If you have more than two friends on Facebook, at least one of them will post something about dreading the upcoming week and wishing it were Friday already.  Or maybe they regret that the weekend has come to a close and will not return for another five days.  Or maybe they wish that the particular circumstance they’re dealing with would just go away.  We’ve all wished for time to warp to satisfy our desires: we could just skip work and go straight to the weekend fun, and we could skip through the unpleasant bits.  I’ve seen a quotation that floats around the web at least once a month: Life should come with a fast forward button for bad times and a pause button for good times – or something to that effect.  I used to have the same desire.  My life would be so much easier/better if I could just skip the tough days.

Then I realized that I would be skipping through virtually every day for the last four years.  I would be skipping the trials that strengthened my faith and my knowledge of who I am.  I would be skipping the very things that make all of the good moments really great and enjoyable.  If I fast-forwarded every bad moment, I would not have the strength or courage that God taught me in the process of just surviving the last four years.  I would not be thriving now; I would still be floundering and bitter and angry.  Given that I am still all of those things to a much lesser degree now, I cannot imagine how miserable I would be if I hadn’t learned to accept the crap and cope with it.  I don’t always cope gracefully, and I know anyone who knows me well has witnessed a meltdown of some variety as a result.  I have had to learn that coping isn’t just moving forward physically; it means that I have to move forward emotionally and spiritually as well.

I can keep moving through the daily routine without actually progressing on any other level – that’s not really accepting the situation and dealing with it; that’s only survival and avoidance.  I have learned to ask myself, “What’s the worst that can happen?”  Generally speaking, the worst isn’t really all that bad, especially when compared to what we’ve been through with so many miscarriages.  I also have every confidence that no matter what the worst case scenario is, God is there with me, and he has given me the ability to deal with anything.  We humans tend to think of the consequences of the worst case scenario being some form of instant death.  Maybe there really is some dark abyss that will open up under my feet and swallow me whole if I admit that I have a problem.  You never can be too careful when dealing with theoretical chasms.

Our church recently had Vacation Bible School, and we performed a musical for family night.  I played the teacher, and there were four students who played students on a mission trip.  There was one scene where every one of us missed a major line, and I improvised a few lines to get us back on track.  When we got off stage after that scene, the kids were rattled and scared they would mess up the next scene.  I made them stop and huddle up and asked them, “What was the worst that could happen?”  Short of falling off the stage, we had just experienced the worst that could happen, so asked them, “Okay, did anybody die?”  No one could say they died as a result of missing their lines.  “Alright, nobody’s dead, and we can’t fix the last scene, so we will just have to keep moving and get the next scene right.”  And we did, mostly.

In my life, there are six little grave markers in my heart where the worst case scenario did happen: somebody died, and it wasn’t me.  I’m not dead, and I can’t change the last scene, so I just have to try my hardest in the next scene.  Sometimes the next scene isn’t a comedy or romance.  If you know plotting, sometimes the next scene is falling action with far more conflict than I’d like.  But I know I won’t be the character I’m supposed to be in the final act without experiencing every moment each scene in my life has to offer.  Every moment is an opportunity for me to “practice what I preach” and find the abiding joy and peace of Christ in the midst of pain and frustration and love and laughter.  I have yet to make the most of every moment, but I am not going to wish any more of my life away.  We have no guarantees that tomorrow will be better than today; we have no guarantees that our existential circumstances will improve; we have only the promise of “I Am” that God in is every moment if we will but search for him.  Fair warning to my FB friends: I will not be liking your status if it involves dreading another workday or waiting impatiently for the weekend.  I challenge you instead to find at least one thing every day that made you smile.  Some days, I feel like I’m only smiling at something ridiculous my dogs do, but it provides at least one moment in the day that I wasn’t thinking about how bad my day was.  That’s something to build on until most of your days really aren’t as bad as you think they are.  Some days are as bad as you think they are, and you will desperately need a moment of pure joy to cling to.  Those times of pure joy make me glad I can live in the moment instead of wishing for something else; the more I stop to notice them, the more I can observe the pain without falling into the abyss.

It’s all over the news today that yet another woman gave birth to a large number of multiples – this time sextuplets.  I am somewhat frustrated by this story for a number of reasons, and none of them have anything to do with my own miscarriages.  In fact, because of my history, I am far more likely to be sympathetic to someone trying desperately to have children.  I will say, though, that there has to be a line; I am not for having children at any cost.  I will never condemn anyone’s motivation for choosing to have a lot of children at one time, but I think this story provides a lot of weighty issues anyone dealing with fertility issues must contend with.

