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everyday parenting as spiritual practice

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Grieving Together: A Couple’s Journey through Miscarriage

Grieving Together: A Couple’s Journey through Miscarriage is our new book through the common questions, crises, and grief that arise after miscarriage. Available now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Our Sunday Visitor (with free shipping).

The book gathers Scripture, prayers, practical resources, and theological wisdom that speaks to the toughest questions surrounding the loss of a child: Why did God let this happen? Is our baby in heaven? How could this suffering be part of God’s plan?

Grieving Together draws deeply from the Catholic tradition, with the hope that all who have experienced miscarriage will find comfort within its pages:

    • help for the first days and weeks after miscarriage
    • perspectives on how mothers and fathers grieve differently
    • ways to navigate common cliches about miscarriage
    • prayers for when you struggle to find the words
    • creative ideas to honor the life of your child
    • times to remember your baby throughout the year
    • hope for your marriage and future after loss
    • stories from real-life couples who’ve experienced infertility, stillbirth, multiple miscarriages, infant loss, and miscarriage without living children

We hope that the book will also be a resource for priests, ministers, hospital chaplains, and other professionals who seek to support grieving parents.

It’s the book we wish we would have had after our miscarriage. It’s the book we hope will comfort other couples and let them know they are never alone.

Advance praise for Grieving Together

“In Grieving Together, Laura and Franco Fanucci tell their personal story with courage and vulnerability, offer sage advice, and share words of solace with anyone who has ever been asked to carry the cross of the loss of a child. This beautiful book will challenge you, heal you, and leave you with a new understanding of just how much God loves you.”

– Hallie Lord, SiriusXM radio host and author of On the Other Side of Fear: How I Found Peace

“This book is a self-contained support group for individuals or couples experiencing infertility, miscarriage, or infant death. Through personal testimonies of loss, experiences in the stages of grief and the accompaniment of God’s presence, the authors will accompany the reader in a way that can be powerfully healing. Thoughtful questions directed specifically to the man or woman provide a means for couples to discuss and communicate their thoughts, allowing growth through what is often a very traumatic experience. Definitely a must have pastoral companion for an important need.”

– The Most Reverend Andrew Cozzens, Auxiliary Bishop, Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis

“This book is a godsend for anyone grieving the loss of a pregnancy. It’s written with clarity, sensitivity, and compassion, and is equally accessible to women and men. Losing a pregnancy can feel like wandering through the wilderness, but this book is an invaluable guide and the Fanuccis are the wisest and most encouraging of fellow travelers. It’s not a stretch to say that lives will be changed by this beautiful, much-needed book.”

– Ginny Kubitz Moyer, author of Taste and See: Experiencing the Goodness of God with Our Five Senses and Random MOMents of Grace: Experiencing God in the Adventures of Motherhood

This page contains Amazon affiliate links.

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About Laura

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

Mother, writer, wonderer.
Seeker of God in chaos & life with kids.
Author of Everyday Sacrament & Grieving Together.
Glimpses of grace & gratitude.

Instagram post 2192445717293184648_1468989992 “What if God were helpless?” Her question shook me.

We had sat together for an hour, wrestling with the biggest, hardest questions—suffering and death and grief and trust. But even from where she sat in her rocking chair, hair white with wisdom, eyes searching up at the ceiling for answers that don’t exist, her words shook me.

No, I wanted to leap to protest. God has to be Helper, not helpless. Powerful, not powerless.

Otherwise everything unravels, right? Otherwise what is solid ground? Otherwise who can I trust?

But I caught my own words. It’s Advent, after all. What we celebrate at Christmas is exactly this: God becoming helpless.

A newborn baby: nothing more helpless among us. Born into poverty. Vulnerable among animals. Away from his community. Unable to walk or talk or feed himself. Helplessness Incarnate.

And this was what God chose, the ultimate Power that set the stars spinning. Incarnation was the vulnerable, unexpected, scandalous, unbelievable way that Love took flesh and came to stumble in dirt beside us.

What if God were helpless?

What if it’s not a hypothetical question, but a theological paradox? What does it mean for my life?

It shakes me, as it should.

If you have understood, wrote Augustine, what you have understood is not God.

Advent is not a simple season, chocolate calendars and Christmas countdowns.

This is a time to remember that Jesus’ story is radical, upsetting every neat category and tidy expectation.

It would be easier if God stayed powerful: distant, removed, almighty. The shock is that Jesus becomes powerless, too: intimate, humble, among-us.

What if God were helpless? What would it mean for my life, my faith, my need for surety and solid foundation?

If God can be both—Helper and Helpless—what else might turn upside down? What grace might be waiting in the wreckage of our expectations?
Instagram post 2191564285632887396_1468989992 Anna Quindlen wrote that hidden within each of her grown children is the baby they once were, like the toy duck in the bathroom soap.

I feel the same way about infertility.

Yesterday I curved my sore back over the baby huddled inside, bent and swayed by the bathroom sink, seeking any relief. Nausea, sciatica, normal aches and pains—all of it daily burden, barely worth mentioning after all these years.

But I felt her rise up within me, the one who wanted Exactly This. All of This. Nothing But This.

She is the me inside me, the former and forever.

