Cheeseburger and a Baby Pls

I've been all over the place in the past few weeks. Sometimes I feel fine! Thank you! Sometimes I feel certifiable. Let me tell you about one of the latter times.

So there's this normal-seeming guy at work. He's one of those people who got married recently and had a baby right away. Pretty much every time I've run into him in the last year he has asked the same question:

"So.... are you guys thinking about having kids soon?"

I've demurred several times. Finally after my second miscarriage I said something like:

"I just had a miscarriage." 

So he's like, "Oh. I have a book for you to read."

Weeks and months went by and I never heard any more about the book. I figured I had already read it, since there are approximately 2.7 books about miscarriage in the world. 

Suddenly, last week, he drops by my office to give me a book called Supernatural Childbirth. 

Omg, you guys. 

Here are some of the claims in the book:

• all you need to do is pray and you are GUARANTEED children by God
• if you're having problems conceiving you are not praying enough
• God doesn't want you to have miscarriages, and if you're having them it's Satan, and you haven't prayed enough
• you can pray for AND God will grant you a pain-free delivery
• all birth defects are caused by Satan, and you just didn't pray enough
• women are cursed by Satan from back in the Garden of Eden
• you can select the gender, eye color, and hair color of your future child with prayer

Seriously, the author claims she prayed for a 7-pound baby girl with red/blonde hair and blue eyes and guess what? She got what she wanted. Just like the drive-thru at In N Out burger.

The author claims that she was once declared infertile and then she prayed her way out of it. Now she has 4 healthy children! (Of course she gave no actual details of her supposed infertility.)

The book is full of testimonials about people who read her book and listened to her tape. They are like, "I had two miscarriages and then I started listening to your tape EVERY DAY. Now I have a beautiful baby boy!"

I wanted to shred the book to bits (might still do) and scream at this Jackie Mize for espousing complete bull shit (might still do). 

But on the whole, it just makes me sad. I'm deeply saddened by this book and for the women who are desperately trying to pray their way out of tragic fertility problems that are completely out of their control. 

It makes me sad that stereotypes about woman and infertility persist because of books like this one.

It makes me sad that my coworker would own and PASS ON a book like this.

It's sad and pathetic that this woman looks at her 4 healthy children and says, "I did this. Me and my amazing faith." 

How narrow-minded. How sacrilegious. How pathetic. 

Casey Anthony: Why Couldn't She Be Infertile?

Anyone following the Casey Anthony trial? Her web of lies is just despicable, and the evidence clearly shows that she did it. In addition to whatever sentence is handed down, I think she should be put in a room with a group of infertiles, who will then have the opportunity to say whatever they want to her for a few hours. I would have a string of profanities for sure....

Not Preggo Over Here

Everyone around me is pregnant. Like, everyone. Even my infertile friends. Anyone out there still not pregnant?! I'm telling myself every female creature on the earth is pregnant, so that I don't feel kicked in the teeth upon every announcement. 

love,

ed

5 Ways to Get out of a Funk

My birthday and Mother's Day really put me in a funk. I'm bummed out and crying at Subaru commercials. You know the one where the mom is taking her gaggle of boys to their little hockey game? Cue tears. Anyway, this is how I'm getting out of my funk.

5. Buy stuff. One of the oldest tricks in the book. I bought a new dress from Banana Republic for an event we have on Saturday.
4. Put clothes on. Brush hair. Put makeup on. Just do it. Everything is better with good hair.
3. Join an infertility group. Mine is through RESOLVE. It's lovely.
2. Invest in friendships that help. Ditch friendships that don't.
1. Bootcamp. I've written before about the benefits of spinning. I'm changing it up by doing bootcamp twice a week. It is scientifically impossible to be grumpy in the hours after this insane workout.

Let me know if you have any more tips.

Part 3

Take a break from world news, sit back, and relax because here is the third and final installment of my Q & A with Pastor Elise Erikson Barrett, author of What Was Lost. We definitely saved the best for last.