The article I read this morning was short on details, and I honestly wasn’t interested enough in this family to watch the press conference video attached to the article I read.  The details that were provided were that the babies were delivered at 27 weeks, and that the multiples were the result of fertility treatments.  Very generally speaking (and not very scientifically speaking), sextuplets only happen if a large number of embryos are implanted via IVF or through the use of a drug like clomid that increases egg production, which might cause multiple eggs to be released and fertilized at one time.  From my research, very few doctors are going to implant more than a few embryos at one time because of the risks involved in carrying multiples; obviously pre-term labor is an issue, but gestational diabetes and preeclampsia are significant risks to the mother’s life as well.

I would secretly (okay, maybe not so secretly) love to have twins.  My personal grocery store prophetess thinks that God should bless me with twins to make up for our losses, but that’s a whole other post about entitlement thinking…  As badly as I want to have children, and as badly as I would love to have twins, I would never consider allowing a doctor to implant more than two or three embryos if we did IVF.  Our fertility specialist has a one more/one less policy, meaning that after they review your case and suggest a procedure for IVF, you as the patient can choose to implant one more or one less embryo than they recommend, and they usually recommend one or two.  Our bodies are just not built to sustain these crazy pregnancies of quintuplets and sextuplets and septuplets.  So, without considering the possible medical problems you are setting up for the babies, you are first and foremost putting your life in extreme danger.  As an overweight person, I cannot throw too many stones here, but you can’t deliver healthy babies if your body fails before they can be safely delivered.

The risk involved for the babies is even greater since they are almost always delivered extremely early.  Although modern medical science can do amazing things, and there are gazillions of miracle babies who survive pre-term delivery, there are always extreme risks: lung development, brain damage and a host of growth and developmental problems.  I cannot imagine willingly choosing those risks for my children.  These newest sextuplets were delivered at 27 weeks, so while they are certainly medically viable, they are all on ventilators and “continue to be at very high risk for complications.”  In all likelihood, they will be in critical care for weeks, if not months.  I really do not understand why someone would willingly and somewhat intentionally put a child through such an experience.  There is no way that a doctor implants a large number of embryos or puts someone on clomid without explaining the risks involved, so this family did not go into any fertility treatment blind.

On the other hand, one of the comments on the article left by a member of the general public implied that the woman was irresponsible for not aborting some of the embryos once it became obvious that six of them had implanted.  I could never do that, either, so if I somehow ended up with six implanted embryos, I would not be able to choose to end any of their lives.  If this woman was taking clomid or something like it and accidentally ended up with six babies, I would not have aborted any of them, either.

The bottom line for me is that once you decide to be a parent, which is a conscious decision if you are undertaking fertility treatments, you must begin to think like a responsible parent about your prospective children.  How could you knowingly risk their lives BEFORE day one?  As a parent with no living children, I could not ever allow my desire to give birth to my own child overtake the health and well-being of any prospective children.  There are too many children extant who need good and loving homes for me to be so selfish.  This woman already has a 16 (or 18 – I wasn’t paying enough attention) month old, so she had a child of her own.  Understand very clearly that I am NOT saying that she should have been content with just one child if she and her husband wanted more than one child.  I know that nothing can replace the experience of carrying your child and delivering your child.  However, if my options were to endanger my own life and risk six babies having serious health problems their entire lives or to not have any children at all, I would choose no children.  Again, there are too many kids out there who need homes for me to justify that on any level, which means, yes, at some not-too-distant point we will make the decision to stop trying and adopt if we continue our current trajectory.

