Laughing with Sarah

The change of seasons from summer into fall and winter has always been a time that stirs up nostalgia in me. This is the season of preparing for holiday celebrations, and I feel nostalgic for a whole series of small, one-off memories of otherwise long-forgotten or even insignificant moments from childhood Thanksgiving and Christmas preparations. This is the season of college Christmasfest rehearsals, and I feel nostalgic for choir memories, for college moments, and for the days when there was the perfect mix of of alone time time, quiet space, and coming-of-age introspection. In recent years, this is the season of saying the long goodbye to my father, which evokes a different sense of nostalgia, laden with a lot of "what ifs" and "if we had only knowns." And so this is also a season where I feel nostalgic for all memories of my dad and all the things that I associate with him - food (especially holiday meals and treats), music (especially holiday music), and f...

This is the original of the picture that I posted to Instagram and Facebook yesterday, on Mother's Day. I posted it with the following caption: Never imagined I'd ever take a picture like this. My miracles number one and number two. #picaday #motheroftwo #babyeleanorann #bigbrothersam #mothersday #proudmama #ivf #infertilityjourney For anyone who has ever struggled with infertility, loss, or childlessness (by choice or not), or anyone who grieves the loss of a mother or a relationship with her mother, Mother's Day is a complicated holiday. For me as a daughter, I am one of the lucky ones. I have a fantastic mom, and we have a fantastic relationship. I have a wonderful mother-in-law, and we, too, have a wonderful relationship. But for me as a mother, my emotions on Mother's Day are still plenty complicated. My life these days is busy. Pleasantly so. My days are full of church and family, work projects and home projects, cooking, not enough cleaning, not nearly e...

Finally got brave enough to tell my story on my all-purpose blog. Thought it was worth posting here as well! For the last five years of my life, something has been happening in the background. You've heard a lot in this space about my journey through seminary and internship, and my first years of being a pastor. You've heard about my family and some of my vacations, my love for baseball and knitting, my thoughts on dialogue and division, and my crazy idealism for the world we live in. Recently, because I've been busy, you've mostly gotten lots and lots of sermon transcripts. But behind all of this, for the last five years, Matt and I have been on a long journey to try to start a family. It has been quite a journey. A journey that has included frustration and tears, losses and medical interventions, countless needle-stabs and blood draws, surgeries (major and minor), and through it all, enough peace in our hearts to keep stepping forward, one day at a time, witho...

I just got off the phone with my RE's office, taking care of three items of business that are all big in their own ways. I called in to get things started for another frozen transfer cycle. No sense in waiting. So just like that, we are onto another cycle of meds and blood draws and ultrasounds leading up to a fourth embryo transfer. I want to feel hopeful, but right now, I can only assume that this cycle will end up like all three of the others. I mean, a lot of me is pressing forward because hey, we have at least six good embryos frozen and it'd be a shame not to go ahead and keep trying. I know that I'll bounce back, but right now, I'll admit that I have a pretty lousy attitude going into this cycle, even if I passionately want to press ahead and do it. So related to this, I also scheduled a consult with my RE to ask the same question I asked last time, "Is there anything that we should be looking for, or anything we should do differently, or any possib...

On the ride to work this morning, Matt asked me what I wanted for my birthday, which is less than a week away. I told him that I didn't really want anything, or nothing big or special, at least. I told him that my Amazon wish list was up to date, albeit with small and uninteresting things, but things that I'd really love to get. In my head, I asked myself the question again: "What do I want for my birthday?" And my head gave me a clear answer: "A baby. A house. Money to go back to Africa." Ok, so suffice it to say that I have bigger things on my brain than my birthday present. Turning thirty was no big deal last year. It felt like an obnoxious but necessary milestone, and I made peace with the fact that thirty isn't really any different than twenty-nine, and everybody still looks at me and thinks I'm twenty-one or twenty-two anyway. Way back when we first started trying to conceive, it didn't occur to me that we wouldn't have a ba...

