A New Perspective

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Photo credit: Alan Johnston, Flickr

The following reflection was written by Linden. 

I entered the teaching profession at age 27 with no formal training or certification. But I loved it, and still do after recently finishing my second year! I get to teach high schoolers Spanish, and that involves a lot of Enrique Iglesias and Shakira. My husband works as a campus minister. He has a calling to mentor and encourage college students. (He also has a calling to rub my feet every once in awhile).

Four years into marriage, we felt ready to start trying to have kids. After the first few months, I began to wonder why it wasn’t working. It seemed so easy for everyone else. I had always been healthy. And on some level, I thought: “I’m a good person. I’m an upstanding citizen. Doesn’t God think I deserve to be a mom?”

Before we knew it, we had reached the year mark without success and made an appointment to talk with a doctor. I remember walking into the office on a bright but chilly January day. Gripping my husband’s hand, I said to him through tears, “I can’t believe we are this couple. I can’t believe we are having to do this.”

A year into working with this doctor, we made some discoveries about our situation. I was attending the weekly worship service at the college ministry where my husband works, and during that time, I felt God reveal something new to me. It wasn’t audible, but it was a fresh thought about infertility that I knew hadn’t come from myself. I had prayed, journaled, discussed with my counselor, and talked openly with friends and strangers alike about our journey through infertility, but that night, I was given a new perspective. One that gave me hope.

It wasn’t an idea that was easy to swallow. It didn’t make everything magically better. But it was hope in the most difficult season of my life. My husband and I had both taken the long route to finally getting jobs we loved. These jobs were personally fulfilling and making a difference in the world. We’d been placed in positions to influence and care for young people. For the first time ever, I was able to see that if we never had a child, we would always have these “children” in our lives. For me, my high school students. For my husband, his college students.

I had never thought about it in this way before. In the moment of realization, I felt simultaneously the pain of infertility and the comfort of knowing that we would be O.K. if we only ever had these children in our lives. That thought provided me with a hope I hadn’t felt yet about our infertility and renewed energy to press forward as we sought to grow our family.

Into a Great Fire and Out Again

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Photo credit: Matt Green, Flickr

The following reflection was written by Tiger Lily. 

I always know what I want. It takes me 20 minutes tops to find an outfit I like and get out of a store. I usually know where I’m going. I have a good sense of direction, and can visually remember the way to almost anywhere after having been there once. I know what I want to do. I’ve wanted to make films and write since I was 8 years old.

I don’t wrestle with decisions much, because I usually know exactly what I want and what I hope for. So as you can imagine, when my husband and I got married and eagerly anticipated having children, I already had names picked out, bedrooms designed, and dreams imagined for those children.

My husband is quite a bit older than me, but it’s never been a stumbling block. If anything, it has been a source of strength. He has been through a lot of hardships in his life and though he always dreamed of having a family, he never thought it would actually happen for him. He met me, we married, and suddenly that dream once again sparked in the darkness and grew into a little flame. I desperately wanted to fan that flame, ready to become a mother at any moment. I wanted so much to give him everything he never had.
Our first year of marriage was wonderful. We couldn’t get enough of spending time together and looked forward to the future with a fluttering anticipation. I was taking pregnancy tests every month, waiting to see those plus signs. They never came.

After that first year life got hard… really hard. Our jobs were draining us dry in every way imaginable, our finances tumbled into a pit with seemingly no way out, my anxiety went through the roof, and his depression weighed him down like an anchor. The second and third years of marriage passed in this tumultuous storm. Still no children. Still no relief from our circumstances. I have always believed that my husband’s calling in life is fatherhood. He is a quiet and gentle soul towards whom both children and animals gravitate. He is a natural in nurturing, teaching, and caring for people and things. He never made me feel guilty, but I certainly made myself feel guilty about our failure to conceive. I felt that I was failing at providing him with children, and the faces of the children we dreamed of started to fade. We had called them each by name, but those names faded too.

