Unbound

Chapter 1

“The Trying” and Hannah

It felt comfortable stepping into the gently flowing river of couples who were trying to conceive. Many of our friends already had babies and were on to their second or third, like a round of drinks. We felt like part of the gang, Cheers-style, where everybody knows your name—and your business. But I didn’t mind the questions at first. I wanted to talk about cycle length and ovulation days and the days that Jody needed to move heaven and earth to avoid being sent out of town for work so that this baby magic could happen. A few friends even started pawning off their kids’ outgrown shoes, baby hats, Melissa and Doug puzzles. It was like we had cruised right into pregnancy and babyhood without the conception part. Because that’s what happens. People take it for granted that you’ll get pregnant. I mean, if teenagers can look at each other and make a baby, and movies like Knocked Up and Nine Months exist, then surely a nice Christian married couple can follow in good stead.

But if there was a secret to this particular parlor trick, we weren’t in on it. No amount of smoke and mirrors was going to make that pregnancy test show two lines. This was the part I did not share with friends. I barely spoke it to myself.

You remember Hannah, mother of Samuel, right? She was married to a man named Elkanah, who never gets much screen time in this story. Elkanah was also married to Peninnah. She was a vending machine of fertility. She had lots and lots of babies. Hannah had none. Peninnah was the kid in the cafeteria who always had the best lunch, the fun stuff, like psychedelic Goldfish and two desserts. That’s also the kid who always lines it all up on the table so everyone can see but no one can touch. Peninnah tormented Hannah year after year, the bully in the lunchroom. Every time Hannah walked into the house, Penninah “kept provoking her in order to irritate her” (1 Samuel 1:6) and brought her to tears, prodding her into more of a weepy hormonal mess than she already was.

Poor Hannah, she, too, probably knew that stress was bad for conception. There’s nothing less conducive to a calm uterus than stressing about stress. Elkanah wasn’t much help. “Why are you weeping?” he asked her. “Why don’t you eat? Why are you downhearted? Don’t I mean more to you than ten sons?” (1 Samuel 1:8). He could not understand why she wouldn’t just be happy with him, sans kids. “Aren’t I good enough?”

Yes and no, I wanted to say every time Jody and I had a variation of the same conversation. How do you explain a part of you that can be filled only by a child? Hannah couldn’t explain it; but she took her wishes to the Lord and prayed, “If you would only look upon your servant’s misery and remember me, and not forget your servant but give her a son, then I will give him to the Lord for all the days of his life” (I Samuel 1:11). We all know how that went. Baby Samuel.

In that first year, I thought about Hannah often. I wept and prayed. I prayed and wept. I thought up deals in my head: Dear God, please just let me ovulate this month and I’ll rest and spend more time reading Scripture and do my daily gratitudes. Dear God, please let this cycle be a normal twenty-eight days and I’ll make a home-cooked meal every night and not skip community group at church. Dear God… I offered bargain after bargain. I prayed with my hands on the Bible as if it were a Ouija board. Please spell out B-A-B-Y. And with every month that passed without success, I slowly lowered the dimmer switch on my view of God’s goodness. Clearly, He didn’t care whether I got pregnant or not. Clearly, I wasn’t that important to Him. I wasn’t Hannah, or any of the teeming millions of pregnant women who suddenly seemed to live within a five-mile radius of my house. This menacing train of thought made a station stop in every part of my life. I issued demerits to my high school students one second after the bell rang to begin class. Grace period was for elementary school. I refused to allow Jody to have any issues other than conception. Trouble with work? I did not even pretend to listen, because it seemed so small in comparison. Even the poor dog was too needy. “What, you need to go out again?”

The only surprising thing about this time was that I was not perpetually depressed. I had my ups as well as downs. I am, if nothing else, a roller coaster of emotions. I will always spend too long trying to pick an emoticon. During the long wait, I still laughed when we watched The Office and I still took the dog for walks. I still lost myself in teaching The Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies, kids gone wild, a Freudian curriculum slip. But it all felt a bit hollow. Or I was hollow and none of it was doing the trick to fill me up. Jody did not know whom he would be coming home to at the end of each day. He waited, watching my face as he walked in the door before assembling his own. I do not envy him those few seconds.

The thing I didn’t realize at the time was that a baby wasn’t going to fill that hollowness either, or at least not in the eternally satisfying way that you picture getting the thing you currently want. If anything worked that way, commercialism would be out the window. We buy new clothes and new phones in the hope that the satisfaction will stick like a supersized value meal. Somehow, I had tacked the “baby” label on to “fulfillment” and could not see a Plan B. That was my one heart’s desire. Period.

Though I knew Hannah’s story well during that time, the thing about her situation that I did not care to notice until years later was the order of events. She didn’t ask God for a baby, have a baby, and then walk away happy. She asked God for a baby and immediately walked away happy: “Her face was no longer downcast” (1 Samuel 1:18). This was before the positive pregnancy test, my friends, before she got the “yes” to her request. She found a peace just in the naming of her desire and holding it up for God to inspect. She did not know the end point of her path, but she felt better in letting someone else walk it for a while, because now it was out of her hands.

Does that get you the way it gets me? Placing my hopes, desires, needs in God’s hands has never been my strong suit, or even a middling one. I always feel like there is a part of my life’s journey that is still under my operating instructions. Desperate to control my way to motherhood, I was playing life’s version of the Claw, the arcade game where you steer the dangling robot hand, cross your fingers, and aim for the biggest stuffed duck. If I could just maneuver my life a tad up and to the left, I’d be able to win the prize. Hannah’s lesson was not to guess God’s price for a baby and offer it, but to let it go and walk away from the levers. She knew there was someone whose plan was greater than hers, and who would answer her prayer in His time and in His way.

