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the other baby

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Last week was the anniversary of the baby we lost to miscarriage.

I could not bring myself to enter into it.

I am sick of being heart-sick.

. . .

Remember when you were a kid and you got sick? Strep throat or stomach flu or whatever winter cold cough crud kept you home from school?

By day two or three, you’d hit that pillow-pounding point of frustration – I’m sick of being sick! – where you didn’t want to lie in bed anymore, didn’t want any more extra attention, didn’t even want to watch TV. You wanted to be free, to be outside again, to be back to your old self.

That’s a good sign. Your mother would smile as she tucked you back in and kissed your warm forehead.

It means you’re getting better.

. . .

He and I never expected all this heartache. We didn’t want the drama.

We were just a couple of kids. Who wanted to have a couple of kids.

But then there was infertility, and then there was miscarriage, and now there is the loss of our babies – and yes, believe me: I know we have three healthy children whose births and lives are shining luminous startling salvific truths in the midst of this present suffering.

And I know so many suffer such worse; I hold my heart at this deep knowing; it shapes every bright blessed day of the life whirling around me – the cluttered house sticky with kids, shouting with noise, trampled with shoes, littered with toys, spilling with food, leaping with games, grimy with dirt, jumping with love.

But please, believe me, too – when I tell you that this story is nothing like we expected.

Still sometimes I want to stamp my feet and pound my fists. How did all of this happen to us?

I want a normal life. I want a boring day.

. . .

Remember that mass shooting in Kalamazoo?

(You probably don’t. Hundreds of news cycles ago. Hundreds of shootings since then. Too much, too much, too much.)

A gunman opened fire at random, killing people in broad daylight. Two of the victims were a father and son, outside looking at cars.

Two weeks after the shooting, days after we lost our daughters, I watched an interview of their wife and mother. Startled, I looked at her face and saw my own. The stunned shock. The grief sunken into her eyes. The contortions of cheek to keep from crying.

She looked exactly like what I saw in the mirror. It was the first time I realized how my particular grief was part of the universal.

I never forgot her face.

I have thought of her every day since.

. . .

After the latest wretched week bleeding with the worst of what humanity can inflict, I heard and read heaps about grief fatigue.

Too much! people protested. We cannot take it! We cannot see any more violence, we cannot hear any more suffering. We can no longer deal with the weight of it all.

I get it. I feel it, too – the horror and hatred pressing down on us, threatening to crush our hope (and maybe our breath itself, maybe the lives of those we love, what if we are next? what if it happens here? what if? what next? how long, O Lord?)

But here is why I do not turn off the news. Here is why I keep vigil with the suffering of the world.

Because of that woman in Kalamazoo. Because her story is not mine, but it is woven with mine.

Because she does not get to flip off the TV and sigh that it’s all too much. It is her life. 

Grief fatigue? I get it. I’m sick of being sick. But I don’t get to choose. 

. . .

After a few months, people lose their patience with grief. This is understandable: they must tend to their own lives. Normal has its needs, too.

(“Grief lasts longer than sympathy, which is one of the tragedies of the grieving,” wrote Elizabeth McCracken – and believe me, she knows.)

But when your own life is at the epicenter, you do not get to choose.

In the days leading up to this year’s anniversary of the miscarriage, I tried to hold grief at arm’s length.

I cannot, will not. I cannot go there this year. I cannot enter in.

The other baby. The one without a name. The one we never got to hold.

The day arrived, gaping hole in the calendar. I busied myself with birthday preparations for the living breathing growing boy, itching to celebrate his day next.

But then, of course, grief crept quietly. And snuck back in.

I could not hold that day, that life, that baby at arm’s length. Grief does not work like that. We do not get to choose, control, or contain.

Because it was my story. It was so many mothers’ story, so many women who have written me about their miscarriages and hugged me at parties and whispered I lost babies, too and told me how they labored and wept and never forgot.

I am worn out on grief, but I have to keep going. For me, for my baby, for all those women, for all those babies.

(Maybe it’s a sign we’re getting better.)

Because going means grieving. This is the only way life works: moving forward but reaching backward, imagining and remembering, mourning and rebuilding, loving in two directions because love means you breathe in two countries. 

Grief is the toll you pay for passing through.

 . . .

Jesus understood this.

Moments of exhaustion and enough edge closer and closer to him in the Gospels, pressing harder the nearer he gets to the cross. All the madding crowds, pleading and begging, grabbing and shouting, pushing on him with their wants and wounds and never-ending needs. There are always more lepers, more sick, more poor, more bleeding women, more dying children.

So he goes off alone to pray. Again he goes off alone to pray. Again he climbs to the mountaintop. Again he seeks shade in some quiet corner. He prays through the fatigue, the temptation to throw up his hands and say too much!

He knows love does not get to choose. Love shows up, sits with the suffering, stays when others leave, bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Jesus does not run himself ragged, but he does not run away. He prays and he persists.

So when I want to shove our own story away – forget its jagged edges and chaotic complications and pity potential and awkward avoidance and small talk sabotage – this is all I can do, too.

Go off by myself. Try to pray. Try to persist.

Because life deserves celebration: head-tossed-back laughing delight at what goodness we are given. And it deserves mourning: face-in-hands keening wail at what awful we endure.

I will not do either side injustice. This is what it means to be human.

. . .

Post-script: My friend Haley’s mother makes mother’s bracelets with the birthstones of the parents and children. She sent me this after Maggie and Abby died. It is the only thing I have that includes all our babies. And a woman I have never met made it for me. This, also, is an amazing example of what it means to be human.

the other baby 2

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  1. Michele says

    8 August 2016 at 10:24 pm

    Thank you so, so much for this! It’s been three months size I lost my Gabriel and the grief keeps hitting. It helps to know I am not alone!!!

    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.
 
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“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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