At the crux of this pain and devastation, I started watching Game of Thrones. (You don’t need to have seen it to understand the point I’m making). Something happens in the story that really left an impression on me and changed my perspective on our situation. I really connected with Daenerys Targaryen (the character with the fabulous white hair). She was forced to marry a barbarian warrior, but over time they grew to truly love each other. By the middle of the first season/book, she was pregnant and there was much anticipation for the birth of their child.

In a tragic turn of events, her husband is killed and her baby stillborn. She loses everything. She was given three dragon eggs as a wedding gift, and while everyone else believes they are dormant, she dreams that if she carries them into a great fire, they will hatch. As an act of faith, she does this very thing, and when the smoke clears and the fires burn out, she rises completely unharmed with three dragons in her arms. This is how she becomes “The Mother of Dragons.”

This particular moment has stayed with me. In the wake of devastation, she takes a leap of faith and is rewarded for her belief. It didn’t bring back her husband, their son, or the life she had before. Nothing could undo the pain of her loss, but it was redeemed with a new future, a new hope.

God spoke to me through this story, as a metaphor for my own life. When I look back now, I can see that it was for our own good we did not have children. Our burdens were already so hard to bear–to add a child to that hardship might have been too much. I am grateful we weren’t parents during that time of struggle because we probably couldn’t have been available to them as much as they would have needed or deserved. It’s always hard to see clearly in the anguish of the moment, but the Lord held us firmly in His Hand through those years, and our pain was ultimately for our good.

The symbol of fire has been important in my life. It also reminds me of a story from one of my favorite books in the Bible (Daniel), in which Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego encounter the fiery furnace. They are being executed, thrown in the furnace for not bowing down to the false gods of their king, Nebuchadnezzar:

“Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego answered and said to the king, ‘O Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to answer you in this matter. If this be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the golden image that you have set up.'”

Even if God did not bring them to safety in the end, even if he did not fulfill their desire to live and escape such a death, they would not waver in their faithfulness to Him. “But if not” is the most powerful part of that passage to me. Even if God does not help us, we will not serve your gods. He doesn’t always give us what we want, but He always provides what we need to fulfill our calling as His children.

Like Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, and Daenerys, I went into a great fire, a trial, and came back out again. Though covered in the ashes of loss, a new dream was born. I am not saying I’m giving up, or that we will never have children. I still hope we can some day, with all my heart! But even if we do not, I know our lives and our marriage are not devoid of purpose and passion. We have now been married over 4 years and I feel a new contentment in our relationship. Having one another truly is enough. Children could add to our lives, but having them is not the end-game of our union.

There is always hope. I still hope that I can see a child of our own in my husband’s arms, laughing in our home, playing in our yard, and resting their head upon my chest. Whether they are biological or adopted, I hope for them. Right now, I cannot see any open doors for this to happen, but it is always possible with God (lest we forget Abraham and Sarah). In the present, I have my own dragons to nurture–they are the stories I intend to tell the world through film, television, and other writing.

It wasn’t until years later that I could look back and see purpose in the pain we’ve endured so far. One day, I may be looking back upon this day in the very same light. Perhaps even with that dream child in my arms.

July Focus: Hope

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Although it is easy to focus on the hard stuff, the infertile experience is not without moments of clarity, growth, and hope. It goes without saying that these are as varied and specific as the losses, discouragements, and pains of the journey. Hope has a way of audaciously reaching into impossible moments to soften hardened hearts, open closed eyes, and empower the weary soul.

It is important and powerful, but hope is also a tricky thing to share with someone going through infertility. Although the storyteller’s goal is to uplift the listener, it can often have the opposite effect. Stories of pain, loss, and loneliness lead to connection and understanding, but hope is different–it challenges. It asks us to dare to believe there could be something beyond the mire in which we trudge; that there could be something good, and that it could be for us. One slogs rather than travels through infertility; the length and shape of the road is different for everyone. Sharing moments of hope can be a reminder that light exists out there, somewhere, but often, we must have our own experiences with hope if we are to be changed by it. 

