The following reflection was written by Hawthorne. 

We couldn’t have children. That’s what the doctor said. Technically, we couldn’t have children without major medical intervention. We had done that for years already, and I was so, so tired. We had done everything–fertility drugs, multiple I.U.I.’s, two rounds of IVF. My emotions were worn raw and my relationship to them, and to my body, so tenuous. I hadn’t been able to trust my emotions in years: The hormones coursing through my body from the injections I took in an attempt to regulate my body’s broken reproductive signals made me doubt everything I felt and thought. I was done. Three years of trying was enough for me. My heart couldn’t take it anymore.

We quit trying to have kids in November of 2016. It was one of the hardest moments of my life, and for a long time I could do nothing each day but wake up and remember that I was not alone and God was with me. I had no hope in a future that held joy, and everything, even breathing, took effort. Then, slowly, my husband and I started to heal. We had sweet time together. We had great conversations about why we had wanted kids in the first place. We decided to adopt. My heart for adoption grew even bigger as we learned more about the process, although there was definitely fear in that as well. We went through the process and were put on the waitlist for a baby.

And then I got pregnant.

Out of the blue, without intention, without warning. And I couldn’t believe it. My initial reaction was disbelief, followed by anger and grief. I couldn’t talk to hardly anyone about how I felt because my emotions didn’t make sense to anyone I knew–including my husband, although he tried to understand. I didn’t know how to explain to him that I had moved on. My heart had closed to this desire, and to get pregnant after all that just made me feel like the whole infertility experience was a total, meaningless waste. It reminded me again of all the pain of constant disappointment, the constant fighting to not feel rejected by God, and the grief of my early miscarriage.

I think somewhere in my mind I had become a new person after infertility. A person who couldn’t have babies…a person who had been shaped and built by grief. A person who could understood people’s pain and could empathize with others. Honestly, pregnancy made me feel like God had hit the restart button on my life. It felt like he was saying “Oops, my bad, that’s not how it was supposed to go for you! Hang on a sec!” It felt like all the truth and beauty I had found after healing from infertility was a lie. It felt like God had just played with my emotions for four years. It felt like my pregnancy meant my infertility was a giant mistake, honestly, as opposed to some harrowing and horrible journey I had gone on that had ended somewhere good. In my mind, it negated the whole experience.

It took me a long long time to be able to verbalize any of this. No one I knew could help me figure out what I was feeling, and honestly, most people in my life were just super confused about my attitude toward being pregnant. They were overjoyed for us, and so was my husband, but for me it took almost my entire pregnancy before I could believe and feel pregnant. Even then, I dreaded anything stereotypical, from baby showers, to people touching my belly, to getting attention from people. It all made me feel so, so sad and I didn’t know how to communicate to anyone how I was feeling. I felt guilty about the whole thing. Honestly, it was perhaps the loneliest part of my journey toward becoming a parent.

My son was born recently, and parenthood has been so sweet. I am so in love with this tiny person. His birth and being his mom has validated how sweet and real and normal a desire it is to be a parent and has validated how real a loss infertility is for people.

I wish that I could put my experiences in a neat package and give them a purpose. I wish I could say why God made us go through all of that pain if it was going to end the way it did. It was, honestly, meaningless in many ways. But pain often is. Not all darkness leads to discovery and not all tragedy is part of some beautiful story. I wish it were, but I think to do so would be a disservice not only to myself but to everyone who has gone through infertility.

God is not necessarily teaching you something, building you into a better person, or going to give you something “better,” although that may end up being a result of your experiences. He is not preparing you to be a better parent or teaching you a lesson for some past sin. If you do get pregnant, it is not because you did something to earn it or because he has decided after all to “bless” you. This may rub people the wrong way, but listen to what I do believe:

God is with us through it all. He is not toying with us; he is grieving with us. He is our constant companion in a broken, sin-riddled, and painful world. He is showing up and holding our hearts when everything is just too hard. No matter how our stories end, He has promised to be there with us and to hold us as we heal. He is not the grand manipulator teaching us lessons as he jerks our puppet strings. He is our friend, our suffering Savior, and he is the only one who can truly understand our hearts.