Life matters

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Infertility Journeys stories of heartache & hope ...60

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For many couples who marry, the dream of having a child of their own remains unfulfilled.

Subfertility or infertility is not merely a technical glitch in the operating system of a couple’s baby-making, but affects couples deeply, including spiritually. We feature the personal testimony of three couples who had their pregnancy expectations challenged. Here they share their journeys from grief and distress, towards acceptance and peace.

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Infertility journeys

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Anne-Marie and Steve Parsons met through a mutual friend and married when they were in their early 30s.

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Great Expectations Like most couples, when we were engaged we talked about our expectations of having children and we agreed to consider adoption of additional children after having some biological children first. We couldn’t possibly have known then that we’d end up having to rely on adoption as the only way to build our family, but having the ‘A’ conversation early certainly helped us to cross that bridge later. We left the plan to start a family in ‘the hands of God’ but in time, when nothing was happening, we began to consider other options.

One doctor with a strong focus on natural remedies was convinced we’d be pregnant within 12 months if we adhered to his strict diet. The following year we used a Billings Method mentor to help us monitor ovulation cycles, helping to pick the most fertile time in the cycle. Twelve more months trying this also proved unfruitful.

The next option was to consider more conventional medical assistance. We opted for minimal medical intervention as it was more in line with Anne-Marie’s Catholic beliefs, yet this, too, proved unsuccessful.

We were crushed when the specialist advised us to give up.

We desperately wanted to be parents and both felt it was our calling. Fortunately, we were blessed to have the support of family and friends and we quickly came to a point where adoption was not only something to think about, but what God was in fact calling us to do.

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Adoption was what God was in fact calling us to do

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The Fertility Treatment Treadmill

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Pathway to Adoption

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We knew that with adoption there was no guarantee of success but for us, being parents wasn’t about passing on genes, it was about being family. For us, adoption wasn’t an option that we saw as settling for second best, but something that fulfilled our calling. We settled on the Centacare (now CatholicCare) adoption program because it seemed more in line with our views of what an open adoption should be.

One of the requirements of the program was for us to attend a live-in weekend retreat. They took us on a guided meditation where we laid on the floor and said ‘goodbye’ to the biological child we couldn’t have.

It was very painful, but a very necessary exercise!

At one point, they took us all into a room with a table in the middle covered with baby and small child paraphernalia such as baby clothes, books, toys, and footballs. We were asked to pick one item each which best expressed what we felt we would be missing out on by not being able to have children.

Most of the couples chose footballs or baby clothes. We each, independently of each other, chose a book on the subject of pregnancy. We both felt that all we’d be missing out on was the pregnancy bit.

At one point in the afternoon we were all gathered in a large room with lovely leadlight windows when Anne-Marie looked up to see a single ray of sunlight streaming through a crack in the window, and sobbed. She had just prayed for God to show His plan ... and He had. We just knew adoption was for us.

We felt extraordinarily blessed when, in 1999, we welcomed Aedan into our family and Conor two years after that.

Throughout the adoption process, and in our family life, which has had plenty of adoption-specific challenges, AnneMarie’s faith gave her strength. Steve became a Catholic in 2006. Together we have embraced God’s plan for our lives in the context of our Catholic faith and values.

Living our faith determines who we are as parents, and gives us the support we need when the going gets rough. F

Looking back, we can see the hand of our Lord in our infertility journey; he was always there, holding us in the palm of His hand

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God’s Gift of Peace

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When a child is born‌or not Sally Jones* reflects on her journey of becoming a mother. She lives in NSW.

Beginning a family did not come easily for us.

Infertility is difficult all the time but sometimes the sadness feels much more raw - like at Christmas time when we celebrate the birth of the Christ-child.

Over a number of years I noticed that a lump would form in my throat and I could not sing “when a child is born�. While I understood the song is referring to Jesus I felt this anticipation in a very personal way; the hope of new life seemingly denied to my husband and me.

So many prayers were offered for us over the ten years of our marriage, that God would grant us the gift of a child. We also had great medical support, including FertilityCare. Three miscarriages were devastating blows. Thankfully, our family now includes two beautiful children, as well as our three angels in heaven whom we hope to meet one day. F *Name has been changed.

Despite these blessings, Christmas is still bittersweet for me; while I rejoice in the coming of the Christ-child and our own blessings, I feel deeply connected to the many childless couples with whom I share a common longing Sally Jones

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Life Matters 68 Timothy O’Malley is the director of the Notre Dame Centre for Liturgy, Institute for Church Life, at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. This is an edited excerpt of his article ‘Waiting for Gabriel: Learning to pray through infertility’.

The Way of Love In our first year of marriage in Boston, where Kara was a youth minister and I was a doctoral student, we decided it was time to begin a family. Month one passed.

Month two passed. Month three passed.

After a year, we began to see a barrage of infertility specialists, who based upon test results, concluded that we should be able to have a child. No low sperm counts. No problem with reproductive systems. All in working order. The verdict: inexplicable infertility.

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Six months later, our home became the anti-Nazareth, as we awaited an annunciation that never came

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God himself became my nemesis: why have you duped me? Why us?

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Unexplained Infertility Unexplained infertility is a surprisingly miserable diagnosis. With every slight change in Kara’s monthly cycle, a glimmer of hope rises in our hearts, only to be dashed with the arrival of menstruation.

