Post 2

There isn’t much to say about S’s first 24 hours. So perhaps we should go back a bit to the beginning.

This adventure is starting almost 6 years later than we had expected. We first got pregnant at the end of 2004. Seeing that first positive pregnancy test took some of the sting off of the Red Sox comeback against the Yankees in the ALCS and subsequent World Series win. We had been married about 2.5 years, and it felt like it was time to become parents. The Career was in a good place. The Wife was ready to be a mom. The Plan was working.

The first indication that the Plan was being thwarted was the miscarriage in early 2005. I had no idea what was going on as it was happening, but the bleeding was clearly not a good sign. No biggie, the doctor’s said- some 20% of pregnancies end in spontaneous abortion, and all signs indicated that this was nature’s way of saying this child wasn’t fit for survival of the fittest. But everything else was good news- we were two relatively young and healthy people who should have no trouble getting pregnant and sustaining a pregnancy in due time. I was sad, but encouraged that there were no structural reasons that would give us trouble in the future.

But then it (miscarriage) happened again.

And again

And again

Well- you get the idea. At this point- a man of faith begins to wonder, “What’s going on?” Why is this not working for us? One alternates between the introspective (I/We must be doing something wrong) to blaming external forces (God is withholding this from us). Sadness one day, anger the next, with a healthy serving of confusion interspersed throughout.

Our next step was to do more extensive diagnostic testing, and explore getting some medical assistance. To people of means, in-vitro fertilization (IVF) is the recommended route. NYC feels like the mecca of IVF, and we checked out the various clinics to see what they offered. The wife was always at best ambivalent and sometimes even downright against this route. However, she knew how badly I wanted to be a father, and this seemed like the most expeditious path to getting there. We tried several clinics, and they were all magnificent and great at what they do. But it was not to be.

Thus I (we) entered the scariest of places. All I really wanted from life at this point was to be a father. But our prayers, and the prayers of our closest friends and some of God’s most faithful servants were not working. In addition, the cumulative knowledge gleaned from the best minds in the science of fertility yielded no signs of progress and no explanations. And worst of all, it seemed as though God was either ignoring our situation, or He was present but powerless to change the circumstances. Neither option was particularly comforting. CS Lewis, Christian apologist par excellence, writes extensively about the difficulty of going to God after the loss of his wife and particularly about this sense that No One was listening to his plight. I would often wake up at 3 AM and find my mind racing with anxiety about a childless future. My feeble attempts to convince myself that life would be OK sans children were utterly empty and powerless. I had officially entered the Dark Night of the Soul.

There were few places I could go for comfort. The only place that provided even temporary solace was to read the book of Job. I sheepishly admit that I could only feel better about things when looking at my plight in comparison to the man who experienced untold pain, especially a more righteous man. In the middle of this treatise on suffering, he states in Job 13:15

“Though He slay me, yet will I hope in Him”

The words still echo in my mind to this day. Some translations say, Though He slay me, yet I will trust in Him. I had a simple choice before me- to believe that God was distant/absent/powerless, or believe that God was still on the throne and running the show. I went with option B. I had entered a new liminal space.