Chapter Five: Springing Up

If I had to distill the theme of this recent spiritual journey, it would be trust. It is what was taken from me, what I suffered without, what I fought to recover at last. The leap from I am alone to He is with me required a great deal of trust.

We have been examining the details of this elaborate landscape in my life: I have been longing to reveal the panorama. Yet, there are two puzzle pieces left to snap into place. 

The first was revealed to me long before I could make out its connection to the whole. It was early December 2019. My mother had made a surprise day-trip to spend time with me and the kids. During nap time, as she helped me make an absurd amount of cut-out cookies, we talked about something I was processing—forgiving past hurts. Fresh in my mind were the circumstances and memories I had been rehashing lately with my counselor and mentor, recalling an array of formative experiences that shared a common thread: rejection. Being left out, left behind, abandoned, discarded, forgotten. I was feeling emotionally near to that little girl who had tried so desperately to fit in, to be accepted and loved. She worked with tireless trust to be worthy, believing without end that this time, she would be accepted and valued. But time after time, her precious efforts were ignored or discarded. I mourned for that tender heart: even as I write about it, I feel that familiar ache in my chest. My mentor had been urging me to forgive the figures whom I had come to hold responsible for the lion’s share of this pain. I was feeling stuck. To forgive was a dangerous act of trust, tearing down walls that were protecting me from further hurt. I could see that unforgiveness was keeping fresh old wounds that wanted to heal, but how could I make myself vulnerable and still protect the tender girl that would be exposed? 

True to her nature, my mother quietly listened and absorbed until my words were spent. She contemplated in silence, then allowed the Holy Spirit to speak truth over me through her voice. Even in that moment, I could hear God in her words—they tumbled out with conviction and certainty and power. The spoke affirmations over me about my special value and worth. They revealed the connection between those grievous experiences and the beautiful shape my life had taken: the flower that had bloomed from the seed. They showed the unbreakable bond between the rejection I had experienced and my fierce heart for including and welcoming others. They proclaimed the ultimate victory of my tender heart over the cruel experiences that were meant by evil to break it. She said over and over “you won.” I hadn’t perceived my story as triumphant. I had felt ultimately underfoot, my bright love muddied and dulled. She showed me the ways that my light had persisted no matter what had sought to extinguish it—reminding me of the people in my life that had been enveloped by it. “You’ve won, Laura. You win.” These words became to me a precious jewel, nestled in the palm of my hand—my own treasure to gaze at in wonder.

Returning to February 2020: the last few weeks found me experiencing small spiritual victories. The panic and fear that had defined my life was finding itself unwelcome, its power greatly diminished. In early March, my daughter had a mysterious health issue causing her pain and disrupting sleep. I took her to the doctor where she had invasive testing that revealed no problem or solution, and when we arrived back home, she was in increased pain and discomfort. I employed several home remedies to try to help her, but each thing I did only led to greater hysteria. As the day ended, I finally ceased all futile efforts. Holding her until she was calm, we put her to bed and prepared for a night of little sleep. Before I went to bed, I prayed for complete healing for her body and that she would sleep all night. We awoke the next morning after an uninterrupted night’s sleep to a cheerful daughter exhibiting no signs of discomfort or pain. I do not mean to draw here a definite conclusion between my prayer and her healing—I have prayed many desperate prayers for healing and sleep that have yielded no such results. But it was an experience that pestered me with significance. Processing with my mentor later that week, I realized that situation was a microcosm of the last decade of my life: working desperately out of my own strength to combat the challenges of life, only to find that the resolution I sought was in surrender rather than resourcefulness. In an effort to self-protect, I had constructed a reality that I could not rely on anyone but myself—but the truth is, I had only shifted allegiances rather than done away with them. I had depended on sleep, on health, on doctors and medicine, on my husband, on time, on money or scheduling or routine—on any number of things that I felt I could control or manipulate. Each of these reliances would give me temporary security but inevitably failed. Each time they did not come through, I would experience deep panic. I was drowning in the waters of uncertainty, fear, and anger as the driftwood I clung to kept breaking up. I would reach for another to stabilize me, but it would disintegrate, too. It was a desperate way to live.

When I showed up to my March counseling appointment, my life had much more equilibrium. For the first time, I didn’t have some kind of crisis I needed to process with her. I asked her what clients talk about when they have no trauma to discuss and she laughed and told me that they were often the most productive counseling sessions. As I discussed with her my coming to terms with the need to truly grieve infertility loss, I asked how I might begin to exhume that pain from the false notions I’d used to bury it (“It doesn’t matter anymore; I’m a mom now” or “I can’t feel sad about that when it brought me three beautiful kids” or “That’s in the past: there’s no use dredging up those old feelings”). We turned to the technique Brainspotting. It’s a method centered around the discovery “where you look affects how you feel” that aids movement from the thinking process of the brain to the emotional and body process. It’s been a helpful tool for me because I’m often trying to reason away what I feel instead of simply feeling it and finding its purpose or significance. 

