Christmastime can expose couples facing fertility challenges to an acute feeling of loss in a season supposedly brimming with gain.
The challenge of fertility is the subtext to all of our family’s adventures in foster care and adoption.
Lindsey, my wife, and I adopted three kids from the foster system because we were and still are (at the time of this piece’s publication) unable to have biological kids. Most foster parents get into the gig knowing that the placements will be temporary. We have waded these waters to bring back little baskets to the shore of our household. Moses could not return home, as it were.
I’ve mostly avoided writing about fertility / infertility. And that includes some major events over the last two years. Yes, I’ve mentioned it here and there but have never dedicated any serious word count to it. I have lots of reasons for not writing about it. One is that it’s just so personal, so intimate. Another is that I’m the guy. This is not my realm. I feel like I’m out-kicking my coverage (let the reader understand.) This is holy ground. The soil is charged. And even now, as I’m writing this, I fear to walk it in the form of words on a page.
I’m not going to get into a lot of details here. I want this to be more Public Service Announcement than open-hearted exposition. But the truth is we’ve been on this journey for nearly 13 years. Linds and I have done and tried and pursued almost everything you can conceivably (ha) try and pursue in this arena. We’ve conceived twice—once in 2015 and again in 2022—and both pregnancies ended in early miscarriage. In this current season, we are assessing things and seeking clarity about next steps.
And this time of year inevitably stirs up all sorts of emotions and longings and questions. Like a river swollen with melting snowpack in spring, the sediments get all mixed up.
How could it not? Waiting and expectancy are pre-built into the Advent and Christmas seasons. There’s a birth at the heart of everything. A womb opened and a promise delivered. And everywhere you look, all of the cultural artifacts that make this season what it is, are bursting with the theme of fertility.
Imagine you’ve been struggling with fertility for however long and you come across this line of dialogue in It’s a Wonderful Life:
George: Mary Hatch, why in the world did you ever marry a guy like me?
Mary: To keep from being an old maid.
George: You could have married Sam Wainwright, or anybody else in town.
Mary: I didn’t want anybody else in town. I want my baby to look like you.
Do you know how many times Lindsey has told me how deeply she wants a baby that looks like me? That looks like us?
Or take this stanza from Luci Shaw’s poem “Kenosis“:
He is in a dream of nipple found,
of blue-white milk, of curving skin
and, pulsing in his ear, the inner throb
of a warm heart’s repeated sound.
Who doesn’t want that? Who doesn’t want to experience that kind of closeness, that level of with-ness? Of course, the irony is that when you’ve walked this kind of journey for any length of time, desires can either burn all the hotter because of the hope deferred or grow cold from all the walking. Sometimes, you don’t know what you want. Sometimes, all you want is your life back.
Christmastime can expose couples facing fertility challenges to an acute feeling of loss in a season that is supposedly brimming with gain. Over the years, we’ve shown up to family gatherings and Christmas parties at friends’ houses and have held newborns or beheld expecting mothers. It’s perpetual looking in, with no room for us. At first it was hard to be as happy for our loved ones as we wanted to be. By God’s grace, over the years, we have learned to rejoice with those who rejoice over the new life growing inside them or the infant experiencing his or her first Christmas.
A couple years ago, on Christmas Day, actually, Lindsey relayed to me that, for the first time, she could relate to Mary. Fertility-related circumstances that weren’t chosen, lack of control, and two big questions: Can I accept what the Lord is doing and giving to me? Can I see it as a gift even if it’s not what I would choose?
We read Mary’s response in Luke 1, the Magnificat. Lindsey liked how Mary situated herself in Abraham’s story—God’s people’s story. God’s story. The grandness of it can be dizzying, and I’m sure Mary felt dizzy with fear and confusion and a hundred other things. Infertility stings, but I think that pain, that intimacy—well, it doesn’t seem like a stretch to think that Mary, of all people, could sympathize with us.
Building our family via adoption over the last seven years has helped alleviate the pain and loss. We can clearly see how God took something like barrenness (or, as Mary Oliver might put it, “a box full of darkness”) and used it as a means to “settle the solitary in a home” (Psalm 68:6). It’s a story we never dreamed would be ours. And the gratitude and joy we’ve experienced because of our kids and because of this journey has been beyond measure. I do think we have experienced a tiny foretaste of what the prophet Isaiah records here:
“Sing, O barren one, who did not bear;
break forth into singing and cry aloud,
you who have not been in labor!
For the children of the desolate one will be more
than the children of her who is married,” says the Lord.
And yet. Adopting three beautiful kids cannot fully replace or eliminate the frustration and sorrow of 12-plus years of trying to have biological kids. They are in parallel, the joy of one walks alongside the grief of the other.
What I’m saying is that it’s complicated and often exhausting. The beauty of the Christmas season is sometimes bitter. And if you know someone who is facing an uphill walk in their fertility journey, I’d counsel you to give them a hug, to pray for them, to make them a strong, joy-filled drink. Or all of the above. The point is, you know them. Ask them what they need. Ask them how you can be present with them as they try to manage these tensions. Because in a season overflowing with holly jolly-ness, their unseen pain will often go overlooked.
Infertility is a kind of death—a death of something that is supposed to be. And if Jesus, born the child but yet the King, swallowed up death and the sting of death in his resurrection, then that means that even infertility and miscarriage have lost their sting. We will hold our lost babies one day, and all will be made right in God’s holy city.
We don’t know how our fertility story ends. Nothing is impossible with God. Our hope is in him, as we try to keep believing that his answer is not, “No” but, rather, “Not yet.” Or maybe, “I have something better.”
So we are not without hope. Because we do know how the bigger story ends. We know that whether or not dreams and desires are fulfilled in this life, disappointment does not win in the end. The baby born to the Virgin is our Older Brother through adoption, leading the way to new realities wherein he wipes away tears and touches “the bare branches” (Malcolm Guite, “O Adonai“) of a life lived in a sin-stained world, bringing forth new life.