This month, we are focusing on hope at Re-Storied. These stories are personal reflections about times when light broke into darkness, if only for a brief moment. Perhaps these stories will serve as a reminder to you of the unending cycle of death and new life (the daily rising of the sun, the turn of the seasons) that is present in us as it is in the rest of the natural world. Our hope for you is that you will be encouraged by these stories–that they will refresh your memory of past hopeful experiences, or bolster your spirit until your own moment in the light arrives.

“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.”
Anne Lamott

A Loss of Autonomy

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forsythiaThe following reflection was written by Forsythia.

There are turning points in my infertility experience that will stick with me forever. Even for memories that I view differently now, their potency is as alive and near to me today as it was then. One of the most powerful of these moments is when I realized that the only choices available to us in order to grow our family required including strangers in a very intimate part of our lives. And not just temporarily—these strangers would be part of our journey for the long haul.

For six years, my husband and I had been letting go of the picture in our heads of how our children would come into being. One option after another presented itself and drifted away. Before we felt ready for it, we were spending countless hours picking apart adoption and its implications. In this process, we found ourselves drawn towards embryo adoption. Our first concept of what this would look like for us included anonymity. We were still grieving the loss of our dream for biological children, and the only way we could wrap our minds around bringing an adopted child into our lives was to think of them as ours–which is to say unattached from anyone else.

Our doctor told us that the most challenging part of embryo adoption would be finding embryos. We could go through an agency that would double the price of our procedure, or we could be wait-listed for an indeterminate length of time. Months before this appointment, we’d been told through a third party about a couple in our city looking to adopt out their embryos. What had once seemed like a random happenstance suddenly felt like a miracle. We immediately started pursuing more information about this opportunity.
Our mutual friend relayed that this couple was very interested in connecting, but asked that we meet with them as a next step. We were wrestling with so many fears associated with adoption—questions of attachment and interference and uncertainty—and we hoped, perhaps truly believed, that we could avoid many of these challenges if we entered into a closed adoption. I was so angry when I learned of their request. Having a child felt closer than ever before and this felt like an unnecessary, even selfish, roadblock between us and that possibility.
We took some time to carefully consider before responding to the donors’ request. During this period, I was standing in my kitchen with a good friend, processing the intense emotions I was feeling about whether or not to pursue this particular embryo adoption. As through a fog, I sensed an emotional block obstructing my path. I could not name it, but it was keeping me from moving forward. My friend asked one pointed question after another and I struggled to express what I was feeling. When I finally named the mysterious block, the words left my lips before my brain could even process them:
I want a child that is just ours! I don’t want anyone else to be involved, but those are our only options. 

As with most of my infertility losses, I was blindsided by this realization. It was a particularly hard one to admit because it was a complicated mix of justifiable and unjustifiable emotions. Saying it aloud helped me to see that my grief over this loss was the source of the anger I was directing towards our potential donors. The full weight of this loss settled over me, and I wept in the arms of a friend who let me feel it without judging or trying to fix me. The anger dissipated.

We saw a counselor and I attended an adoption support group for several months. We quickly came to see not just the validity, but the potential healthiness of the donors’ desire to be connected–for our child’s sake more than anyone’s.

It is difficult for me not to minimize the effect of this loss–one of freedom, of autonomy. My instinct is to downplay its trauma: Even this loss had its gain, though it took me a very long time to see it. But while I was waiting for things to make sense, this loss was a very real death. For me to have the desire of my heart–something so many around me were achieving naturally–I had to surrender independence. For whether we chose open or closed adoption, someone other than us would be part of the life of our child in a complicated, unique way.

We said yes, entering into an arrangement that required us to die to the things we had always known and imagined about this part of our lives, including a certain independence. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. We mourned our dying dreams and began to let them go as we stepped into the unknown, not certain where our feet would land.

The Pervasiveness of Loss

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pic_windswept_hawthorn1The following reflection was written by Hawthorne. 

