Fertility

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Tomatoes and basil are the Christmas decorations of my summer. Despite blight, Japanese beetles, wretched summer storms and birds that rip baby plants right out of the ground, tomatoes and basil always end up late summer on a colorful blue floral plate with chunks of fresh mozzarella, flaky salt, a drizzle of olive oil, and balsamic glaze.

The year when the tomatoes came to harvest, but the basil lay fallow, I felt immensely sad. I assumed its fecundity, never thinking I would have to rip out barren plants, buy sad little plastic packages at the grocery store to make my year-end freezer batches of pesto.

My basil was as infertile as I was.

Though the pitiful basil plants came almost 30 years after our “infertility of undiagnosed origin,” it released a reminder of my failure, my insecurities rooted in my inability to reproduce.

It is astonishing how two letters can so significantly change the connotation of a word. Adding in to fertility, immediately shifts the root word – the one that conjures up the mythical Aphrodite, abundant gardens, rich soil, glowing pregnant women, and photographs filled with children – from plentiful, abundant, fruitful, multiplication, to empty, hallow, quiet, fruitless. Historically, the fertility of a culture, both sexually and agriculturally, ensured its future. In ancient cultures, the fertility of humans, animals and the land was so crucial that various rituals evolved to encourage it. Infertile women were thought to be cursed.

Scholar Rebecca Flemming, PhD., has studied and written extensively on fertility in ancient cultures said, “Moreover, a key point about infertility is also born out in the ancient world, which is that whatever the understanding about conception is, however much male failure can be implicated, the drama of infertility is always played out in the woman’s body. That is to say, some things don’t change.”

I wore the label of infertility like a visitors badge I forgot to remove. The adhesive was cemented not only by the years my body rejected conception, but, more importantly by the societal connotation of infertility which has Biblical roots. Women like Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel and Hannah, Samson’s mother, and the elderly Anne sought relief from their broken barrenness. The Lord answered their desperate cries. A child is born to Sarah and, later, to Elizabeth well into old age; Jacob and Esau are born to Rebekah, after years of pleading; Rachel is granted sons after she prays for God to open her womb; Delilah has Samson after years of infertility. I found no consolation in the Biblical stories.

The Church – a place where celibacy is seen as a higher calling for priests and religious women and fertility in the married life is celebrated with the intensity of fireworks - - does not provide much guidance for those suffering from infertility. Church pews lined with children and internet blogs of large homeschooling Catholic mommas leave infertile couples bereft.

To those living with the constant disappointment of an empty crib, the words of the church sound hollow, patronizing. “It is important to remember that infertile couples are fruitful when their married life is open to others, to the needs of the apostolate…the needs of the poor…the needs of orphans…and to the world,” said Pope John Paul II, reiterating the type of statements that can be found on the USCCB website.

Journalist and author Kaya Oakes wrote in an April 2021 article in America magazine: “My church kept reminding me that this barrenness made me an outlier. It was not just the Mother’s Day celebrations. It was also the constant talk about Catholic supermoms, the focus on families with children, the praise of fertility and fecundity as the true measure of womanhood.” Oakes said she has searched to “recast my understanding of barrenness to see it as a space of possibility.” While working on her book The Defiant Middle: How Women Claim Life’s in-betweens to Remake the World, Oakes says she was inspired by a Jewish friend to look to the childless women of the Bible, like Queen Esther, who saves her people from death, and Miriam, the sister of Moses who delivers him to the Nile River to escape infanticide, and later leads the Hebrew women in celebratory singing and dancing; and Mary Magdalene, who is a sinner-turned-devoted-apostle and the first to see the risen Christ. Like Oakes, I want to see how my life can be a fertile ground for producing goodness so I can shed the shame that being infertile wrought.

In medical terminology, “Infertility is a disease of the male or female reproductive system defined by the failure to achieve a pregnancy after 12 months or more of regular unprotected sexual intercourse.” When my husband and I passed our year mark, deeming us “infertile,” we sought medical treatment, we joined a support group, and we did a lot of things to distract ourselves. We bought an old house at an auction and gutted it – spending every night after work painting, scraping, replacing walls, ceilings, floors and antiquated plumbing and electrical systems. We worked constantly. “Maybe you should just relax,” friends and family told us. “You are doing too much. If you relax you will get pregnant.”

But when the house was done, we moved in without a baby. I plunged myself into a 15-month master’s degree program in communication studies and Todd worked endless hours at his father’s electrical contracting business with the goal of buying it.

We forged through our infertile years, accepting what doctors had to offer, but rejecting the procedures that were not right for us. When the answering machine messages to “have sex with your husband because you are fertile” became too ridiculous, we pursued adoption. Within ten years we were parenting four children.

We are 60 now and our four children are adults. Mother clings to me like my youngest daughter did when she came home from Guatemala, too sick to eat or hold herself up at six months. My husband says: “You wore her like a shirt for two years.”

But the presence of my children did not erase the insecurity I felt at being infertile. My ability to bear abundant fruit in the world will always be one that is not physical. My fruitfulness must be interior – not something that can be physically counted, like the visits to the gynecologist, where I am asked, year after year, “how many pregnancies?” The question always hits me like a clap of thunder.