You are right if you figured that my radio silence over the weekend meant bad news. I made it the full week from transfer to blood draw with no bleeding (unlike last time), but with no hint of any pregnancy symptoms (like last time). After the blood draw, we spent the rest of Friday morning at the Arboretum, which was lovely. A good sunny day for taking walks, eating lunch outside, lingering in conversation, and storming the freezer case for ice cream cones. I got the bad-news phone call just before we were about to leave for the airport, where I was dropping Matt off for a weekend in California for a friend's wedding. I was stuck at home for the weekend because I had to perform a wedding. After I dropped Matt at the airport, I wandered around downtown Naperville before the evening's wedding rehearsal, and then both the rehearsal and the rehearsal dinner were far more enjoyable than I had been expecting. I winked to myself as I drank both a glass of wine and a cup of...

I've been thinking the last few days.  I've been thinking, though not coherent or connected thoughts. I've been thinking about the monotony of this cycle, and its slow, nonanxious pace.  I had my second bloodwork and ultrasound this morning.  I'm still plugging along.  But I have no idea yet what the schedule looks for our transfer date.  I'm hoping that it could be Thursday of next week, but I'm wondering if I'll get pushed off to Thursday of the following week. I've been thinking about whether I expect this cycle to work or not.  If our two best blasts didn't take during the fresh cycle, then why should our third and fourth best blasts work this time? I've been thinking that despite the hype, IVF is really just an expensive way to deal with the same uncertainty and odds that you would deal with if you were able to just try normally.  So I suppose that I expect repeated failure. I've been thinking that we will of course go ahead with...

Forty-six percent. That was the possibility that we would get pregnant transferring two embryos (blastocysts, if you want to be accurate). In those first few days after our transfer, with those two little dudes trying to figure out how and whether to stick around, I thought about how good a near-fifty percent chance was. My glass was definitely half-full . In those first 24 hours, I felt sure and terrified that we'd end up with twins, because if they put two of them in there, of course two of them would stick around, right? As the week went on, I felt the shift in my soul, from the glass being half-full to the glass just being, well, half-something. Not half-full. Not half-empty. Just half. I realized that there was just as big of a chance of us not getting pregnant as there was of us getting pregnant. But I yet continued to remind myself that in nature, if you're doing this whole "let's get pregnant" thing the old-fashioned way, you have around a th...

This is me, standing in the fog and drizzle on the patio outside the Shedd Aquarium, texting family and friends that our first IVF cycle ended up negative. In so many ways, this picture sums up the mood. --- Thanks to Matt for planning a Chicago getaway today, where we could celebrate if there was something to celebrate, and enjoy ourselves (and distract ourselves) if the news came back negative. We got the phone message about the bad news while we were on our way to see the penguins. We took a quick break to text close friends and family who had been praying for us and to call the doctor's office to schedule a follow-up consultation. But then, we went right back to enjoying all the fishies. We saw sharks and sting-rays and turtles and all sorts of crazy and colorful fish, and there were eels and frogs and manatees and starfish and seahorses and penguins and otters. Oh my. Otters are cute. By the time we left the aquarium, this is how I was feeling. Much better, do...

Since the start of 2012, just a few short weeks ago, no less than eight different friends of mine have announced pregnancies. About half of these friends are having first babies, and about half of these friends already have children. Each announcement makes me feel defeated. I mean, first, I feel jealous. And mostly, it's jealousy over the ability of others to procreate like normal. I am in a bitter place right now, I've realized, where I resent the fact that I don't have the option of "normal." Others decide to try for a baby, and get to do it the fun way...the simple way. We decide to try for a baby, and we have to save up ten thousand dollars, make doctor's appointments, go through weeks of injections, anesthesia...and all to get us to the uncertainty of a two-week wait, where we face the reality that none of these interventions guarantee us a baby. And then after I get over that first flicker of jealousy, I feel left behind, as if having children...

I should have posted this sooner, but here is an article I found that talks about about the church and the ways that clergy and churches can be more aware of and more sensitive to infertility and pregnancy loss affecting members in their midst. In the article, entitled " Infertility: Comfort, Comfort My People ," Deborah Patterson says, Children, indeed, are a wondrous gift from God, but sometimes the path to parenthood is a very challenging one. There are many avenues to blessed parenthood for those who would truly know the joy of raising a child, and the Church can play an important role in supporting that journey. Things to keep in mind for my own ministry, surely, and things to encourage other pastors and churches to think about as well.

