Kiss Your Miracle

If I had to summarize the last month of my life with one word, it’d probably be the title of my last post – grief. But today, God broke into the middle of our sadness again and gave us a beautiful night. After a day of working around the house we went down to the beach for the sunset. My brother Hans and his wife Katy picked up McDonald’s for everyone, and Nelson and Adam built a fire. My mom and Aunt Mary brought the dogs, who always entertain the babies, and Sky ate her very first Happy Meal. A true American, she loved it. A little later she had her first toasted marshmallow, which she also loved, until she realized her fingers were completely stuck together and there was nothing she could do about it. Before Sky’s meltdown though, I did manage to stop and take a breath and acknowledge how nice it was to be down on the beach in the still, fall air, having a sunset picnic with my family.

My family is changing. My dad isn’t with us anymore, and soon Adam and I will have a son. The thing about infertility that many people don’t know is that it affects every other area of your life. If we were still dealing with it, the pain of my dad’s death would be magnified. That sense of change – of saying goodbye and of welcoming too – would only be a sense of loss. The time we’ve spent remembering my dad would be shaded by the fear that my husband might never get to experience fatherhood himself. For me, infertility quietly emphasized every other pain I faced.

Recently I’ve had friends express their sympathy to me that my dad died during this pregnancy. And it is tragic to think about how my father will never get to meet his next grandchild. But at the same time, nothing in my life so far has shown me God’s extravagance the way being pregnant has. I’ve never prayed for anything more than I prayed to become a mother, and God chose to answer those prayers with miracle babies. No matter how sad I am to have lost my dad, I can’t ignore God’s sweetness in my life. I still have my mom, and my brothers and sisters. I have my Adam and my Skylar. And even as I write this, I feel my baby boy – another miraculous answer to prayer – kicking and stretching, each day growing a bit closer to entering the world, my family, my arms.

My dad’s cancer is the main thing on my family’s mind these days. We’ve spent hours praying, talking, and wondering what the future holds. But at the same time, life rolls forward. Since I got here three weeks ago, the leaves have changed colors and the air has grown cooler. “Your belly is definitely getting bigger,” I hear from someone just about every other day. Sky is fifteen months now, and since we arrived she’s learned to repeat names and say her first full sentence – “I don’t know” – which she says like a teenager, making us all laugh every time.

The other day Adam and I took Sky over to my cousin Johanna’s house. She has a two-year-old named Beck and a nine-month-old named Ruby. My brother Hans and his wife Katy were there too, with nine-month-old Nicholas. The kids ran/crawled around in a chaotic mess, and we all marveled to think that a year from now, there will be three more babies in the mix (our baby boy, due in February, and Hans and Katy’s twins, due in April).

I have to be honest. I haven’t spent much time lately thinking about my pregnancy. When I stop and give it my full attention, I’m excited, but there’s been so much happening with my dad that my thoughts have been concentrated on my parents. But as I watched the kids play, I was struck by the simple thought that one of those children is my daughter. And when Katy talks about her pregnancy, I can participate firsthand because I’m pregnant too. Me. The girl with a major hormone imbalance and just one fallopian tube, which is supposedly blocked.

My dad is struggling and it’s difficult for us all. But the God who gave Adam and me two “impossible” pregnancies is the same God who holds my dad in his arms this very moment. Sometimes His miracles are tangible – answers to prayer that we get to hold and hug. And sometimes His miracles are so deep in a person’s soul that only God is truly aware of their extent. But they are no less miraculous than physical blessings. God is at work in the heart of each individual in my family, and He alone knows what is most important for each of us.

Many things have surprised me about parenthood. Today while Sky entertained Adam and me with a doo rag (thanks Julia!), I realized how much our little girl makes us laugh. And once she realizes that she’s the one responsible for it, there’s no stopping her. She goes on and on and we end up laughing so hard our faces hurt. It’s quite the contrast from our pre-parent days. Sure, we laughed with each other then. But the sadness of infertility was always with us, even when we’d pushed it to the back of our minds. Home is a different place now – noisier and more chaotic and always on the messy side – and we love it this way.

At the same time, I’m nervous about having our second baby. I’m thrilled. But scared, too. Days when Sky demands all my attention I wonder how I’ll manage with another one. I wonder when I’ll sleep. Sky does great at night, but often naps an hour or less. When I’m up with a newborn at night and up with Sky all day, how will I function? I love sleep. I need sleep. For the first few months after Sky’s birth, I lived in survival mode. I knew overall that motherhood was just what I always wanted. But I still spent many of those early days at home fighting the baby blues, struggling to keep perspective. And when I really and truly remember that time I start to panic at the thought of doing it again, this time with a one-year-old along for the ride.