That one question erases everything I am.

I put “0” on the line. My mind screams “4.”

I wore this label of infertility like Punchinello, the main character in Max Lucado’s book You Are Special. In Lucado’s story, Punchinello lives in the town of Wemmickville where every day residents award one another stickers – gold stars for the achievers and the beautiful, gray dots for those who are ugly or failures. People in my “Wemmickville” have pressed gray dots onto my heart with their insensitive comments – “oh, I could get pregnant if my husband just looked at me” and “there must be something you could do to get pregnant” and “maybe you should just get divorced if you cannot have your own children” and “if it were me, I would do anything I could to have a baby with my husband.” I have allowed myself to remain covered in gray dots.

In the Audible book Miracle and Wonder, Paul Simon is talking to Malcolm Gladwell about his relationship to Art Garfunkel and the differences between their voices. Simon says his mother told him that he had a nice voice, a good voice, but that Artie had a fine voice. “You see how long that one line stayed with me,” Simon says quietly. One sentence, one word, can alter the path of a life, maybe create beautiful music like Simon’s, or maybe stymie art altogether. One word, one title, can leak into other areas of your life, destroying the possibility of fruitfulness.

I once wrote a letter to the editor of a Catholic family magazine regarding the stories they had run about women who had struggled with conception or who had secondary infertility: “It is very frustrating for me and probably for other chronically infertile people to read article after article about women who could not get pregnant a second or third time or who struggled to get pregnant for a year and then had four children. Why don’t you write about what it is like to live with infertility your entire life? Why don’t you write about the women whose prayer for a biological child is never answered?” The editor challenged me to “write it yourself.”

I had no desire to dig deep into the rocky soil of that word. Just to say it affirmed that I was broken, incapable of the one thing that bonds all women. I had no desire to write about my infertility when I was parenting four children. This cross had shifted to a chronic condition.

At that point I didn’t want to be pregnant, I just wanted to shed the shame.

Bréne Brown studies shame and vulnerability. She says, “I define shame as the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging - something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection.” She has spent years researching, writing books, giving TED talks, and developing Shame Resiliency Therapy, which shows that “shame is most harmful when it goes unacknowledged and is not spoken of.”

Infertility isolates women in an igloo of insensitivity.

“Shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change,” says Brown.

Ten letters that take up no more than an inch on the page can spread miles of pain. Our infertility deems us flawed. Brown’s books tell us the importance of embracing our flaws and allowing ourselves to become vulnerable with people who provide safe shelter. “I don’t believe shame is helpful or productive. In fact, I think shame is much more likely to be the source of destructive, hurtful behavior than the solution or cure. I think the fear of disconnection can make us dangerous,” Brown says.

Infertility disconnects. The barren woman is left out of conversations of pregnancy and birth. She cannot contribute to the stories women have been telling for generations. Brown suggests that we determine the factors that led to our feelings. “If we recognize our shame triggers, we can make mindful decisions about our response to shame,” she says. Life provided continual triggers – baby showers, breastfeeding mammas, talk of labor and delivery, birth control, monthly periods, menopause. Those triggers were not going to go away; what I had to learn was how I would respond to those triggers.

For several years, I led a Catholic women’s bible study called Women of Grace developed by EWTN radio and television personality Johnnette Benkovic Williams. The brief description promoting this study is: “Women of Grace encourages and affirms women in their dignity as daughters of God and in their gift of authentic femininity.” One of the primary teachings in this study is that “all women are called to be mothers” and to “birth Jesus to the world.” The concept employs many metaphors and analogies to physical motherhood, conception, receptivity, birth, bonding, acceptance, implantation, growth, pouring forth of new water, but the focus of the study is our role as women to spiritually birth Christ to the world.

The Women of Grace teachings refer to the writings of St. Pope John Paul II and, specifically, his document Mulieris Dignitatem (On the Dignity and Vocation of Women), in which he describes the universal vocation of all women, not just women who bear children. He said: “The moral and spiritual strength of a woman is joined to her awareness that God entrusts the human being to her in a special way…This entrusting concerns women in a special way – precisely by reason of their femininity – and this in a particular way determines their vocation…A woman is strong because of her awareness of this entrusting.”

In 2007, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy issued the document “Eucharistic Adoration for the Sanctification of Priests and Spiritual Maternity,” encouraging all women, regardless of their state in life, to consider themselves spiritual mothers. Religious sisters have always been spiritual mothers – nursing the sick, caring for orphans and the elderly, founding and teaching in schools, spending hours in prayer for others. “Spiritual mothering is about nurturing life,” says an article by the Carmelite Sisters. While the Congregation for the Clergy’s document was primarily concerned with establishing a more formal way for women to be spiritual mothers for priests, other Catholic women saw it as a call in their own lives, especially for women who did not have biological children.