A friend shared this link on Facebook today and I thought it was worth sharing. It's an article called " The Barren Woman Bible ," written by one of my former seminary professors. She says, amid other things, In real life, barrenness is much more complicated. It's infertility and miscarriages. It's bleeding and not-bleeding—but on the opposite schedule than you want. It's counting days, doctor visits, taking blood, running tests, more doctor's visits and a slew of bills and—if you're lucky enough—insurance forms. And did I mention what it does to sex?! What was once fun and adventurous can become calculated, programmed or halted. And then there's the ending. In real life, God's "fix" is not always a boy-prophet. Sometimes it's adoption. Sometimes it's a birthed child. Sometimes it's nieces and nephews. Sometimes it's finding peace with childlessness. At least that's how it is for me and the other women who I...

There is, admittedly, a lot to process about the past few days' experience. Especially given that there is a lot left to process about these last few months and years. At some point, I'll probably recount my time in the hospital, and try to process my feelings about that experience. But for this morning, I think I just want to admit that as brave as I am trying to be about going forward with the new and limited options for us to start a family...I'm not feeling so brave this morning. I don't feel the same resentment as I've felt at other points; I am not struggling with the feelings of inadequacy from unexplained fertility. Now I just know my limitations. But they are BIG limitations. I am no longer in a group of people even able to pretend that we can have kids of our own, unassisted. Or even with small assistance. On the Today Show this morning, they were telling the story of a woman who, after having 11 (yes, 11!) kids, finally decided to go back to ...

Pardon me for being a nervous, twitch, crazy-lady. I realize that in being such, I've talked a lot about my pregnancy, and a lot about my previous loss, but not much about the other pieces of this journey. A week ago, before that pink plus sign, I certainly would have identified myself by my inability to conceive. It was the first thing I thought about in the morning and the last thing I thought about before I went to bed. My infertility is definitely a bigger part of me than my loss, and at this point, a bigger part of me than this current pregnancy. So I should talk a little about it, shouldn't I? We suffered in silence for a long time. Remember how we started ttc in March 2008 (however unofficially)? It was March of 2011 before I got off my butt to do anything about it. It, too, was sparked by a phone call. My best friend from high school called me out of the blue. And, of course, out of the blue phone calls mean one of a very very short list of things. Pregna...

In case you were wondering about the title of the blog, it is a reference to Genesis 18, where old, infertile Sarah is promised by a mysterious stranger that she would yet have a child...and she does what we'd all expect her to do: she laughs. A good year or two into this struggle to get pregnant, I thought about how often infertility shows up in the Bible. How many women are barren...or struck barren...and I at one point had huge plans to dig into all of these stories and perhaps write something - an article, a series of blog posts, a book? - about them all. Maybe this is a good space to dig into a few of them, maybe not. But for today, here's the story of the blog's namesake. I feel in good company with Sarah. --- God appeared to Abraham at the Oaks of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance of his tent. It was the hottest part of the day. He looked up and saw three men standing. He ran from his tent to greet them and bowed before them. He said, "Master,...

It's really kind of funny to me that I didn't start this blog months or even years ago. In March of 2008, while I was doing my year-long ELCA internship in Rockford, I received a phone call from my older sister, who was living in Scotland at the time. My first thought when I heard her voice on the other end of the line was "uh-oh, what happened?" Because I certainly didn't expect to receive a run of the mill phone call from the other side of the world. But it turns out that she was calling with WONDERFUL news: she was going to have a baby. Her fourth, to be exact. I was 26 years old at that point. Matt and I had been married for three years, and I had not yet felt any sort of urgency or interest in starting a family. In fact, I had spoken to a few close friends, concerned about that fact that while I knew, deep inside my head and heart, that I wanted children, I was concerned that I hadn't yet felt that drive, that sense of "I need to do this.....