I feel funny admitting that. I hope I don’t sound ungrateful. And I know that millions of women all over the world cope with a lot more than two kids at once. My own mom has seven. My aunt has seven, too. Sometimes I wonder what’s wrong with me. How can I want more children and still find myself intimidated by it?

But recently I discovered something that helps me whenever I start to get anxious. I picture my parents and my brothers and sisters sitting around the dinner table. I think about each person, and the way we’re all different, but how we still get along, and how much laughing goes on when we’re all together. I can’t imagine my family with even one person missing and I’m so glad my parents didn’t just focus on how exhausting and expensive it is to have babies. From the beginning they saw each of us as individual people, created by God to be part of our family, but with our own separate lives, too. And that’s how I want to see Sky and our next baby and any other babies God decides to give us – not as my full-time job or even just as my children, but as growing, changing individuals with a God-ordained destiny far bigger than simply enlarging my family. On days like today, when Sky makes us laugh and we get to see a little bit more of who God has made her to be, it’s not so difficult to do.

This morning while Skylar and I ate breakfast, we listened to one of Pastor James MacDonald’s Walk in the Word podcasts.

Digression: Rereading that sentence makes me laugh. It makes it sound like we sat peacefully at the table together, drinking tea and eating muffins while listening to a sermon. I actually feed Sky breakfast while she runs around the kitchen and plays. She’s anti-high chair these days and letting her roam free in between bites is the only way I can get her to eat anything at all. I asked my mom about it one day and she said, “Don’t make food a battle. She’s thirteen months old. Do what works.” I love my mom.

So breakfast is typically chaotic, but I can still usually half-listen to a podcast at the same time. This morning Pastor James was talking about attitude. He said that God doesn’t usually take away the trials that we face, but that he helps us through them. You only have to look at the hardship all around us to see the truth in that. People everywhere, including Christians, deal with incredibly difficult circumstances, sometimes for years with no end in sight. I like it when church people acknowledge the pain and suffering in the world, when we even admit how confusing it can be when God doesn’t remove the pain despite our many prayers.

But as I thought about Pastor James’ statement, I couldn’t help but think of our infertility. As we walked through those years, I wondered if a life without children might be God’s plan for us. I cried many tears over our infertility and I usually felt God’s comfort and love in those dark moments. But I never felt like he promised me a baby. I had no idea what the future would hold. Then one day I found myself surprisingly – shockingly! – pregnant. And just like that, infertility became an enclosed section of time in our past.

It’s true; many times in life God doesn’t take away our pain. But sometimes he does. Sometimes he does it dramatically, miraculously. He is God Almighty and nothing is too hard for him. He can change a person’s destiny in the wink of an eye. And sometimes he keeps changing it. If you’d told me during our infertility that within a year of our first child’s birth, I’d be pregnant again, I would have been speechless. To think that I could go from wondering if I’d ever be a mother to wondering how I would handle two little ones at the same time is still beyond me. The infertility years were long. But then all of a sudden, God changed everything.

I don’t know what you’re facing today or what God has in mind for your future. He might not take away your particular pain until heaven. But maybe he’s about to do something huge in your life, in a way you’ve never imagined. Sometimes I think it’s good for us to let our minds wander, to remember with a sense of anticipation just how much he is capable of accomplishing.

The other day I gave Sky a bath in the morning, then brushed her wet hair back, and got her dressed. I’d just started to get myself ready when I heard her laughing. I turned around and there she was, bouncing on her little plastic ball like she was in a Pilates class or something. I laughed with her and took a picture. But when I looked at it later, all I could see were the bruises on her forehead. She’s done a lot of falling lately. Sometimes her body gets going a little too fast for her legs, and if she’s holding something at the time, she doesn’t always catch herself. A couple days ago she hit the tile with her head so hard that Adam and I spent the rest of the day watching her for signs of a concussion.

Like every mom, I hate it when my baby gets hurt. And a bruised forehead is just the beginning. I wonder what she’ll face as she grows. Will kids be mean to her? Will friends reject her at some point? Will a boy she loves break her heart? What if she deals with infertility one day like I did? I suppose I should keep in mind all that the Bible has to say about adversity, that it builds character and it’s God’s way to get our attention and draw us close to him. I know those things are true of the hardship in my own life. But the mother side of me looks at my little girl and just wants to say no, no, no. Please God, let her somehow learn life’s lessons without the pain.