The last thing that bugs me is the press coverage, not that there is press coverage (Who doesn’t want to hear about sextuplets these days??  Uggh!), but that the parents so readily participate in it.  Another illustrious commenter suggested that this family can now star in their own TLC reality show.  I’m sure that the Gosselins and the Duggars only have their children’s best interests at heart by participating in reality shows that put their lives on display and make them part of the media circus; surely they must be putting the salaries towards college educations and activities that will enrich their children’s lives.  Something must be worth allowing the media to document and the whole world to watch virtually every moment of their children’s lives.  Imagine having ALL (or most) of your awkward growing years be public property.  I for one was horrified if the dog stared at me when I hit puberty; I could not have survived in the Gosselin/Duggar reality world.  All of my cute and awkward moments made for a great photo montage at our rehearsal dinner, but I was old enough to appreciate those moments and not be horrifically embarrassed about having photographic proof that I not infrequently wore underwear on my head (seriously – nothing covers hair rollers better than bloomers 🙂 ).  I love that I am able to share the lives of my friends who blog about their families, and some people might consider that an invasion of a child’s life; the scale of what is shared is wholly different and filtered by people who love them rather than film crew editors.  While I’m sure the reality parents have considered whether or not their children want to participate, I still sincerely question the motives of any parent who puts their child on display in such a public and prolonged manner.  Given the number of child actors who have serious issues stemming from growing up in the public eye, I wonder what we as a society are doing to this generation of reality kids.  I personally can’t watch most reality programming; much of it is staged to be melodramatic, and I get enough reality dealing with my own life.  The few reality shows I watch are So You Think You Can Dance and Project Runway; I have enough trouble keeping up with my own family and friends to start investing time in the lives of people I haven’t met and really don’t care about.  I don’t even watch American Idol; it’s just not my thing.  I can’t and won’t judge the content of the Gosselin’s and Duggar’s shows, but if you do watch them, what do you think?  Is what you’re seeing really in the best interests of those children?  If it’s not, is it really in your best interest to continue to watch it?  We all rubberneck to watch a train wreck, but should we?  What do you think about the frequency of such high multiple births and the attention that gets focused on them?  I am now stepping off my soapbox and handing it over to you. 😉

I know I’m a little late for Cinco de Mayo, but the Mexican holiday is a special day for me and my husband: it’s our anniversary, and this year was our tenth anniversary.  So I thought you all should know what a great man I married.  I have not always (and still do not often enough) recognize how wonderful he really is or how much I love him.  He is smart and funny and kind, and he works hard to be a good provider.

My husband is big and strong – physically, emotionally, spiritually.  In spite of the turmoil of the last four years, he has been a rock.  Admittedly, I sometimes resented that, but I wouldn’t have made it through it without him and his strength.  He has loved me through all the pain, the depression, and the sometimes utter crazy that my emotional life has been, and he has accepted me for what I am even when I know he would’ve prefered to walk away.  We have had some extraordinarily difficult moments, and I know we both considered the option of moving on, but I also know we both know now that it would have been a mistake.  I truly cannot imagine my life without him in it, and I can’t wait for the next decade of Cinco de Mayos so that we can be even better together.

My husband is not Mr. Romantic, but he is generous and gentle beyond measure; he is a solid refuge on which to build a life together.  God has given me an amazing gift: my lover, my partner, my friend, my leader, my home.  All the flowers and chocolates and mixed tapes in the world fade in comparison to that certain knowledge.  There is no romantic gesture that could top the feeling that when I see him, I am home and I am loved.

Marriage is hard work, and I have made his job harder more than once.  In spite of (or maybe because of) that I am sure our foundation is strong enough to stand if we keep doing the work.  I know that we have a lot more of life ahead of us, but in ten short years it feels like we have weathered the worst of it and come out stronger on the other side.  I don’t mean that there aren’t worse things than miscarriage and rough patches that we may have to face in the future, but we met ththose things at our weakest and grew together through them.  As long as we keep growing together, there is nothing that we can’t handle together in faith.

So, I hope you will not shoot me for posting about you, dear.  I am always your Bookdork (a name lovingly conferred upon me in college that stuck like glue), and I love you mostest!

Perhaps you are a kinder person than I, but I often have moments where I just can’t help thinking, “Any idiot can fill in the blank.”  Most recently this led to fit of pique after watching a clip from a reality game show in which a woman was trying to win her car back from repossession if she could answer three out of five questions correctly.  She was standing in her front yard with a toddler in a playpen while she tried unsuccessfully to recall which founding father discovered electricity by flying a kite in a storm, which might have been the most difficult question she was asked.  After deciding against Uncle Sam, she settled on Bill Clinton as her final answer.  The only thing more painful to watch was her listing of countries (Dallas) and nixing states (France, Canada…) in an effort to divine the word “Tapan” instead of Japan as the country in which kimonos are a traditional garment.  The clip is pretty funny, but it is devastatingly sad to me that someone could think Uncle Sam was not only a real person but also a founding father.  I get the same feeling watching “Jaywalking” clips on Leno.