I see her in crowds, the one in ten walking brave each day through a world that flaunts what she wants (as the world does when we are wanting, filling our longing view with happy couples or pregnant bellies or warm homes or good jobs while we lust for the same). I carry her with me as I have carried each child, the ones whose hands I held and the ones I had to let go.

She taught me what it meant to crave control and to discover that I have none. She gave me the language of lament and the songs of sorrow.

I left her behind eleven years ago, on a cold winter morning like today, when a thin plastic test blurred to two lines for the first time.

I burst through the bathroom door as someone new, someone pregnant, someone’s mother.

I have never been the same.

But she is still me, and I am still her. Every day she prays me back to the place of all who are still waiting and weeping.

I could never call infertility a gift. But her companionship is.

When she whispers, it is louder than any stranger’s sneer, the judgement heaped upon four kids running ahead and a waddling mother trailing behind.

This, she reminds me.

You wanted exactly This.
Instagram post 2191077565846125357_1468989992 Advent is waiting to be discovered.

By those of us who have lived it for a lifetime. By those of us who have found it brand new.

Advent is quiet and calm when the world is anything but.

For those of us who delight in stillness and silence. For those of us who struggle to slow down.

Advent is the antidote we seek.

For those of us who crave radical challenge. For those of us who love ancient comfort.

Advent is never what we expect and always what we need.

The shortest season for the longest wait.

The perfect paradox for the God of surprises.

Advent is already the gift.

You can dip into this current any time, running strong and steady beneath the chaos of December above.

Any Advent moment will bring you peace and joy, which is already Love Incarnate, which is already Emmanuel, which is God among us.

A miracle. Don’t miss it.
Instagram post 2186625723368059660_1468989992 When I was pregnant with the twins, a strange thing happened.

As we started to share the news—in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving—people reacted in a way I never expected.

Instead of raising eyebrows or laughing out loud, they would get this wistful look in their eyes, offer a longing “oh...” and pronounce the strangest blessing. “Your holidays are going to be so wonderful.” I thought they were insane. I could not understand. What on earth did Thanksgiving have to do with it? Didn’t they see that all my plans had been dumped in a blender and set to Purée? That I never wanted twins, or five children under six, or any of the current complications life was hurling my way?

But over and over, friends and strangers looked at me with wistful, longing faces, saying so many times I lost count in my bewilderment:

Your holidays will be so wonderful.

Imagine all of them around the table.

You’re going to have so much fun when they’re all at home.

I am not in the habit of judging family size. Infertility, loss, first-hand heartache of the complexities and complications of childbearing have ripped back the stories beneath the surface. I know there are a thousand reasons why one might choose (or not) to have any number of children—or none at all.

But what I learned from countless unexpected reactions to my own unexpected news was this surprise. Sometimes we see only scarcity or overload where others are able to see fullness.

You might think your life is too much or not enough. But outside perspectives catch angles you can’t glimpse from where you stand. Goodness might hide where you see only hard.

Now I remember those voices every Thanksgiving. In years when holidays felt painfully lacking and in years when they brim to bursting, I remind myself how many saw fullness I couldn’t see.

Whether dreaming of the future or longing for the past—from countless friends who whispered they wanted one more or the stranger who told me she would have had ten if she could have had one—what they taught me was the beauty of here and now. The goodness before my eyes, even if it was never what I would have chosen.

We believe we see our whole story. Thank God we don’t.
Instagram post 2180338770783390438_1468989992 The world is different because of them.

Not just the two who inspired tonight, the girls we loved and kissed and held as they left this world.

But every beloved child whose name or life was spoken into that sacred space.

The world is different because they were here.

47 years ago, one mother told us as she lit her candle in the chapel. And it doesn’t get easier.

Two weeks ago, said one dad. And the whole room felt it, the weight of new grief and the rush of our own memories, ever an inch below the surface.

On the drive to church tonight, I told my husband that I was so grateful that Maggie and Abby inspired us to start this Mass for other families—and I also wanted nothing more than to turn the car around and head home. Anywhere normal.

But we don’t get to choose, any of us. Life happens and death happens, and the world is different because of every person we’ve chosen to love. Even the ones we had to let go.

Two weeks. 47 years.

That room held so much love and sadness tonight that my heart could hardly bear it—but here is the phenomenal power of the human heart. It was made to hold so much more than we realize.

We don’t move on. We don’t get over it. We don’t put it behind us. We don’t forget. We remember, together. What a gift, to be part of our communal awakening to the truth that remembering together—not suffering alone—is the way we heal.

The world is different because they were—and are now and ever shall be.

Love without end, amen.
Instagram post 2177704820978590285_1468989992 When we were dating, then engaged, then married, I used to catch a glimpse of him and think—God, please send us daughters.

Because I had never met a man like him, so strong and gentle all at once, so humble and quietly confident, so genuinely kind and caring.

I watched how he treated his mother, his sister, his friends, and me.

And I knew—with all the women who suffer father wounds, who never learn that they deserve to be treated with respect by every single man they meet—that we were meant to have daughters.

I knew it—but I was wrong.

Read the rest at MotheringSpirit.com. Big news on the blog today 💛
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