You interviewed many women who experienced miscarriages for the book. What surprised you the most in your research?

This is especially interesting given your blog's topic, but there were so many women who just loved hearing some of the comments that made me want to go ballistic. The "God needed little angels in heaven" one was supremely comforting to some beautiful, lovely, bright, sincere women I interviewed. I wanted to say, "Are you KIDDING me?" but instead, I had to discipline myself to say, "Okay, this comment made me crazy, but this other woman is a terrific human being and she found comfort in this (appalling) comment. Why? What was comforting about it? What sort of underlying truth or hope did she sense in this?"

In your role as a pastor how to you see miscarriage affecting your congregation or the people who come to you for pastoral care?

You know, it tends to marginalize this whole group of people. Congregations tend to make a big deal out of welcoming children - and according to Jesus, this is right on. But there is often no acknowledgment of or space for people who are childless, particularly those who desire children greatly and have experienced pregnancy losses.

So you have this whole public narrative that sounds like, "Children's Sabbath is this week! Come to children's choir! Here's a baptism! Easter Egg hunt at the Smith's house! Family Festival on Wednesday night!" And these announcements and events just batter the ears and hearts of people who have lost babies. I've heard of people skipping Sundays when they know there's going to be a baptism or infant dedication; it's just too painful. And it's hard for people to find a place to process their grief, especially if they find themselves in a Sunday school class or Bible study group with a lot of young parents who, reasonably enough, mostly talk about their children.

I started trying to name as many of these kinds of silent, secret grief burdens as I could in pastoral prayers and sermons -- pregnancy loss, but also infertility, mental illness, dementia, Alzheimer's -- the burdens of loss people lug around in silence because they're ashamed and don't know how to bring them to their community of faith or their God. Just allowing those kinds of losses to slip into the public narrative seemed to break the seal for some people and give them a reason to contact a pastor for pastoral counseling, or just to acknowledge that they were struggling and needed prayer.

Many of my readers have emailed me to say that a certain comment made by a friend or family member has driven a permanent wedge between them. How can we try to heal these relationships without minimizing our grief?

It's so hard. I think that occasionally, the relationship was already either not all that deep or troubled to start with, and the response to the pregnancy loss seemed to nail the coffin shut, or to shake into dust something that was already lifeless. I think in other cases the relationship is important and worth preserving... which in some ways is more difficult than being estranged from your second cousin whom you only saw twice a year anyway.

You typically have at least two options, it seems to me. One is to say nothing, to let time soften your anger against that person, and eventually to come to a place where you can allow the relationship to function more or less normally, with that place of hurt covered over but still very much a part of your feelings toward the person. This can actually be the best way to go IF you have other people with whom you are processing the grief well and IF there is no possible way that you can help the person understand that what they said was hurtful. (It might apply, for example, if you have a great-grandmother who lost everyone she loved in the second World War and had two miscarriages herself, and functioned for the rest of her life by "keeping a stiff upper lip." Her worldview is almost certainly not going to change, and it may be more pain for you than it's worth to try, but by saying nothing more to her, you may find that the edges of whatever she said are smoothed over with time and grace and love.)

The second option is to approach that person and explain how they've hurt you, why what they said hurt, and to tell them a way to restore the relationship. This is certainly both more scriptural and more likely to bring deep healing to the relationship. It's also more awkward, more difficult, and more liable to explode on you. But if it's a relationship that matters to you, it's worth the risk. I think that you have to be very clear with yourself both about why the comment hurt and what you hope will come of any confrontation, so you can be clear about those things with the other person.

So, instead of, "I think you owe me an apology for what you said," you might try saying something like, "Mom, I love you, and that's why I feel like I need to talk to you. When you said, 'Think of all the money you'll save!' after John and I lost our baby, it felt to me like you didn't understand how much we were hurting. I think you wanted to help us find something positive about the situation, but it really just felt hurtful and dismissive. What I need instead is for you to just understand how sad we are, and to take this loss seriously, because we do. Maybe you would be willing to come to the memorial service our pastor is having for us at our home next week. And I have a book/blog/article about miscarriage that I was hoping you might be willing to read and then we can talk again. Would you be willing to do that?"