In that moment, I was thinking, “Look, she has a child that she is responsible for raising and educating.  Any idiot can have a baby, so what’s wrong with me?”  And that “what’s wrong with me” has both physical and spiritual connotations, questioning both my body and the wisdom of God’s plan.  Of course, in asking the question of God, especially with an “any idiot” introduction, I realize that I am being judgmental and certainly not loving my neighbor as myself, thereby making a moot point of my complaint to God. 🙂

I know I would not be a perfect mother, but it is terribly frustrating to watch someone like this ignorant woman and not compare myself to her.  I know better, but I can’t stop the fleeting feeling that there must be something wrong with me; I can’t stop feeling that the gift of motherhood can be earned if I just get my crap together.  Seeing this clip makes me feel like I must be a horrible person if God can’t entrust me with a tiny person to mold, yet this woman who can’t remember first grade history or geography is worthy.  It is not a worthiness issue, and I know it – I just have a hard time accepting that in my weaker moments.  I know there is a reason for this season in my life, although I don’t understand it, and I want to wholeheartedly proclaim with Job that I will accept both good and bad from God’s hand as equally valuable gifts.  I have learned that I am stronger than I knew I could be, and I have new depths of empathy and compassion that have come from just surviving so far.  Now if I can just ignore the idiots and accept them as great entertainment…

Here’s the link to the clip, in case you want to watch it.  I’m not sure I inserted it correctly, so you may have to copy and paste it:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rq3-PycEXHk

I have a problem saying no – and delegating.  And, just like everyone else, I have too much to do and too little time to accomplish all that I’d like to do.  So, I have a new mantra when it all becomes more than a little overwhelming: “Just do the work.”  I also try repeating said mantra when it’s a job I hate, like house cleaning.  I am a horrible housekeeper; I read Proverbs 31 and think, “There’s no way my husband will call me blessed if I don’t dust this month.”  Yes, I said month.  I’m getting better, but in true procrastinator/perfectionist style I avoid doing something I know I don’t like and don’t have time to do well.  Housekeeping chores fall into this category more often than not.

While lack of time is a small factor in why I don’t do everything I want to and should do, there are some other major factors involved, namely, depression and a major lack of will power.  On the days that I would rather sleep or avoid people altogether, it is tremendously hard to find motivation not to give in to the depression.  Why bother moving at all if it’s just going to be a hard day?  Just do the work.  If I can do one thing, however small, then I can regain some control over the self-pity.  Some days, scooping the cat litter box is my only major accomplishment.  I can now claim that with great pride; in spite of feeling like I could totally drop out of my life, I managed to check something off the list.  I can just do the work and let the feelings straighten out later.  For me, depression is very much an emotional reaction to stress and grief, and I feel more comfortable now knowing that it will pass.  I am finally starting to recognize when I am reacting emotionally and not rationally and giving myself time and space to vent before I try to tackle the problem.  Sometimes I wonder if it would have been a quicker journey through the grief if I had asked for medication for depression.  There was a fairly extended period (over a month) when I was depressed and could not work or function normally sometime after the fourth miscarriage.  I think if that were to happen again, I would try medication and counseling instead of just counseling and boot-strapping.  On the other hand, when I consider medication as an option now, I know I’m just trying to shortcut the process to avoid dealing with my feelings.  At any rate, when dealing with the occasional mild depression, just doing the work can lift the fog enough to get moving again.

Self-discipline is my other major malfunction.  I am really bad at sticking to it, whatever it is.  Sometimes this is a function of depression and my perfectionist streak, but mostly it’s that I’m really bad at following through with something I don’t want to do.  This also means I’m really bad at sticking with the things I want to do because I’m usually playing catch-up with work or housework that I put off doing, causing an overall breakdown of time management.  This is where just doing the work keeps me from feeling completely overwhelmed.  If I do a little bit at a time, then I don’t feel panicked when I take a break to write or crochet or dig up snakes in the yard (yet another reason to avoid weeding…).  I’m a work in progress.  Eventually, I’ll be perfect, but then it won’t matter to me because I’ll be in heaven, doing the work of the saints – praising God and knowing as I am known.