For me, infertility loss cannot be neatly summarized or packaged. It’s a messy ball of loose nerve endings and raw edges that leaves you simultaneously emotionally overflowing and emotionally empty. There is no single thing for me that hurt the most, just many, many “small” things.

(Note that the following is a list from one perspective at one point in time and obviously oversimplifies some very complicated issues.)

 Losses and Griefs:

-Being on the outside, excluded from the “happy, normal people” whose lives go just as planned and have no complicated feelings about babies or pregnancy.

-Feeling out of control of my body.

-Feeling physically, emotionally, and mentally weak, especially during infertility treatments.

-Feeling empty and barren in a way I think is pretty impossible to understand without experiencing it.

-Feeling the loss of privacy in having to go through medical treatments that felt humiliating and degrading to me.

-Losing the hope that there would ever be a little one who was the result of my husband and me: of our marriage and our lives together.

-Feeling utterly alone.

-Losing the dream of being a mom the “simple” way, with a child that undeniably “belonged” to us and owed no ties to anyone else (ie: his or her birth family).

-Feeling so much anguish over being the reason my husband would never get to see his own birth child when that was such a deep desire for him, and knowing that my past choices and pain were taking this from him.

-Losing the dream that sex would ever just be fun, simple, or easy, instead of the complex and emotion-ridden thing it is during infertility.

-Fearing the loss of joy around kids and babies when they have always been some of my favorite humans. (I am grateful for friends who encouraged me to push and fight through my hurt in order to stay with them, rightly telling me I would lose a big part of myself if I stepped away from kids and babies.)

-Knowing that no matter what happened, there would be no “neat ending” to my story.

The Loss of Connection, part 2

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forsythiaThe following reflection was written by Forsythia.

 

“The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing… not healing, not curing… that is a friend who cares.”
–Henri Nouwen

As I evaluate the losses my husband and I have accrued through our infertility journey, the most obvious one to me is the death of our dream to have biological children. There are so many other losses attached to that, from seeing our features in a child’s face to what the process of conception looks like.

But as a new mother to an adopted son, there is another great loss that haunts me. It is powerfully devastating: a heart-aching loss I never anticipated. I am reminded of it especially in the daily text exchange between me and my best friend, Dogwood.

She is my go-to on any manner of baby-related subjects:

Did you ever have trouble with your newborns being gassy or straining to poop?

At what age/weight did you move up to the next level of car seat, and would you recommend the one you have?

Did you use essential oils on yourself like normal even while breastfeeding?

And also the person with whom I share every sweet revelation or difficult moment:

HE’S SO COZY I COULD SNUGGLE FOREVER 

How silly all my fears [about adoption] seem now

He was rotten all night

She’s always there with a word of wisdom, solidarity, encouragement. The way she loves my son is breathtaking. Her willing, joyful, tireless involvement in this new stage of my life is a priceless gift.

This is a gift that I did not, could not, give to her.

When she was becoming a mom for the first time, I was in the early stages of discovering our infertility–in that brutal period of adjustment where expectations are shattering, dreams dying, hope dissipating. My husband was years away from the emotional stage of processing that I was in and I felt utterly alone. I was in shock and struggling with grief, and every new pregnancy or birth I encountered threw a giant spotlight on my wretched emptiness.

So when Dogwood called to tell me she was pregnant with her first child, it was indescribably painful. A hot wave of dread crashed over me. Tears flooded my eyes. Through a constricting throat, I managed to congratulate her and tell her I was happy, lying because I was ashamed of how I felt and because I believed it’s what she wanted to hear. Somehow, I kept my composure until we hung up, and then I called the only friend I knew at the time who had experienced infant loss, the only friend I could think of who might understand the weight on my heart. On the phone with her, I sat in a dark bathroom, trying to keep my tears secret from my husband as I sobbed uncontrollably into the receiver.

