Unexpected Gifts of Infertility

Steve and I began our marriage just knowing that it wouldn’t be much beyond nine months before we would be holding our own perfect little newborn. Granted, we were both thirty-eight, but we were both healthy and otherwise “successful” people.  And the NFP charts we had observed during our engagement looked normal enough.

Moreover, it had been overwhelmingly clear how everything else about our relationship – including the way we had met and gotten engaged – had been part of a divine plan. Surely a brood of our own little ones would follow easily and naturally, right?

Well, six months of marriage and no pregnancy made us begin to wonder. We took a naturalist approach first – dietary changes and supplements – but that didn’t help. By our first anniversary we heard about Dr. Tom Hilgers and his newly developing science of NaproTechnology. Not only was he achieving remarkable results with infertile couples, but he was doing it fully in keeping with Catholic teaching.

When I first walked into the waiting room of his Pope Paul VI Institute in Omaha, what first caught my eye was a wall covered with photos of babies, children, parents, and families. We felt immediately wrapped in the warmth of a love for life.

Nine months after first meeting him and his staff, Steve and I were blessed with the announcement that I was pregnant! As we watched our little one’s heartbeat at five weeks, our hearts overflowed with joy and gratitude. That was only to last for a month, though.

The next ultrasound showed no heartbeat. Our tiny child had died.  The brimming joy of a brand new life all too soon gave way to the numb sorrow of a very early death. But we wanted our joy, not our sorrow, to be our lasting memory and so we named our little one, Cause of Our Joy – one of the titles of the Blessed Virgin

We kept our hope up for a while longer, but as we began progressing through our early forties it was dawning on us that we would not likely conceive another child. God was asking us to bear the cross of infertility. Hard as it was to carry, another would be added.

We still knew that we wanted to be parents and so we turned to adoption. We ended up suffering through not one but three failed adoption attempts. So, not only could we not conceive a child the normal way, we couldn’t even adopt one the normal way. While we didn’t giving up hope of adopting we decided that while we were waiting we would provide state-licensed foster care. God was quietly preparing the way.

Five years, two months and seventeen days into our marriage, we got a call from our assigned case worker. “We have a newborn girl, can you take her in?” What a little beauty she was:  a full shock of hair, eyelashes to die for, elfin eyes and a bubbling, happy spirit.

With foster care when you take a child in you never quite know how long he will stay. We had already taken in a boy a few weeks earlier only to see him leave a month later. But in Krystena’s case, after six months we were asked if we would adopt her.  Oh yes!!! And so our little Krystena was ours.

Jacinta came shortly afterwards. An Ob/Gyn friend of ours contacted us out of the blue:  she had a birth mom who wanted her child to be adopted and our friend thought, knowing our story, that we would be just the right fit. Was she ever right!

We were introduced to Jacinta’s biological mother when she was five months old in her mother’s womb. God had cleared the way for our dear little, dark-eyed and deep-spirited Jacinta to be placed in our arms at birth.

Before we knew it we were a family of four, and it had happened in ways we could never have imagined or even prayed for at the beginning of our marriage. But God wasn’t finished with us yet.

Six years later, having already turned fifty, God stirred within Steve and my hearts. We decided, “Let’s welcome one more.” We reactivated as foster parents and asked for a boy under two. We first took care of an eight-month old boy for about a month, and then we welcomed in a fifteen-month old.

He was sick and scared when he arrived, but after several weeks of good meals and loads of TheTLC – which all four of us were delighted to give – he emerged as a spunky and bright little boy. And as it was with Krystena years earlier, we were soon asked if we would be willing to adopt him. Again, yes!!! And so we welcomed our Dominic.

What is the moral of our story? Children are gifts freely given by God. We can and should ask Him for these gifts, but we can never expect Him to give them, not, anyway, in the way that we might have expected. That is the nature of a gift.

Naturally conceived children are His normal gift for married couples, but with some couples that is not His plan. But even if He might not give His gifts to these couples in the normal way, in the way they might have expected, He still wishes to give gifts to them.

Steve and I cannot imagine how a family with three naturally conceived children could be any happier and more grateful than we are with our three adopted ones. But we could never have known that when we began our journey together as a married couple.