Mother’s Day has not been the easiest holiday for me to cope with for the last few years, which is one reason I waited to write about it this year.  I also didn’t want to rain on anyone’s parade.  As uncomfortable as I sometimes feel about Mother’s Day, I wouldn’t want anyone to feel the same way because my situation is radically different from theirs.  Much as I struggle with the day, it’s not fair to not honor the great moms out there, especially the ones that I love and adore.  I have two friends who are new moms to adopted children; I have several friends and my sister-in-law who are new moms to babies born in the last year; and I have friends who are expecting new additions to their families this Mother’s Day.  And don’t forget my own mom, Blessed (I stood up to type that, so that you can say I have risen up to call you “blessed” :)).  These women should be celebrated!

For the last three or four years, I have manufactured a reason to avoid church on Mother’s Day so that I wouldn’t have to deal with the social awkwardness I feel in that situation.  It’s hard to sit in a service and listen to praises of the moms who are present – the instructions to “Give your mom a break today,” and the special gifts like flowers and books that are sometimes given out are difficult to navigate.  What should I do when they ask all of the mothers to stand so everyone can applaud them?  What should I do if someone tries to hand me a flower after church?  What if they do baby dedication on Mother’s Day again?  What if I can’t stop crying and embarrass myself?  Clearly, I have issues with Jesus’s command not to worry. 😉  But aside from that, my weirdness about the situation is not a reason to call off Mother’s Day for everyone, so I simply kept myself out of the situation.

Thankfully, this year was different.  I’m not sure exactly why, but I was not afraid this year.  In general, I finally feel like a whole person again; plus, I cried all the way through a sermon about a month ago, and the world didn’t end.  No one looked at me like a crazy person; no one stood up and pointed at me bawling like an idiot in the choir loft.  In short, if I can’t stop crying, I now know I will not be embarrassed.  So last week, I felt secure in the knowledge that there were people who knew my story and loved me, and that was a tremendous Mother’s Day gift for me.

I had already decided before church that I would participate as a mom, and anyone who didn’t understand could just wonder about it or ask me about it.  But I know in my heart that I am a mother with six beautiful babies waiting for me in heaven, and I think that counts enough to stand up and be counted on Mother’s Day.  One person told me Happy Mother’s Day because she just knew that, “One day, you’ll be a mom.”  My mother-in-law got it right, though, with a straight up Happy Mother’s Day.  It is time for me to proud that my children are in the presence of God instead of feeling ashamed of my failure to be a real mom.  I am a real mom who loves her children and misses them dearly.  I wonder what they do every day, and I worry that they don’t know how much they mean to me.

After a sweet friend helped me confirm it last night, I have decided I will probably answer everyone who asks that I do have six children in heaven.  If nothing else, it opens a door to share why I believe that, and, more than anything else, it confirms their presence in my life.  Maybe it will help people to recognize that there are a lot more grieving moms out there who can’t share their stories.  Everyone deals with miscarriage differently, but everyone who experiences it grieves for their lost child in some way.  I don’t know that acknowledging that in the same way we acknowledge mothers on Mother’s Day would be appropriate.  Who wants to cheer or clap for something so horrible?  But maybe we could offer a moment of silence or some other gentle and loving acknowledgement of the mothers in our presence who have lost children.  That’s just my two cents – what do you all think?

“Tenacity is more than endurance, it is endurance combined with absolute certainty that what we are looking for is going to transpire.  Tenacity is more than hanging on, which may be but the weakness of being too afraid to fall off.” Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, Feb 22

If you pay any attention to popular culture, then you have probably heard a fairly constant stream of authors and self-help gurus touting the absolute power of positive thinking; if you just believe something hard enough, then it will come true.  I suppose that sometimes this is true.  I also suppose that doing so would likely derail your faith for a number of reasons.

Spiritual tenacity is clinging to God only – God above all else that we may desire.  I love the Oswald Chambers quotation about spiritual tenacity because you can believe with absolute certainty that what you are looking for is going to transpire IF you are looking for God.  If you are looking to become thin or become a millionaire or have a baby, then you may not believe with absolute certainty that it will happen.  You can hope that it will happen, but you can’t know it absolutely.  So why do I think that believing with absolute certainty in something other than God will derail your faith?