Kind-hearted family, friends, and colleagues, who learn about our infertility, share stories about a mother or sister, who finally became pregnant. They recommend ‘doctors’ who have a proven track record of curing infertility. But unfortunately for us, we have no way of knowing if we will one day join the ranks of the middle-aged firsttime parent.

And every trip to a doctor is a risk, because once again, we start to hope. Aware now, of course, that hope alone does not fill one’s home with children.

Faith Challenged Our diagnosis affected not simply our friendships, our own relationship, but particularly our spiritual lives. Each morning, I rise and ask God that we might finally have a child. I encounter only the chilly silence of a seemingly absent God. Such self-pity, while pleasant enough for a time, is both exhausting and a sure way to end up not only infertile but a narcissist.

You begin to imagine that yours is the only life full of disappointment. Yours the only existence defined by sorrow. You close off from relationships with other people, particularly those with children, as a way of protecting yourself from debilitating sorrow.

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Spiritual Recovery How did I find myself out of this hell?

First, I had to learn to give myself over to a reality beyond my own control. Human life is filled with any number of things that happen to us, despite our desires.

For me, praying the psalms helped. I used short phrases from psalms throughout the day, whenever I was tempted to enter into self-pity, to call myself back toward openness to the Father. The psalms became for me the grammar of my broken speech to God, a way to express a sorrow where words failed to suffice.

Second, I also began to meditate upon the crucifix in silence whenever I entered a church. Such silent meditation became essential to prayer, for by gazing at the crucifix for long periods, I discovered how God’s very silence in prayer was stretching me out toward a more authentic love.

Has God caused our infertility?

No! But, have we been called to it? Based upon the six years of infertility, perhaps that is indeed our calling.

In contemplating the silence of the cross, the image of Christ stretched out in love, I could feel my own will stretched out gradually to exist in harmony with the Father’s. To accept the cup that we have been given. And as my will was stretched out, I found new capacities for love available to me; a new awareness that the ‘calling’ of infertility has made me aware of the lonely, the vulnerable, the needy, and allowed me to perceive the true gift of a human life.

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Third, in my formation in prayer through the sorrow of infertility, I have grown in appreciation for the silence and halfsentences of God. Through entering into God’s own silence, I find my own bitter silence transformed into one of trust, of hope, of a kind of ‘infused knowledge’ of God’s love that I have come to savour, to taste, to experience during this growth in prayer.

I have grown in appreciation of the silence and half-sentences of God. Lastly, our infertility has slowly led me to a deeper appreciation of the Eucharistic quality of the Christian life. How all of our lives must become an offering, a gift to the Father through the Son in the unity of the Holy Spirit.

True self-gift is hard. It’s hard to give yourself away to a God, who doesn’t seem to listen to your prayers. It’s hard to wait for a child that may never come, to prepare your home with the proper furniture for what seems at times a pipe dream. It’s hard to love your spouse, as deeply as you desire to, when you’re distracted by the phantasms of sorrow that have become your dearest friend. It’s hard to muster a smile when your friends announce that they will be having another child. It’s just hard.

At these moments, I don’t know what else to do but to seek union with Christ himself; to enter more deeply into the Eucharistic logic of the Church, where selfpreservation is transformed into self-gift.

Our Marriage Mission For, it turns out we weren’t married that we could experience the joy of having children. We were married that our lives might become an offering of love for the world. To our nieces. To our nephews. To our friends. To a child, yet to be born, but who we hope to one day welcome through adopton. To a child, who has suffered more from neglect, whether accidental or purposeful, than we do from the absence of a child.

Our infertility isn’t about us. It’s about how God can transform even our sorrow into joy; how even in the shadow of this very real cross, the light shines in the darkness and the darkness will not overcome it. F

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Pope Francis

speaks

I would like to remind the couples who are experiencing the condition of infertility, that their vocation to marriage is no less because of this... The vocation to love, in fact, is a vocation to the gift of self and this is a possibility that no organic condition can prevent.

Pope Francis | Address to the Pontifical Academy for Life, February 2012

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Children have a right to be conceived by the act that expresses and embodies their parents’ self-giving love United States Conference of Catholic Bishops | Life-Giving Love in an Age of Technology

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Fertility wisdom The Catholic Church supports married couples in their building of families. Where couples struggle to conceive due to low fertility, it encourages fertility treatments that help conception to occur naturally through the sexual union of the couple.

This may include medication or hormonal treatment, surgery and fertility awareness methods (FAMs).

FAMs are a healthy, natural process where couples record their fertility symptoms to determine their fertility status day by day. The information can be used to time intercourse so as to avoid a pregnancy or to maximise the chance of conceiving.

The fertility charts also facilitate the diagnosis of subfertility as well as other related health problems. When used with NaProTechnology (a women’s health science), FAMs avoid the ethical and moral difficulties of IVF and other assisted reproduction techniques (ARTs).

The goal of treatment is to restore the couple’s fertility which allows them to try

to conceive a child, and any subsequent children, without having to resort to assisted reproduction technology each time. Couples have conceived using NaProTechnology despite a history of repeated, unsuccessful IVF attempts.

IVF children are loved by God All children are precious gifts of inestimable value and overwhelmingly loved by God regardless of how they are conceived, but the Church’s view is that the way God planned conception is important. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops has produced a clear overview of why the Church does not support many artifical reproductive technologies in their document titled ‘Life-Giving Love in an Age of Technology’.

For a link to the document and other resources visit www.franklymag.org