me during a very difficult time. Those ladies are gifts from God. Thanks for the shout-tout 😉

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  1. This is everything, yet this is not everything (the infertility goggles) « still counting stars says:
    16 November 2011 at 11:45 am

    […] baby kicks & infertility blogs (motheringspirit.wordpress.com) […]

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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
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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