The Child Lives: Wisdom from Mother Angelica (and some beautiful free printables)

When searching the internet for Catholic prayers and advice following a miscarriage, it's no mistake that one of the first things most people come across is this beautiful piece:

My Lord, the baby is dead! 

Why, my Lord—dare I ask why? It will not hear the whisper of the wind or see the beauty of its parents’ face—it will not see the beauty of Your creation or the flame of a sunrise. Why, my Lord? 

“Why, My child—do you ask ‘why’? Well, I will tell you why. You see, the child lives. Instead of the wind he hears the sound of angels singing before My throne. Instead of the beauty that passes he sees everlasting Beauty—he sees My face. He was created and lived a short time so the image of his parents imprinted on his face may stand before Me as their personal intercessor. He knows secrets of heaven unknown to men on earth. He laughs with a special joy that only the innocent possess. My ways are not the ways of man. I create for My Kingdom and each creature fills a place in that Kingdom that could not be filled by another. He was created for My joy and his parents’ merits. He has never seen pain or sin. He has never felt hunger or pain. I breathed a soul into a seed, made it grow and called it forth.” 

I am humbled before you, my Lord, for questioning Your wisdom, goodness, and love. I speak as a fool—forgive me. I acknowledge Your sovereign rights over life and death. I thank You for the life that began for so short a time to enjoy so long an Eternity. 

-- Mother M. Angelica

What beauty and truth that short piece contains! What consolation! What wisdom!

My generous and talented friend, Kendra Tierney (blogger at Catholic All Year) made a few printables from this lovely prayer and offered them to me to share with my readers. They would make a lovely image of remembrance in your home or a gift for a friend after a loss. I received a beautiful framed print of Jeremiah 1:5 ("Before I formed you in the womb...) from a friend following my second loss and it is a very cherished piece to me.

These printables are free for you to save and print. To download the high resolution image to your computer, click on it to bring it up in a new window, then right click on it to save it to your computer. You can then print them yourself or upload them to a print shop or website to have them printed in more professional quality. As with all the beautiful printables that Kendra offers, they are only for personal use or to give as gifts. If you use them on your own blog, please link back to this blog post or Kendra's blog, Catholic All Year. Kendra also offers customized printables of the prayer, quote, poem, etc. of your choice for only $10 so if you have another prayer, quote (or perhaps maybe the names of the child(ren) you lost) you'd like to hang in remembrance of your child, she's your gal. Click here to purchase your own commissioned printable.

Thank you so much, Kendra, for your generosity in sharing these beautiful images.

Creating Space

It's been over a week since we've returned from our trip and I'm doing pretty well. Today my daughter, out of the blue, told me I'm, "full of joy" and since little kids are very perceptive, I'm taking her at her word. I have felt joy returning over the past week.

One of the things I've done that has been most helpful in healing has been ridding our home of baby and maternity items. I started the process a while ago and have slowly been giving away what we've accumulated, but in the last week I've finally gotten rid of the last of it and it feels so good. I've been thinking about why it's been so therapeutic for me and I've come up with the following (myriad) reasons.

The very obvious, practical reason that this has been so great is that there's so much more space! The fervor to get rid of baby things has also sparked the desire just to get rid of all things and we finally have space in our small townhouse. There are no longer boxes and junk lying around. Our closets aren't filled to the brim with things we may or may not ever use, but are instead organized with things we do use. I do so much better in uncluttered space and so fixing my physical surroundings has such a positive affect on me emotionally and psychologically.

Clearing our space and making our home more comfortable is something I can do as a wife and mother to benefit the lives of my family right now. Instead of saving things for children we might have and cluttering up our lives in the meantime, I'm taking care of my family right now. And that is so, so good for me. If these losses have taught me anything, it's that I must strive to do my best as a wife and mother in every moment, not just prepare for a future in which I will finally be at my best. As I've mentioned previously, I need to feel useful right now and this is useful.

Giving away our useable items makes me feel useful to others as well. Most of Lucia's clothes and many of her baby items have gone to my sister-in-law for my niece, but I've also been able to bless women from church and random strangers with baby and maternity items they need. It feels so selfish to stockpile them when there are people who need and can use them right now. Giving them up helps me to focus on others and to have perspective. One of the lines I pray every day in the Litany of Humility is "That others may be chosen and I set aside, Jesus, grand me the grace to desire it." This one line never fails to be the one that stands out to me, that targets me especially. Right now, I have not been chosen to carry a child to term. I have been set aside, at least for a time, but I must still use this time to serve the Lord, which I can do by helping those who God has chosen.