Soon after, Dogwood made me confess what my true reaction to her news had been: even then she knew me so well that concealing my feelings from her was impossible. That was one of our first and biggest fights; it was what I had feared would happen, but strangely, not for the reason I had feared it. Instead of being upset because her pregnancy had brought me pain, she was upset because I was pulling away from her, trying to hide my true self from her. I believe that this conversation set the tone for our relationship over the years to come. It was when Dogwood told me “I’m all in.”

I wish I could say that her willingness to walk alongside me in my pain made me more open to her joy. Perhaps it did in some ways; nevertheless, it did not make me able to be emotionally present in her early days of motherhood—with her first nor, sadly, her second child.

These days, as I eagerly send her a question regarding the daily rituals of parenthood, or text her a picture of the son I can’t seem to stop photographing, it is ever in my mind that she never had the luxury of sending me such messages. There were no phone calls or texts venting new mom frustrations, and I knew she was careful about expressing excitement and love for her children to me.

Infertility comes with an astronomical price tag. In the thick of it, I was giving my friend everything that I felt able to give to her, and only now do I see how little that was comparatively. There are parts of Dogwood’s life that I completely missed; a season of her growth and experience as a person that I will never know. The grief of infertility took this from me, and I will never get it back.

I have no way of knowing to what degree this loss led to gain in our relationship: how much the honest working through of our pain, frustration, sadness, and joy has contributed to my longing to know her more and more. I cannot separate the two—I wish I could for her sake. But perhaps we’re not meant to.

I cannot now, nor ever will be able to express my gratitude towards Dogwood, and to all the others who allowed infertility to take from them so that they might have more of me.

The Loss of Connection, part 1

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The following reflection was written by Dogwood.

Forsythia and I have a unique friendship: one of those once-in-a-lifetime connections. Our souls just recognize each other. She and her husband battled infertility from the start. She was never on birth control and was surprised many times at the beginning of their marriage when she was not pregnant. I remember the first time I witnessed a reaction to a negative pregnancy test. Forsythia had come over to hang out with my roommate and I at our tiny college duplex. She had stopped at the drugstore on the way to pick up a test. She told us when she arrived that it was just a precaution; her period could come any day and she didn’t think it would be positive, though she hoped it might be. We changed the CD, sipped iced tea, caught up on each other’s lives. Then, it was time to look at the test. We were all very excited at the possibility of a baby for our first married friends! We had a lot of hope that it would be positive, though there were questions of how they would provide and make room in their lives for a baby. I’m sure I held my breath as she walked out of the bathroom holding the little white stick. Sure enough, it was negative.

We all felt it–the loss of hope. Little did we know that my friend and her husband would never conceive a biological child. I could never have imagined what it would be like to walk alongside my best friend as she watched her dream of being a mother slip away. I was still a young woman and those thoughts were not in my realm of imagination at the time.

Watching Forsythia experience one loss after another was unbearable. I did my best to stick with her through the ups and downs of her and her husband’s uncertain journey towards parenthood. What this looked like was mostly listening and mourning with her. I shook my head at the awful things people would say to them about having children, and held my breath when mutual friends announced new pregnancies.

During this time, my husband and I received news from my doctor: “If you want to have biological children of your own, you need to do it now” (I was 24 at the time). They had discovered endometriosis in my uterus after an extensive myomectomy. We wanted children, but had planned to wait a few more years. I knew I wanted to be a mother and that I wanted to see my husband father our children, so our plans changed and we started trying to get pregnant as soon as I was recovered from my surgery. I got pregnant after trying for 2 months. Sharing this news with Forsythia was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. She and her husband were in the trenches of infertility: telling her that I was pregnant felt like sticking a finger into her open wound.

I was unprepared for motherhood; I was thrown into it by the circumstances of my health. I was excited and full of joy and could not share any of this with my best friend. Up to this point in our friendship, there wasn’t much we hadn’t shared. It felt strange and alienating to hide this really important part of my life from her. I had made many transitions in life with her by my side–graduating college, beginning a career, marriage–and now I was transitioning into motherhood without her. She could not come with me. I could not expect her to be happy for me.