To say that you believe in God and then to also try to obtain some blessing from him using what is essentially a Jedi mind trick is perilously close to not believing in God at all, or having an idol as a backup plan like the Bible records so many times.  To allow something to take as prominent a place in our hearts as God is to allow something other than God to rule our hearts.  It’s easy for me to say that, but it is not very easy to do – to single-mindedly follow only God.  I am human, and my human passions do not naturally run straight to God; they run to wanting children, to doing and eating the things that I enjoy without thought to the consequences, to all the things that I would like to accomplish…

And what happens if your persistent positive thinking comes to pass?  Do you think that you would attribute the blessing to God’s work in your life?  Or would you be like me and start to enact the same positive thinking model on every aspect of your life without really thinking about God?  I am not good enough to think that I would do anything else but say, “I believed that it would happen, and it finally did.  Oh, yeah, and God probably helped.”  But if I prayed to God for something specific AND asked for him to show me and to carry out his purpose rather than mine, then I can know that what came to pass really came from God and came in his time with his blessing.

But what happens to your faith when your positive thinking mojo doesn’t work?  I can tell you: your faith will be shattered because what you believed wasn’t solid, and it can’t support you when things go bad.  Without some bedrock to build on, we’re literally and only dust in the wind.  Or, you’ll lose any sense of confidence and value you ever possessed because you’ll know that you weren’t strong enough or you didn’t believe hard enough for your positive thinking to come true.  I appreciate the efforts of those who think that sheer will power and mind transformation can affect actual results in the world.  The truth is that they can, when they are done by Christ.  When those things are attempted by us, mere mortals, we foul it up.  We have no power except that which God gives us.

To those who only believe in the power of positive thinking, keep a wide berth, as I am likely to whack you with a blunt object the second you start talking to me about it.  Do you really think that I wasn’t thinking positive thoughts about each of my pregnancies?  If you really believe that we make our own destinies, do you honestly believe that I want to feel this kind of pain?  Do you really want to tell me that if I had only prayed harder or dedicated more positive thinking that the outcome would have been different?  Do you really think that I haven’t prayed specifically about having a baby?  I have, and God has answered me.  It wasn’t the answer I wanted, but it was a solid answer that I can hang on to with great tenacity.  He told me to wait – to wait for his time and his plan.  He told me that he could have let me have a child right then if that’s all I wanted, but if I wanted to know him and trust him I needed to wait for him.  Some of that answer was clearly audible to me, and some of it is my wording of the knowledge he placed in my soul when I pray about the situation.  I also know that soon, I will have another answer; I just don’t know what that answer is yet.

I can pray that I will have a child, and you can pray along with me, as long as you realize that God may have another plan.  Don’t tempt me by forcing a single plan on me, however inadvertently.  I appreciate the sentiment when you say that you “just know that we’ll have a baby soon,” but I don’t want to only hope to have a child if that’s not the direction God has for us.  Pray with me instead that I will see and accept God’s plan, and then we can praise God together for his answer.

Living in Alabama provides ample opportunity to gain working knowledge of tornadoes and volatile weather.  Everyone here was affected in some way by yesterday’s storm system.  Everyone here is still watching news coverage and waiting to see the full impact of the devastation.  Tuscaloosa suffered extensive damage along with a confirmed fatality count that is still rising.  Cullman had fairly extensive damage with the storm that came through in the early morning hours and then again with multiple tornado strikes.  And several Birmingham communities are also facing complete devastation and lost loved ones.  These cities are just the surface – there are smaller towns that were completely destroyed and others that are suffering damage and loss, and that’s only in Alabama.  Across the southeast region today, people are picking up the pieces and trying to locate loved ones.

One of the biggest things you can do to help is to pray.  Pray for the safety of the ongoing search and rescue operations as well as the safety of the emergency personnel and utility crews that will be working around the clock for days, maybe even weeks.  Pray for the families that are facing loss – loss of loved ones and loss of property.  Pray that those in need will get the help that they need to have a safe place to stay and food and clothing.  If you feel led to do something more, please donate to the Red Cross or even the Alabama Baptist Association or another church group that is planning to assist in the recovery effort.  It may sound strange to donate to a religious group, but they do an excellent job of mobilizing in situations like this – so much so that Governor Bentley in a phone interview last night mentioned “the Baptists” when he was listing out the emergency services that had already been deployed to begin the clean up and recovery effort.

Yesterday changed the lives of a lot of people who will be facing a long road through grief and rebuilding.  Today they must begin the process, so keep them in yours prayers.

