For This Child I Have Prayed

and peed on sticks; and cursed

the numbered days—the counting up, the counting down, the turning

into months, the dreaded year;

and so I did the questionnaire, the consultation, all the tests,

lay back and thought of babies;

for this child I had switched to Tylenol from Advil,

and so I downed two pills and donned a gown and booties,

and clasped the washcloth from the nurse

and prayed the flush of dye would part

this great Red Sea before me.

For this child I received like Eucharist

three yellow tablets on my tongue

days three through seven,

and pierced my side with needles,

my works of satisfaction for

my slothful follicles, those pools of darkness in my vacant womb, space

for this child, if ever

he should need it; for this child

I choked down vitamins and tears,

for this child

was no guarantee; I filled a chest

with hopes deferred and fading dreams

for one I longed to love

but feared might never be;

For this child we could do only so much,

and there were no indulgences to pay,

no sins to be confessed,

no alms to be performed,

no offering to give;

for this child I surrendered my vain works, my conceptions

of the life that I would have,

the mother I would be.

For this child

I kept one light on upstairs

as though at midnight he would sneak in through the door

long after I had gone to bed

and I would wake to find

my wanderer returned—

mercies great, the goodness of the Lord, the morning’s joy

that followed every night I had endured.

For this child I have prayed,

and in this yes I see

my works could never save,

for it was always, ever

grace.

---

It was supposed to be quick, easy, and fun. I knew fifteen-year-olds who had done it—first try, practically. We had bachelor’s degrees and jobs and a mortgage and a dog and four years of marriage to our family name; of course we would figure it out. So we started trying.

I don’t think I started to worry something was wrong until the following summer. Now it was a year. Now we needed to see someone. We had our appointments: primary care for a referral, consultation, testing for him, testing for me, then more testing for me until we reached a diagnosis and with it, a treatment plan. We would start with medication. I stood in line at Walgreens for the crinkly paper bag and the question from the pharmacist: “Are you currently pregnant or planning to become pregnant?”

I had been planning. Now I was just hoping.

It had been another year. Ten trips to the pharmacy. Two ultrasounds. No luck. We went back to the clinic. “If you’ve been on letrozole for a year and you haven’t conceived, your likelihood of getting pregnant is 5%.” But we were young. We could try IUI. We could try IVF. We could try what we ultimately ended up trying: Ovidrel, the trigger shot to be taken CD 14 following an ultrasound confirming adequate follicular growth. Two out of the four cycles, everything looked beautiful; the other two, I couldn’t take the shot. At what would be my final scan, they looked for a developing follicle and found my ovaries empty as a starless sky. “We can do bloodwork to see if you already ovulated.” But I hadn’t, and I knew I hadn’t, and I didn’t need to spend however much money it would be on top of the $300 ultrasound and the $250 shot hiding in my fridge door dairy compartment to confirm that. I kept that vial of Ovidrel for another ten months, unsure if the 5/26 printed on the box meant it expired on the 26th of May or the following May. Either way, I couldn’t bear the thought of throwing it out, but I never called the clinic again, not to make the embarrassing announcement that today was Cycle Day 1 so I could refill my prescription, not to schedule another appointment, not to start another course of action that may or may not work.

We didn’t stop trying, but it felt like quitting nevertheless. If you don’t do everything possible to obtain it, do you really want it? We did. I did. I wanted it when my bathroom trash can filled with LH strips in varying stages of development as I sought to divine what was happening in my body. I wanted it when I felt that low ache start in my belly and knew I wouldn’t need to take a pregnancy test. I wanted it when people asked whether we had children and I replied, evenly, calmly, “No, it’s just us.” I wanted it when I hung two stockings at Christmas and we cried again watching Klaus because maybe that was going to be us, growing old together yet alone, waiting for children who would never come. I wanted it when I held my new nieces and nephews—three of them born during that year of letrozole, when I didn’t know whether my sadness and anxiety came from the medication or from the reality of why I had to take it. When I stopped, I wondered whether it had all been for nothing—a year and a half of my life wasted in medicated limbo.

Another December passed and my great fear was confirmed: we would be childless at thirty. “When we have children” became “if we have children.”

Everybody tends to see the future as more certain than it truly is. Only when unexpected circumstances arrive do you realize you never actually know what’s going to happen next. You are never guaranteed a particular outcome; you simply believe your actions will bring about your desired results. You reduce the world to an equation, readily understood and easily solved. But with infertility, there are too many variables. You can take a fistful of supplements and overhaul your diet and swap your personal care products right down to your underwear, but you can’t biohack your way out of a chronic condition. You can follow your course of medication and schedule your appointments and extract all the physical components necessary to make a baby, but you can’t wave your hand over a Petri dish and will an embryo into being. This is not to say, of course, that all medical interventions or lifestyle modifications are immaterial. Such courses of action may be both appropriate and efficacious, but when medical advancements offer no help, we revert to the retribution theology that predates them, this idea that I did all the right things so now God should give me what I want. And if I don’t have what I want, it’s my fault. Maybe it was something I was doing wrong. Maybe it was something I had to start doing right. I wanted my suffering to be an escape room so I could find the key and get out already.

But there is a reason the biblical metaphor for suffering is a wilderness and not a locked room or a math problem. It is a place you must wander, and sometimes it is a place you will never leave. Yet it is also a place in which God is with you, as He was with me through those long years. I thought often of a favorite Proverb: “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life.” I did not give up hope, but I had to allow my hope to change. Children are not entitlements or trophies; they are gifts. Though I could not expect a child, I could expect God to work in my life, to provide peace, meaning, and joy in whatever path He prepared for me.

Over and over my hopes were deferred. But in that instant when I saw those two pink lines, up sprang a tree of life in what had been only a barren wilderness.

When I start my day with prayer each morning, I thank God that He said yes. I thank Him for my child, a son like He gave Hannah and Elizabeth and Rachel and all the other barren women of the Bible whose stories comforted me so greatly. I thank Him for my body, which I felt for so long had failed me, but is to my great delight finally doing exactly what it’s supposed to do: sustaining not only me but also the new life growing in my womb. I thank Him for the miraculous (though sometimes uncomfortable) changes I have seen in it during these eighteen weeks of pregnancy so far. He did not have to do this for us. We could have waited another seven years; we could have waited forever. Sometimes I wonder why it had to take so much time—we could have had three babies in the time it took to have one. More often I wonder whether it’s fair that we’re having a baby while others have waited just as long, or longer. I am, I suppose, allowed to wonder, but I am not appointed to know these answers while I am on this earth. Two things I know for certain: that it is a miracle any of us exist at all, and that any answered prayer is not a measure of faith but a gift of grace.

For this child I prayed, and the Lord has granted what I asked of Him. Blessed be the Lord.