Another spiritual fruit of the baby product purge is that it is teaching me to rely more fully on God to provide for my needs. I tend  to hold onto something if it might ever be used again. In that way, I learn to rely on myself to provide for my future. By getting rid of the baby things I not only rely on God to provide us with a living child, but I also rely on Him to provide us with what we would need to raise that child. It's much easier to pray "give us this day our daily bread" and really mean it if you don't have a cupboard full of food to last you days, weeks, or even months. I put much more trust in God when I no longer stockpile for myself and instead give the goods we have to others.

I also realize that when I give away our baby and maternity things, I am helping do God's work in providing the "daily bread" for other families. When we pray to God to answer our prayers, it's much more likely that He'll answer them through other people then by dropping a baby buggy straight from heaven, a miracle I have yet to hear of happening. It is good to prepare yourself financially and be economically frugal, but there's a point where that gets in the way of doing God's work and starts to become working for yourself. I can no longer justify holding onto baby things for years when I don't need them and there are others that do. I trust that if and when we have another child, others will be generous to us as well, and that we'll have everything we need.

I started giving away our baby and maternity stock because it was too hard to be surrounded by constant reminders of our failed pregnancies and dissipating dreams. I was shocked to realize just how healing the process was for me. Most of all, it enabled me to imagine a life without more babies. Everyone deals with loss differently and for some it may be more beneficial to always have hope for more children and therefore to continue to hold onto the baby things; but for me, it's helpful to be realistic and the truth is that I may or may not have more children. I imagine that statistics are in my favore and that we will most likely have more children through pregnancy or adoption. But I need to be able to acknowledge that there's also a chance that we may not have more children and the odds of that happening are higher for me than for the average woman. I need to build a life and imagine a future that is happy and hopeful and beautiful even if it doesn't include more children for us. So by letting go of this material reminders, we not only give ourselves more space in our home for the things that matter right now, I also give space in my head and my heart to imagine a blessed life as a family of three.

Trying Again.

Yesterday (Christmas) was one of the hardest days of my life. Everywhere I looked amongst the family celebrations, I saw the ghosts of our missing children. When the cousins played together, there was one missing. When we took family photos, they felt so incomplete. My stomach felt so small and flat and empty. I mostly thought of the first child we lost, Francis, the one who would be seven months now. I wonder if next Christmas will be just as hard. Which child will I think about then? Francis or Julian, who would be celebrating their second Christmas then? Or the little ones who would be born in the next year, Adrienne or Christian, who would be celebrating their first Christmas? Knowing that it's not even possible for me to hold a baby in my arms next Christmas made the day even more bleak. I felt robbed of Christmas past, Christmas present, and Christmas future.

Maybe this year is just so hard because I miscarried less than a week before Christmas? Although maybe I'll miscarry a week before next Christmas too. Or maybe I'll be pregnant then, far enough along that I'll be feeling confident, and not  the deep despair and fear that early pregnancy holds for me now. I can only pray that is the case, I can't even hope for it anymore.

What this last, fourth miscarriage has finally done that the first three were unable to accomplish was strip me of all hope. One, two, even three miscarriages in a row can be explained by chance, bad luck, even three different random, unrelated occurrences. Four is...heavy. There is the weight of an underlying cause there. So far, my doctor hasn't been able to find it. I'll have surgery next month to check on a few more things, all which are fairly unlikely anyway, but if my doctor doesn't find anything then that's it. There will be no more treatable causes, everything else would just be an answer with no solution. And I don't feel the desire to know just to know; if there is nothing I can do about it, the knowledge has no meaning to me.

I'm still young (though repeat pregnancy loss has aged me in ways I can't really explain; I feel so old inside) and potentially have many more years of fertility before me. We'll keep trying, over and over again, knowing that there is some possibility, no matter how small, that I will be able to give birth to a living child. Lucia is proof of that. How we got lucky with a healthy first pregnancy, I'll never know but I'm so grateful for that. We'll try again as soon as I'm physically well enough, emotionally healed enough, and get the go ahead from my doctor.