In the last 48 hours, I’d guess that I have answered the question, “Do you have any children?” at least five times.  I obviously hate this question from the start, but I hate to answer it even more.  If I answer honestly and from my heart, yes, I have six children in heaven.  If I answer politely, no, not yet, but we have three dogs and a cat.  I always throw out the animal information because some people get distracted and stop there, content to discuss pets.  The honest answer usually leads to an awkward silence (cue crickets chirping).  However, the polite answer almost always leads to, “Don’t you want kids?” or “Well, you better get busy.”  Or some other inane fork in the conversational road that I’d rather avoid taking since it is usually broached by a stranger who really could care less and really doesn’t want to know that we’ve had six miscarriages.  Inevitably, the conversation will grow terribly stiff on my end, or the stranger will continue until I finally explain why we don’t have children.  At that point we’d both like to walk away and pretend the discussion never happened.

I will take the fork all day long with someone who truly cares or asks out of concern rather than a weird sense of conversational obligation or gossipy curiosity.  But the last two days have been full of people who really don’t care.  One such person was a customer of ours today who went so far as to ask if I was really going to let my sister-in-law show me up.  Beyond being completely inappropriate, that moment was extremely hurtful.  There is no competition there – even if there were, I’m definitely losing as all I have contributed to the grandchild proliferation race is a profound sense of loss and misery.

The conversation went a little bit like this:

Him: “Are you expecting kids anytime soon?” (Which also came out of nowhere…)

Me: “No, not yet.”

Him: “Oh.  Well why not? Are you really gonna let your sister-in-law show you up like that?”

Me: ” Well, I guess so.  It’s not like I can do anything about it.” (Thinking about the mean things I would like to say or do to the man…)

It was terribly tempting not to verbally beat this guy over the head with a snappy comment about having tried and failed six times already.  But in reality that wouldn’t have done any good.  I was already upset, and that would not have made me feel any better, especially since it would have been rude (even if it felt appropriate).  This guy was going to forget all about that conversation in the next few hours anyway, since he was already confused about what day it was, and he’s probably going to say the same thing again tomorrow when he comes back for his paperwork.  My pain isn’t worth causing someone embarrassment over something they didn’t know any better than to ask.  It’s certainly not worth the effort for someone who doesn’t care in the least about the pain they are causing me.  I have made a very few exceptions to this rule, and it has always been with someone who should know better. (And if you’re reading this wondering if I meant you – NO, I’ve never let a friend feel embarrassed about asking questions or talking about the situation.)

I suppose it bears repeating here that I will always listen to someone who needs to share about their own pain, even if their situation is different from mine.  And I will always try to talk to someone who really wants to know about miscarriage and its aftermath, at least from my perspective.  There is a tremendous difference in the approaches of people who are really care about other people and the people who are just trying to say the right thing, whether they mean it or not.  I sometimes catch myself wanting to say something profound to comfort someone because it sounds like the right thing to say, when all I need to say is simply, “I’m sorry , and I love you.”  All the pretty prose in the world is meaningless without the sentiment of the heart expressing it.  Apparently, my heart likes to use smaller words; it’s pretty obvious that my head likes to use big words that sound smart. 😉

The bottom line is that when you pay attention to people and at least attempt to see past the surface, you know who it is safe to talk to about the things closest to your heart, and you know who it’s not worth wasting your breath on.  I am blessed with a lot of safe people in my life right now beyond my family, mostly because I have a tremendous church family.  It seems like a million years ago now that I felt too afraid and too embarrassed to even attend church on a regular basis; it was hard to walk in the door and face what I thought would be hundreds of questions about our losses or hundreds of “church answers” in response to them.  Of course most of that was in my head, and it was a pretty natural fight or flight response to questions raised by grief that I couldn’t answer for myself just then.  Now, I couldn’t imagine living without that feeling of family and comfort and safety and people with whom I can honestly answer my least favorite questions.

It doesn’t make it easier to answer the questions about children that any woman over 30 must inevitably answer, but it makes my honest answer easier to deal with: I have six babies in heaven, and one day my family, both the tree and the vine variety, and I will see them.