My husband and I had moved back to our hometown shortly before getting pregnant. It was a lonely time for me for many reasons. I had my family, but I had no community–no one to walk with me into this very scary world of motherhood. I needed Forsythia. She was unavailable. I didn’t get to send her videos and pictures of my son doing absolutely nothing (that’s what most of those first pictures and videos are, after all). I couldn’t call her to vent about wishing my husband would hear the baby crying at night before me, or about the marital fights that this caused. I couldn’t ask her to come see us in the hospital after my son was born. I couldn’t call her from the hospital to tell her that I wanted to go home, or that I wanted my baby to latch properly so that my nipples would stop bleeding and my milk would stop clogging. I desperately needed her to hear how I was wronged by hospital staff and our doctor–how they stole the first hour of my son’s life from me. I needed her to cry with me and sit with me in the confusion and pain. She couldn’t. Her loss became my loss in an unexpected way.

Instead of sharing my life with her at this time, when we spoke it was mostly about what was going on in her life, and any part of my life that my son didn’t intrude upon. She did what she could; she asked about him when she was able to bear it. But I never dared go into much detail for fear of hurting her more.

Our friendship survived this dark period. I missed her and I know that I could have used her support during those first years of my kid’s lives, but I was able to forgive her for being absent at such an important time for me because I understood that she wasn’t able. I knew that if she could, she would. I trusted her heart.

Infertility does not happen in a vacuum. The pain, confusion, and loss of infertility will reach as a far as it is allowed. I willingly stepped into Forsythia’s pain. Of the losses I chose to endure, losing our friendship was not one of them, because I knew that the heartache was only a season. We are so apt to believe that what is now will always be. That is the lie we tell ourselves, a lie we must reject. As Forsythia and I faced loss together, I embraced hope: that she would be a mother; that we would walk that road together one day; that there was meaning behind the pain we endured. I gripped tightly to these beliefs for my friend, whose heart did not have the strength to believe them, but also for myself: what I was giving up was not in vain.

 

The Loss of Mirrors

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Weeping Willow, Claude Monet

The following reflection was written by Willow.

One of the losses that has become part of my story is the loss of a common experience with other women: I have not been pregnant and will never be pregnant. I do not know what it feels like to carry a baby in my body, feel him move inside me, deliver him into the world.

I remember talking to an acquaintance about my infertility and she quickly tried to console me, saying “Well, at least you don’t have to deal with morning sickness!” I thought to myself, “I would give anything to deal with morning sickness right now.” When my mom friends start talking about what it was like to be pregnant, I immediately become a spectator instead of a participant. I listen with curiosity, not resentment. But the familiar feeling of loss is right there with me every time.

Connected to this is another loss: I will never have a child that looks like me. In the adoption world, this is called “the loss of mirrors.” My brother’s daughter has my granddaddy’s red hair. My sister’s kid has her daddy’s adorable scrunchy face. I will never know what traits a biological child might have gotten from me. I have a beautiful, almond-skin, black haired little boy who looks nothing like anyone in my family or my husband’s family. No one picks me out of a crowd as my son’s mommy.

Everyone loves to make those biological connections–“Oh, she looks just like her mommy when she was little.” Or, “He has his daddy’s thick hair.” Again, I become a spectator of these exchanges, listening patiently from a distance. I think it’s important to note that this particular loss is part of my son’s story as well, if not more so. He will never have the comfort of seeing himself reflected in my face. Looking like one’s family brings an unspoken sense of belonging that my son will never know.

It’s uncomfortable and often socially unacceptable to mention anything negative when it comes to adoption, but these are significant losses. It has nothing to do with my love for my son or his acceptance in my family. There is both great joy and great loss in adoption–to acknowledge one without the other is to paint an incomplete picture of a complicated, messy, beautiful thing.