My counselor asked me to recall a thought or experience associated with my infertility story and I talked about the belief I had uncovered that “I prayed for God to give me a baby, and he wouldn’t do it, so I did it myself.” I did it myself: The very heart of the distrust that had become my life, born out of loss that I’d interpreted as abandonment. As I spoke about it, focused on it, the old feelings sprang up. I felt them in the tightening of my chest, the shortening of my breath, the constricting of my throat. My counselor noticed where I was looking in the room as I spoke—the bottom left corner of the doorframe—and asked me to focus my eyes there as I physically felt the emotional trauma. I was used to the practice. I stared with unbroken diligence and allowed my mind to freely explore what was tucked away in that hidden space. An internal dialogue unfolded as my counselor silently looked on. 

I prayed for God to give me a baby, and he wouldn’t do it. So I did it myself. I went and found the donors for our embryos. I went to adoption support groups to prepare myself for the process. I chose to open our family to another family through adoption, to share our children with their biological parents. I called the lawyer and organized the meetings and developed the contract. I drove to Winston-Salem to pick up the embryos in a freezer canister and literally drove them to my clinic in Greensboro. I had one invasive procedure after another to assess my uterus or check its lining and plan the path for the embryo transfers. I took estrogen in patches and pills and took weeks and weeks of pills and suppositories and shots of Progesterone—I had over almost 200 injections to prepare for and sustain pregnancy because I couldn’t get pregnant naturally. I did this. I did it. I did it; I did it all in order to become a mother.

As I lingered with slow detail over each of the time-consuming, invasive, painful, emotionally traumatic experiences of becoming pregnant with our children, my physical response increased. My body was filled with heat. My breath was a shallow heaving. My throat and chest were clenched and restricted. And then 

I knew you would do those things.

I knew you would welcome another family into yours through adoption. I knew you would drive to Winston-Salem to retrieve those frozen embryos. I knew you would undergo test after test to prepare your body to receive them. I knew you would willingly endure each pill, patch, and injection to bring those children into the world. I knew you would do those things. That’s why I gave them to you.

A voice inaudible but to my own ears, retracing each step of my grief to redeem it with a new perspective. No, not a new perspective, but the true perspective. Grief and pain had closed my heart to seeing reality. I wasn’t able to hear these words before. But the ground of my heart had been cleared, tilled, enriched, prepared to receive them now. They broke over me like a wave and my eyes, wet and burning as I stared at that corner of the room, gently closed in release and relief. My body unclenched, relaxed. My breath normalized. I sat still, listening to his words, nodding, smiling, crying, grateful. Alone with the One who sees through me, transparent, with the bright eyes of love. 

I can’t remember this encounter without the flood of tears returning. I love to tell the story of this moment. This is when that brilliant flower, hitherto invisible to my eyes, shot forth from its dark womb and unfurled its face to the sun. 

I want to end my story by making sense of it all: Explaining everything in exact detail so the connections are crystal clear. Providing evidence to prove all truths for those who feel doubt (I know you, I’ve felt that), to all whose minds are full of questions and hypotheticals and skepticism, who have heard these kinds of stories over and over again and never had their own to make them seem plausible. I get that. I've lived that story, too. There are still a lot of things I don’t understand or know—just the other day, I was talking to my counselor about “anticipatory grief” for the end of the “honeymoon phase” of this spiritual awakening. It is not my design nor desire to analyze and prove, but to share the precious transformation of my life. There are a few simple things that are abundantly clear to me: I now experience deep peace because I'm not alone; I have confidence that I—Laura—am seen by God; I have discovered there is purpose and place for all of my emotions and experiences. 

Every pain, challenge or discomfort that came my way would fill me with panic. It was a constant buzz like caffeine shaking my body at even the hint of adversity. That is no longer my response to life. As things arise, they have become just that—things that have arisen. I no longer live at the ragged edge of my capability, but feel an endless source and supply stretching out around me on all sides. I went from quenching my thirst from a puddle to drawing from a bottomless well. When my enemy tells me You Are Alone, I have the confidence to say "I don't believe that is true."

It made me angry to think of giving worship to a God who merely required me to be a nameless vessel transferring glory to his name. After my intimate encounter with God, I can see now that who I am is of paramount importance to him. That giving honor to him is not a labor that I am bound to. It is a natural occurrence of living the beauty of my unique life in relationship with him. I am not a non-person, as I once expressed it. To him, I am Laura—the girl of a thousand rejections whose turned those into welcome for others. My experiences past and present matter to him. He sees them and has illumined the unspeakable brilliance of them.

For a short time after the thrill and ecstasy of this spiritual turning point, I imagined I had finally arrived at the place we all dream of: that new confidence in God and his promises would turn every challenge into joy, every sorrow into peace. Very quickly I discovered that most of my feelings were still present and strong. The panic is gone, yet I still respond in circumstances with fear. The hopelessness is gone, but deep sadness and loss are not strangers. Instead of trying to separate myself from the hard and uncomfortable emotions, I now try to think of them as a wave that washes over and then recedes. There is a great difference between enduring the crash and tumble of a giant wave when you are treading water alone than when you are in a boat. That’s a poor metaphor to paint the magnificent reality of weathering life’s storms in the company of the eternal God, but it’s a start. Having seen the irrevocable connection between the death and life of my story, I am practicing the art of holding grief and joy in the same hand.

Here is the end, which, in the design of the world, is also the beginning of all that comes next.