Sometimes it can be better to do this in a letter, particularly if the person is someone who may get defensive and lash out to protect her/himself in a face-to-face situation. You do, of course, have to be prepared to be hurt again. But nothing worthwhile -- not babies, not marriages, not relationships -- comes without an attendant vulnerability and risk.

God bless you, both you who are writing and you who are reading this blog, and may God hold and uphold you in this risky, painful, beautiful life we share.

Part 2

Ed: I understand that you had three more miscarriages and now have three living children. What an emotional whirlwind. What did your grief look like for the subsequent losses?

Pastor Elise: Each loss was a little different -- the first one, in my own experience at least, was by far the most intense. We had not intended to become pregnant at that time (I still had almost two years of my master's program left, and I was commuting over three hours one way) and so there was a long space after the loss when I was longing for a baby but we couldn't "try again" for at least a couple of years.

So that time ended up providing space for the grief, both in good and bad ways (i.e., I had the opportunity to process the loss thoroughly and deeply; I also brooded on it and had nothing sufficiently interesting to distract me for quite some time). After that first loss, then, we started being actively open to other pregnancies maybe three years later. And it took longer to become pregnant than I'd expected, and when I did, like many women who become pregnant after experiencing a miscarriage, I reserved most of my potential emotional attachment out of fear. The subsequent early losses (we had one more before our first daughter, then two between our first and second daughter) were extremely early, and I was tired of "processing," I think. It was more of a dull, disappointed grief, and I wanted to close the door on those losses more quickly.

I felt great relief reading the part of your book where you said you didn’t feel close to God for months after your loss. I’m in that space right now. I prayed daily for my second baby and still lost her. When did you begin to trust God again?

I remember when I thought that it would probably be possible to trust God again someday. I remember that I was trying to pray using hymns during that first week after the loss, and I was playing and praying through a hymn text written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer called "By Gracious Powers." The last two stanzas go this way:

And when this cup you give is filled to brimming
with bitter sorrow, hard to understand,
we take it thankfully and without trembling,
out of so good and so beloved a hand.

Yet when again in this same world you give us
the joy we had, the brightness of your sun,
we shall remember all the days we lived through
and our whole life shall then be yours alone.

I mean, the guy wrote this from a Nazi concentration camp. So he understood suffering in a profound and legitimate way, and still wrote these words. And I sang this and thought to myself, "Is God's hand good and beloved still? Well... Bonhoeffer believed it was. And he expected new joy, the brightness of God's presence. And he believed that the memory of the real, deep suffering of the concentration camps would someday lead him to offer everything to God, good and beloved. And so...  maybe I will emerge from this suffering as well, and maybe I will call God good and beloved again, and maybe I will remember this and offer myself again to the God I have loved so long."  I did not feel trust or love or anything at that point, you understand -- I simply saw and believed, for a moment, that it could be restored.

The trust grew back over time... long, dry time. In the book, I compare the way I felt about God after the miscarriage to the way I'd imagine feeling about my husband if he'd had an affair. I don't make the two equivalent -- whatever happened in the miscarriage, it was certainly not God cheating on me -- but my feelings toward God had that same kind of unbelieving sense of betrayal. And I think that much like the aftermath of marital betrayals, for couples who try to rebuild what was broken, it's hard to point to one moment that restored things.

Instead, restoration is accomplished through a cumulative weight in a particular direction. It's months of "yes, he went to counseling with me again," and "yes, she bit her tongue instead of lashing out again," and "yes, he's been home after work every day this week." And then you wake up one day and realize that things will never be the "same" as they were before the event, but you've found something new, new trust, new assurance - and sometimes, the old thing that was broken has made way for a sturdier thing to grow. Not always. But that's how it's been for me with God. That's my primary hope and prayer for women who read the book - that they're encouraged to just keep plugging along with God. It's so easy to shut down; you're just so hurt. But I believe that God wants us to turn toward God, with our anger, our sorrow, our sense of betrayal -- with all of it.  God has taken the absolute brokenness of this world into God's own body on the cross -- God has chosen to suffer our death. It matters to God. You matter to God.