Many writings on spiritual motherhood came from college professor and writer, Alice von Hildebrand, who died Jan. 14, 2022, at the age of 98. Although Hildebrand never had children of her own, her philosophical journey was impacted by the Nazi invasion of her homeland, Belgium, and by her marriage to renowned German philosopher and refugee, Dietrich von Hildebrand. “Motherhood is not only biological maternity. It is spiritual maternity. There are hundreds of people all around who are desperately looking for a mother,” said Hildebrand, who did not have biological children and yet said she was “bombarded” with cards on Mother’s Day.

Hildebrand contended that “spiritual motherhood is more important than biological motherhood.” She suggested that women should always pray for the gift of spiritual children. “You are called to motherhood right now. Not next week, not next month. I am absolutely convinced that God has placed people in your path and called you to motherhood. Your task is to love those that are weak, unhappy, helpless and unloved.”

Edith Stein (St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross), a German Jewish philosopher who converted to Catholicism, became a nun, and died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, also wrote extensively on spiritual motherhood. “A woman’s soul is fashioned as a “shelter in which other souls may unfold,” said Stein, who explained in her writings that the nature of the human soul is to be in relationship with other souls and that women are especially gifted with the ability to have extraordinary empathy for others and not just within the context of biological motherhood.

Stein says: “ The soul of woman must be expansive and open to all human beings, it must be quiet so that no small weak flame will be extinguished by stormy winds; warm so as not to benumb fragile buds…empty of itself, in order that extraneous life may have room in it; finally, mistress of itself and also of its body, so that the entire person is readily at the disposal of every call.”

“To be a mother innately means to cultivate, to guard, and to develop true humanity,” Stein wrote.

Mothering, cultivating it, was an action verb for Stein and Hildebrand. They didn’t see it as a label or a condition but a call to action.

In the deep recesses of Pennsylvania winter, when lakes are frozen, trees are naked and our yard stays white for weeks, I dream of summer produce. I scan seed catalogues and order the seedling potatoes from an organic farm in Maine that my son found three years ago. Every year I tell my husband, “I’m not planting that much this year. We aren’t here enough to keep things going, to keep the pests out and the tomato suckers pinched off.” He says, “You say that every year.”

But it is true. We are gone a lot in the summer, and the garden suffers. True cultivation can only be achieved with the dedication of time – hours of tilling and fertilizing, the careful planting of seeds or starter plants, watching them like a mother watches her toddler.

Abiding Together podcast co-host and author Sister Miriam James Heidland, who often talks about her love of gardening, said in a 2022 four-part series on motherhood, “we want a garden garment of praise instead of despair.” She spoke of how idols break us. “They break our fertility, they break our fruitfulness, they break our families, they break our interior integration.”

Maybe I had made an idol out of fertility.

Maybe I was the one who had allowed it to define me.

The arrival of my first grandbaby in 2019 awakened in me a desire to till and tend the soil of my life, to cast aside the labels that I let other people stick on me.

An adoptive mother of four, I knew nothing of birthing.

Breaking waters, centimeters dilated, the pangs of pushing and the crowning of heads were words without witness, until one of my daughters, once estranged, let me into the circle central of womanhood.

I watched as her waist expanded, wiped tears when a gelled wand located heartbeats and handprints. Awkward, ignorant, and undeserving waltzed with my feelings of gratitude and understanding. Infertility had denied the physical realities my body had craved.

A single 20-year-old, my child went into labor with our first grandchild, and I drove her to the hospital in the darkness expecting an easy delivery, but soon after she settled into a bed, her fever skyrocketed, she was sweating and vomiting. The baby curled herself into an odd angle in the womb. Nurses manipulated the baby’s position but couldn’t stabilize her heartrate. For hours we watched the heart rate monitor.

Things grew dire.

They prepped my daughter for a C-section and gowned me so I could be in the delivery room with her. Minutes later a nurse said, “I’m sorry dear but you can’t come now. We have to put her to sleep.” Just after midnight, the nurse texted me a photo of my first grandchild, who was whisked off to a neo-natal intensive care unit while my daughter returned to her hospital room to recover.

We waited three hours to see her.

A nurse wheeled my daughter’s hospital bed into the small cold neonatal room, me tagging along like a loyal dog; another nurse held my granddaughter out to us, her 6-pound body attached to so many wires I couldn’t imagine how we would hold her. She screamed with ferocity.

Tired from sedation, surgery, stress, and infection, my daughter pulled her new girl to her breast, their black hair and light brown skin blending in a moment of bittersweet afterbirth.

I was no longer exempt.

The February after the failed basil harvest, I scoured articles on the Internet trying to discern what had gone wrong. I had watered, fed, sprayed organic Neem oil, I talked to the plants and picked straggly leaves hoping it would encourage new growth. Sometimes things just have no explanation.

I have spent hours, days, weeks, months, years endlessly contemplating my purpose and pleading with my God for guidance. In this last third of my life, the contrasting title, “infertile mother” has been replaced with “spiritual mother.” I hear the words of the Psalmist: “They shall bear fruit even in old age; vigorous and sturdy shall they be.” I shed the browned leaves of shame that clung to me for so long and exchanged them for fruitful vines that tendrilled in all directions. The fertile soil is there, ready to be tilled, ready to give birth.