But for me, in that first year, as “It’s a girl/boy” Facebook posts increased exponentially as if someone were buying up Google Ads for babies, and I trudged along empty, I had not yet learned the lesson of unburdening. It was maddening to even consider. Instead, I took matters into my own hands. I went to see my general practitioner, who sent me to an OB-GYN, who put me on Clomid, the standard Phase 1 baby-inducing medicine. Here, take these pills; come back for a blood test. We’ll see if you’re ovulating and then get that baby on board. It usually works like a charm. Three months of this with no success and I became one of those “difficult cases.” They referred me to a RE (reproductive endocrinologist), saying I was outside the realm of their expertise. How terrifying. These people had gone to medical school and had helped thousands of women get and stay pregnant, yet I was beyond their abilities. But also, how exciting: a new option I hadn’t thought of. This RE person would fix it all! She would hold the litmus test to determine what I’d been missing all along. I couldn’t give the control to God, but giving it to an expert whom I could see and touch and hear explain all the ways she was going to fix it seemed easy. I became excited and hopeful again. This last year was really just a bump in the road, I told myself. I’m so glad I weathered that so well, I said, even as the water pooled around my psyche. The power of delusion is strong in me.

The doctor’s office tower was a nondescript concrete building downtown surrounded by other nondescript medical complexes. It was all a gray maze of one-way streets and no-parking signs and the elderly in wheelchairs waiting at intersections like abandoned shopping carts while police officers directed traffic. Jody and I drove together and talked of anything but what was coming. It was the one and only time I actually turned up the volume to Car Talk on NPR. It was autumn again. Another new beginning.

The office was on the top floor, and the elevator opened directly in front of the fertility clinic’s doors, their glass windows frosted and etched with the silhouette of a baby. It looked peaceful, asleep, waiting for the stork to drop it into my cage. Despite the fact that I had filled out reams of paperwork before the appointment, I had no clue how this was going to play out. After signing in, we received our matching wristbands. Jody’s stuck to his arm hair. It would happen each time we returned to the clinic and is the reason he still has a bald spot on his wrist.

And then, the awkward wait with all the other empty vessels. No magazine could have been engaging enough to make that wait go any faster. I would later come to learn the Rules of the Waiting Room: (1) No eye contact. Ever. (2) No small talk (that’s what support groups are for). (3) No talking loudly to your partner (we don’t want to know if you are in love or fighting or your plans for lunch). (4) And absolutely no children (this is an actual rule posted at the front desk). Please don’t parade your progeny in front of the needy.

That first initial meeting went smoothly. We discussed and dismissed Clomid (silly useless drug) in favor of stronger, more precise remedies. I would take a different oral medication to induce ovulation, and if that didn’t work, try injections, and if that didn’t work, try injections plus IUIs (intrauterine insemination), and if three to six cycles of those didn’t work, we would move on to the biggie: IVF (in vitro fertilization). So many ifs! But that was, of course, a last resort, our petite and precise RE amended. We also skirted over the costs of these methods. Doctors do not deal in numbers other than mls and ccs. We would not find out until later that insurance and barrenness weren’t friendly in our state. They did not play well together. But before all that, our RE said, standing and smoothing her skirt, “Let’s just do some blood tests to determine the root cause of the infertility.” Because this was now my initial diagnosis. I was “infertile.” Truth: It felt good to name it. Slap a label on me and mark for resale. I was ready to move on. My land was parched, and now the doctor could begin the process of irrigation.

We left that day with Band-Aids on our arms and just a small skip in our step. I love a plan, and this plan had so many parts, and most likely we wouldn’t even need most of those parts, but it was so nice to know that they were there just in case and isn’t the sky a lovely blue today? Jody was sweet and calm and tentative in his hopes (the rational winner in our partnership), but because he gets me, he let me revel in this burst of sanguinity. Our journey to parenthood would look a bit different than others, but hey, at least we’d get there.

Remember Hannah? Yeah, I forgot about her too. Her approach of waiting in peacefulness, stillness, and joy sat with me about as well as late-night Taco Bell. I kept burping up her passivity. She was clearly not a kindred spirit. Isn’t it so easy to parcel out the parts of the Bible you don’t need? What was vital one day was forgotten the next. Hannah got lost in a swirl of test results and cycle charts and high-speed interstate trips to the clinic during my planning periods. My days were marked by hormone surges and sperm counts and follicle measurements and Explanations of Benefits.

My dear friends, the benediction you receive at church is no joke. It is a weekly reminder to “stay rooted and established in love” (Ephesians 3:18) and to always acknowledge “Him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20). Because I had a well-pressed medical professional sitting in front of me predicting my future, I placed my hope at her feet. Sure, I thanked God for bringing this option into our lives, but it was a sidebar gratefulness. No one but me could tell the difference. In my heart, I was still saving up the big “thank you” for delivery of services rendered. I still refused to live in the present because the present hurt too much, and God was in the present and He seemed to be ignoring me. We sat in opposite corners. It would take years to be thankful for the hard stuff. But years are better than never. And though practice doesn’t make perfect, it does make for a gentler pace.

So, practice the stillness even if you don’t feel it. Breathe deeply and sit with God even if you can’t pray a word. The Claw will eat your money and offer promises it can’t give. I wish I’d know that then.

Guiding Questions

Scripture