This last week presented an odd combination of stage fright scenarios for me.  Oddly, the things that used to scare me no longer bother me at all, and the things I used to do without breaking a sweat tied me up in knots this week.  As long as I can remember, I have been on stage, back stage, building the stage – you name a preposition that goes with stage, and I’ve probably been there as a dancer, a singer, an actor or a techie.  All through my childhood and into high school, I was a dancer and a singer.  I even managed to pull off a few solos without too much quaking of the boots.  I remember doing a capella auditions for All-State Choir and not really worrying about much other than finding the lucky audition dress and pronouncing all of the foreign language songs correctly.  Of course, I was a little nervous, but I don’t remember panicking.

In college, I was a theatre minor, so I had to audition and act on a somewhat regular basis.  I spent most of my time on various tech crews, but I was still required to audition for every show.  Singing and dancing were no big deal; acting, on the other hand, had been slightly terrifying for me since high school.  I never felt comfortable in character, and I had a hard time getting into character without feeling like I was playing dress up somehow.  Now I know that I really didn’t know myself well enough to slip someone else’s mask over my own character.  My favorite classes have always been the subjects that were the hardest: AP History, Composition with Dr. Metress, Chinese and Hebrew… My required acting class should have been in that list, but it always scared me to death: I knew that the professor would not like anything I did, and I couldn’t ever figure out how to improve my skills.  You can study harder to learn a language, but acting is tougher to study since it relies on experience as much as skill.  I finished the semester extremely proud of my B because I knew I was at best a mediocre actor.  I had found my niche as a director and a tech grunt.

Fast forward about a decade to this week.  Palm Sunday morning the church choir presented a worship musical, and I got to be a part of the praise team that sings out front.  No big deal, right?  I’ve been singing in small groups in front of people for decades now.  Wrong.  I don’t remember ever being so scared to sing in my life.  It’s funny now, but that Sunday morning, my throat was dry, my hands were shaking, and my stomach was grumbling its anxiety.  There is no logical reason for me to have been afraid except for the presence of a microphone directly in front of me.  I knew the music, I was singing with a group with the whole choir and orchestra behind me, and I was shaking in my clogs.  And right now, it makes me laugh to think of how tightly I had to grip the mic so that it didn’t shake out of my hand.  (Actually, it made me laugh to myself even while it was happening, but I was still helpless to stop it.)

Thursday night, we finished a two-night run of Journey to the Cross, which was a hybrid multimedia/drama production based loosely on the stations of the cross.  It was a walk-through event with a clip from The Passion of the Christ at each stop along with a monologue from a character in the story acting as an eyewitness.  The sets were well done, and we had a great cast of actors and supporting church members to put it all together.  I played Mary, and I performed my monologue in front of around 500 people in total.  There were something like 30 small groups, so we all performed the monologues at least 30 times in two nights.  Based on my acting experience in college, this was the event that should have scared me.  And yet… my biggest fear was not getting all the actors made up on time or the special effects makeup coming off before the end of the night.  Acting in front of hundreds of people?  No big deal.  I even mangled a few of the lines and recovered without panicking or alerting the audience to my mistakes.

I’d like to say that it’s a testament to the vast improvement in my stagecraft since college.  While there’s no doubt I’m a much better actress now that I’ve lived more of life and come to know myself far better than I did in college, I’m no dummy.  There were easily dozens of people praying for this production on a daily basis.  And I learned last week that one group was praying specifically for my role as Mary.  There is certainly no doubt whatsoever that I was never worried because of the effect of those prayers.  God honors the work that we offer up to him, and there were a lot of sacrifices involved for a lot of people to make this production possible.  But most of all, God honors the hearts that submit to him, and we could not have been this successful without those folks who committed to pray for every aspect of Journey to the Cross.  The experience of playing Mary is not one I’ll ever forget, but not because it was a good role or because it was exciting to get to play any part on stage: this experience reminded me how much the Church (not just Green Valley) is a unified body.  We each have a role to play, and we each are a necessary part in the Body of Christ.  We can’t all be heads and eyes – some of us are hands, feet, or even armpits.  Whatever we are designed to be, there is a gap that must be filled when any part of the body refuses to act.  I won’t pretend that I’m never part of that gap, but I know I served my purpose in this production.  I thoroughly enjoy working backstage – being the hands and feet of a production without having to be the face of it.  It was an honor to be a face this time and still know how much work behind the scenes went into putting the actors out onto the stage.  It was also a huge reminder that I am not as consistent in my prayer life as I am called to be.  It was a humbling reminder of how tiny each of us is in the grand scheme of things, yet how great we are when we function as one body.