While I have some friends who struggle with hyper fertility who look at their future years of potential fertility and count how many children that could possibly mean, I think in terms of how many miscarriages those years can bring. Unless I'm coming straight off a miscarriage (which is apparently a very fertile time according to studies I've read and my personal experience), it takes me longer than the average woman to get pregnant, but not by much. I can get pregnant. Four pregnancies in less than a year and a half prove that. Four miscarriages in 14 months. Even if my fertile years end early and fertility decreases over time, I could still have 20+ miscarriages. The odds for that are small, of course. In 20 pregnancies, I'd most likely bring at least a few babies to birth. But, when I see my future, 20 miscarriages is one of the possibilities I can visualize. I can no longer visualize an outcome where there is a baby in my arms. My mind just can't conceptualize that anymore.

As Catholics, we believe that pregnancy should only be postponed (using Natural Family Planning) for serious reasons. Those reasons vary by couple of course and the Church does not have a list of reasons. Personally, David and I can't justify postponing pregnancy based on miscarriage risk alone. As long as I am (physically and emotionally) healthy enough to get pregnant again, we won't prevent it beyond the few months my doctor asks us to wait after a loss. (Whether to wait to not, and how long, after a miscarriage is controversial as there are studies that show getting pregnant again right away has better outcomes and other studies show the opposite. We've decided to give my doctor the benefit of the doubt and follow all my doctor's instructions for the time being. I've gotten pregnant right away and I've waited and both had the same outcome anyway.)

The idea of not charting and not specifically trying to get pregnant but just letting it happen when it happens is very appealing to me, because the trying is very stressful in itself. But as long as my doctor still has hope that we can find a treatable cause and that catching a pregnancy early will give the baby a better chance of survival, I'll suffer through it. Charting seems to force us to specifically try to get pregnant each month because we know exactly when our fertile days are and we have to decide whether we will have sex then. Since we want a baby, we feel like we can't not use those days. If we didn't chart and didn't know which exact days were most fertile, I don't think I'd end up a puddle of tears every time my period came because I wouldn't know if we actually tried to get pregnant. It wouldn't be a disappointment, another proof that my body doesn't work quite right. There wouldn't be that expectation that we did everything right, we'll get pregnant this month, oh please, oh please, oh please.

Coming to terms with recurrent pregnancy loss (RPL) and what that means for the long term for our family means coming up with a new perspective on life, a new way of living. Even if we having another living child, even if it's our very next pregnancy only a year and some months away, that probably won't end my RPL. I'll probably have more miscarriages after that. Of course, I don't know the future, but most likely whatever is causing this isn't going to disappear or ever be completely "fixed". And so that means that we will for the next 10-15 years have cycles of trying to conceive, pregnancy, miscarriage, recovery, trying to conceive, miscarriage, recovery...

And I can't go through those the way I have done in the past. The past year and a half hasn't been living, it's been surviving. I've just tried to get from one stage to another, thinking at some point things will change and we'll regain our lives. It's been living with the pain of trying to conceive thinking, It will all be better once I get those two pink lines. And then living with the stress and fear and utter despair of pregnancy thinking, It will all be better once I see that heartbeat. And then the heartbeat isn't there or I start bleeding and I think, If I can only make it past this miscarriage. And then the bleeding stops and I start thinking, If only I can make it through the next few months of testing and waiting, then we can try again. And it starts all over. And in the meantime, my life is on hold. There is no joy, there is no moving forward. Everything waits. Everything is at a standstill waiting for the baby, the one we want so badly, the one that will restore a little bit of joy into our family.

I need to find a way to restore that joy without that child, for who knows if that baby will ever come. I need to find a way to truly live in the meantime. And so I've been working on humility, on saying, It's not about me. Nothing is about me. It's never been about me. I am only here to do God's will. No matter what I want or I don't want or how much pain I suffer , I can always serve God every situation. It is not about me. It is not about me. It's only about Him. I am only about Him. It is not about my babies that will never be born. It is about The Baby who was born so long ago. It is not about me. And it's helping. Most days, this is what gets me out of bed in the morning. Most days, it allows me to focus on the big picture, what really matters. Because it's when I focus on the details of my small insignificant life that the pain becomes crushing and I become frozen in the pain and anger and fear.