 

June Focus: Loss

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Infertility introduces countless losses into the lives of those it touches. Sometimes, these are obvious consequences of the diagnosis–expectations or hopes that must be abandoned; dreams that will never come to fruition. Even losses that seem “small” or “insignificant” can be devastating: the grief they evoke both blindsiding and enduring.

Whether the re-routing of a dream or the letting go of a single aspect of expected life, these losses not only shape our lives, but the people that we are at the very core. They impact our view of the world, our religious beliefs and relationships, identity and intentions. Many of these life (and self) changing losses go unspoken. They are consequential to who we are, yet are often misunderstood or simply unknown.

Over the month of June, we hope to demystify some of the losses specific to infertility by opening windows into personal experiences. We hope that these stories will validate or even reveal the losses most effecting you in your own season of infertility. Perhaps these stories may even serve to help you understand those around you who are grappling with losses that are shifting what they know about themselves and their world.

You Are Seen

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Photograph credit to www.curiositysip.com

The following reflection was written by Sunflower.

 

After the first loss, I avoided Mother’s Day like the plague. I wasn’t interested in watching others celebrate–so easily, so carefree–something I felt like I was begging for without result. It felt like being asked to go out into a hail storm without any protection. My heart just couldn’t take the beating. So I stayed home wrapped up in my blanket of grief. The second loss was even harder. I had put so much hope into that pregnancy that the grief of it ran over me like a semi, then backed up and ran over me again.

I remember like it was yesterday: The first Mother’s Day after my second loss. The loss that had left me emotionally crippled. When Mother’s Day approached, I was bitter but determined. I was a mother. A mother to babes who graced heaven with their presence. And I was so exhausted with grief that somehow, some way, I was going to make others see me the way I saw myself. So, like a soldier preparing for war, I put on my armor of determination and went to church.

I did well through the Hallmark-y 3 minute video they showed in the service that commended the hard work of motherhood. I didn’t shed a tear, standing there like a rock. I even held it together when the pastor spoke kind words about his mom and wife. Yes. I had this. I was going to make it.

…and then they asked for all the moms to stand in the congregation. They were going to hand out flowers. I breathed in deeply, my tears falling freely as I stood. Here it was: my moment of validation. My heart was screaming to be seen as the thing I so desperately wanted to be, the thing I knew I already was, though I had no baby to hold in my arms: a mother. When the man who was handing out red carnations came to my section, he handed them to everyone except me. I lost all composure and left as fast as my feet would carry such a broken and heavy-hearted woman. I was devastated. All the old voices of shame returned. Why should he acknowledge me as a mom? I had no children that he could see. But my heart cried out that I was a mom. The identity resided in the core of my being. It was the person I was created to be, and the short 13 weeks and 10 weeks of my babies’ lives had made me mom. Yet, the one thing I wanted on that Mother’s Day was the last thing I would receive.

Devastated and broken, I fell before the Father’s feet. On one hand, He was the one I blamed for my pain, my losses. And on the other hand, He was the one I clung to for comfort and hope.

“I just want to be seen.”
“You are seen.”

It was simple. It was truth. He was the One that saw my pain, carried my grief, collected my tears, and made me a mom. He knew.

Even now, 7 years later, that memory is painful. Yet, on days when I don’t feel as though I am seen, I have come to realize that I’m seen by the One who is with me through every pain and every joy. Who is witness to every part of me, the visible and invisible. Who weeps in my mourning and rejoices in my joy.

When the next Mother’s Day approached and I had two losses and infertility under my belt, the need to be recognized by others was no longer there. I didn’t put armor on. I didn’t put my blanket of grief on. I didn’t fake it or pretend it was anything but what it was. Because who I am and what I am feeling is always before the One who created me and sustains me. He sees me.

Mother’s Day is painful. When you are in the middle of this pain and asked to wait while everyone around you celebrates, it is incredibly hard. For me, it became O.K. that it was a hard day when I acknowledged that it filled me with grief and believed that this was valid–not a reason to be ashamed or hide myself. And I didn’t try to change it. I knew He saw me, and for that moment, it was enough.