Part 1

Dearest Readers,
It's time to curl up with your laptop, a cup of tea, and a box of tissues because here is the first installment of my Q & A with Pastor Elise Erikson Barrett, author of the fabulous book What Was Lost: A Christian Journey Through Miscarriage.

Ed: First of all, thank you for writing such a real and sensitive book. What compelled you to write it?

Pastor Elise: I experienced my first miscarriage in 2004 and was blown away both by how devastating the loss was and by how few resources were available, particularly resources written from a faith perspective. After I began serving a church, I realized that there were lots of women looking for the same kinds of support I had longed for. I wanted a complete resource to hand to a church member -- something that would answer the physical/psychological questions most people ask, but would also deal with questions like, "Where was God?" "Did that little life matter to anyone but me?" "How do I pray when I'm so deeply angry?" I also wanted to share stories from others who had experienced miscarriages -- stories that would be true and raw enough to convey the pain of pregnancy loss -- so that if nothing else, the reader might find in the book validation of her own story.

You write about your miscarriage as a young student in seminary and the devastating grief that followed. What was the best thing someone said to you in the days or weeks following?

The things that were comforting in a general sort of way were the sincere, "I'm so sorry" kinds of comments. I remember one particular instance, though. I was telling a friend the short version of what had happened right before a class, and I remember being horribly embarrassed that I said something about how wild with grief I was that this little body of the child I'd loved was in a sewer system somewhere.

She just looked at me, and her eyes suddenly filled with tears, and she just whispered, "Oh, God." And it was a prayer and lament all at once, and I remember feeling suddenly sure that God was walking with us on that path, even though my feelings and emotions were too bruised to "feel" or "sense" God in those days. I would bet that she has no idea what that meant to me -- possibly even no recollection of that event -- but it was her willingness to go to that place of raw, bitter pain with me and lament alongside me that was so profoundly healing, that created a moment that was transparent to God's suffering love and grace.

You write about telling people, “I was only 7 weeks along,” and how that word “only” set up the other person up to say something like, “Oh, well that’s good you weren’t farther along.” This was revolutionary for me. I’ve spent much time being shocked and appalled at people’s comments, but I never thought that I could have some measure of control over the situation. Are there other things we can do to help dissuade negative comments?

Unfortunately for everyone, there's no 100% preventative to keep people from saying hurtful or insensitive or downright appalling things. People are just idiots sometimes -- all of us are to one extent or another. That said, it is possible sometimes to set up your conversation partner for a better or worse response -- especially with those people who truly are well-meaning and just don't know exactly what to say, or who are ignorant about the real pain and grief caused by miscarriage. Be clear with yourself ahead of time about what you want from the person you're telling. Do you want them to talk to you? To listen? To do something concrete like take you out for coffee? Do you want them to get the info and leave you alone? Do you want them to check in with you, or do you hope they never mention it again?  When you know what would be healing or feel loving and supportive for you, lead in with that. So, an example might look like this:

NOT SO GOOD:

You: I wanted to let you know that we had a miscarriage. I...

Them: Oh, well, I guess it's good that you're young. Were you guys even trying to get pregnant?

BETTER:

You: Hey, I have something I wanted to let you know about... before I start, I just wanted to say that it's pretty hard for me to talk about this, because it hit me hard, and if you can just listen and not offer any advice or anything, I would be so grateful. You know we were pregnant; well, we lost the baby this week. It's so much harder than I thought it would be, and the things people are saying are making it even harder. I just want people to tell me they're sorry and to let me be sad instead of trying to fix it.

Them: (hopefully thinking, I'd better not try to fix it.) I'm so sorry.