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Timothy P. O’Malley, Ph.D.
Notre Dame Center for Liturgy
Editor, Oblation: Catechesis, Liturgy, and the New Evangelization
“Do you have children?” For most thirty-somethings, this seemingly harmless question is the opening volley of a round of socially acceptable chit-chat. Colleagues around the office fill silences with a discussion of recent pregnancies, first communions, and the athletic milestones of their children’s lives. At the salon or barber shop, the shearing of hair is accompanied by regaling the barber with mundane details of one’s progeny. “Sally is six, just lost her first tooth, and has begun to wonder about the origins of daisies.” College reunions become an occasion not simply to reminisce about chemistry class or the bizarre rituals of freshman orientation but to meet the miniature version(s) of the guy down the hall, who used to set up a slip-and-slide on South Quad when the temperature climbed above fifty degrees.
For my wife and I, the question about the quantity and ages of our brood is never an escape valve from awkward social interactions. It is the primary reactant that produces uncomfortable conversations with strangers and confidants alike. “No children,” we say, our voices hopefully revealing our discomfort with the question. Responses generally range from, “Oh, I thought you had a couple,” to “What are you waiting for?”, and an occasional “Oh.” We smile. We laugh a bit. We say, “Maybe, one day.” But, how can you tell a complete stranger, a trusted teacher, a friendly cleric, a college classmate: “We’re infertile.”
The Diagnosis and Aftermath
When I was younger, I always wondered why the Scriptures were so concerned with the childless wife. In the Old Testament, Hannah gives birth to Samuel after years of infertility, and sings, “The barren wife bears seven sons, while the mother of many languishes” (1 Sam. 2:5). As a theologian, I’m well aware of the function of infertility in the Scriptures. When the aged Sarah, the elderly Hannah, and the mature Elizabeth gives birth to a child, the reader is invited to remember that God is the major actor in salvation, not human beings. The surprising reversal of infertility in the Bible is thus a sign of new life coming from death; an action made possible by God, who is the creator and sustainer of human life. But that part of me, who has spent the last six years, praying for a child each day, cannot help but read Hannah’s song as a cry of relief. After years of barrenness, loneliness, and tears, finally a child!
Of course, when my wife and I were first married, we did not even imagine the possibility of joining the ranks of Abraham and Sarah, of Elkanah and Hannah, of Elizabeth and Zechariah. We happened upon each other before our senior year at Notre Dame and fell madly in love. At the time, I was preparing to enter Moreau Seminary. After meeting Kara while serving as a mentor-in-faith at (a summer retreat program for high school students on the theme of vocation), I suddenly became aware that I was to spend the rest of my life with this woman. Our first date was a frenzied session of discernment, asking whether or not I should give up my previously planned life for a girl I met five weeks earlier. By the end of the date, I came to the conclusion that not only should I date Kara, but before me sat the woman who I would marry. Happily, she came to a similar conclusion (mutatis mutandi), albeit just a bit later than me. I chose not to enter the seminary, and a little over a year removedfrom one of the most angst-ridden first dates of all time, we were engaged to be married. Like so many couples before us, our nuptials took place at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, and the priest prayed over us, “Bless them with children and help them to be good parents. May they live to see their children’s children.” And at our wedding, jokes surfaced about when the first child would be born to this Catholic couple. We, of course, hoped not long.
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. Looking back, we seemed to perceive that having a child would simply happen, once we desired it (of course, we knew the physiology of how such desire would need to be expressed). So, the desiring commenced.
Month one passed. Month two passed. Month three passed. Six months later, our home became the anti-Nazareth, as we awaited an annunciation that never came. The hope-filled decision to conceive a child became a bitter task of disheartened waiting. 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.
Unexplained infertility is a surprisingly miserable diagnosis. Something about my psyche was prepared for a scientific explanation. One in which the very fine doctors with advanced degrees from Ivy League institutions acknowledged that unless an act of God intervened, no human life would emerge from intercourse between Kara and me. Indeed, a fair number of tears would have been shed on both of our parts. But with the diagnosis of unexplained infertility, conception is scientifically possible. 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 unfortunate for us, we have no way of knowing if we will one day join the ranks of the middle-aged first-time 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.
The aftermath of our diagnosis was extraordinarily painful for both of us. The diagnosis affected not simply our friendships, our own relationship, but particularly our spiritual lives. If you speak to an infertile couple, committed to the Christian life, you’ll notice a pattern: the sexual infertility gradually seeps into the life of prayer. 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. Early in the process, I found particular consolation in the language of the psalms: “My God, my God why have you abandoned me? Why so far from my call for help, from my cries of anguish? My God, I call by day, but you do not answer; by night, but I have no relief” (Ps. 22:2-3). Like the psalmist, I had my enemies. The well-intentioned barber who stated that the future grandparents must be anxious to get a grandchild out of us. The friendly priest, who upon learning that my wife and I in fact do not havechildren, made it a point to say each time he saw me, “No children, right?” The Facebook feed filled with announcements of pregnancies and births, a constant sign of our own empty nest. God himself became my nemesis: why have you duped me O Lord? Why us? We have bestowed some aspect of our lives to you, more than many in the world, and our only reward is pain and suffering.
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. You cease praying, because the words you utter grow vapid, insipid, uninspiring. In this way, I entered into Sheol, hell itself, cut off from the land of the living. Something had to change.
Infertility as School of Prayer
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. We apply to the college of our dreams, only to receive a rejection letter, not because we are inadmissible; but because a fellow student is brilliant and receives what might have been “our” spot. We are diagnosed with illnesses, to which we are genetically predisposed. Our family, despite how much we love them, falls apart because of fighting among siblings over how to handle the remaining years of a parent’s life. We die. In some sense, the beginning of true Christian faith is trusting that even in such moments, God abides with us. And the God who continues to bring life out of death invites us to offer our sorrow, our woundedness as an act of love. As Teilhard de Chardin writes in his The Divine Milieu:
Christ has conquered death, not only by suppressing its evil effects, but by reversing its sting. By virtue of Christ’s rising again, nothing any longer kills inevitably but everything is capable of becoming the blessed touch of the divine hands, the blessed influence of the will of God upon our lives. However marred by our faults, or however desperate in its circumstances, our position may be, we can, by a total re-ordering, completely correct the world that surrounds us, and resume our lives in a favorable sense. For those loving God, all things are converted into good.
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