Maybe Baby #1: The Surprising Subtlety of Magical Thinking

This is the first in a series of posts reflecting on our complicated journey of infertility, trying to start a family, and the way it intersects with the assumed scripts of life and faith. Hopefully this resonates for those on a similar journey, but also speaks to those living with other experiences where life has not necessarily gone according to plan.

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At the end of 2009 Hannah and I were walking and talking on a beach in Auckland. We had been married for little more than a year in a relationship that had taken us both by surprise. Great friends for ten years without a hint of romance, in early 2008 we had somehow started dating. And, despite my continued best efforts to blow up any relationship that came close to turning into anything real, our dating turned into love, engagement, and a wedding in nine short months. And so here we were, one year later, talking about the possibility of starting a family. We had been told by friends that it was best to have two years with each other first, as that would give you a quality of time that would be impossible with children on the scene. But as we talked on the beach we realised we were ready, we were willing to give it a go, and we would figure out marriage and parenthood together.

At first, we remained a little cautious. Perhaps we wouldn’t begin by “trying” to have a baby, but we’d stop trying not to have a baby. If it happened, great, if not, it’ll happen when the time is right.

This last phrase - “when the time is right” - became a common refrain over the coming months and years. Because after 12 months of not using contraception, all we had to show for it were a couple of late periods and some failed pregnancy tests. But, it’ll happen when the time is right, we told ourselves. These things have a way of working out. God has a way of making things happen just when they’re supposed to. 

It is interesting now to reflect on that impulse, and I think that for both of us it came from two intersecting paradigms. 

The first was a spirituality that said things would always eventually “work out” for those who were faithful, believed, prayed, hoped, and persisted. This was the narrative we had absorbed intuitively over many years. After the first year or two, and a more intentional approach to “trying” without any resultant pregnancy, we still assumed that things would happen “when the time is right.” 

It is intriguing to me that I was already well down the path of deconstructing my previously entrenched paradigms of faith, and so it is not as though this experience was suddenly shattering the things I believed. I had already become dissatisfied with the assumption that God would guarantee blessing, prosperity and success to the faithful, and I had done so because of both the difficult experiences of my friends, and a re-forming theology that helped me to see God in a different (and more beautiful) light. And yet despite my intellectual transformation, there were clearly still the well-worn inner paths that had been cultivated over many years. If you’d have asked me, I could have told you that things don’t always work out and that we shouldn’t expect them to. 

But what I discovered was that I still expected them to. 

My changing beliefs were not yet capable of undoing years of subconscious ideology. In many respects, although we never would have said it like this, our view of the world was shaped by a version of magical thinking. If we think the right thoughts and behave the right way, then the desired things will ultimately unfold. That is just the way things work. And even though I had peeled back layers of theology and embarked on the journey of re-understanding what I thought about God, this deep-seated way of seeing the world had persisted under the surface.

And we were following the script to this point: grow up, get married to a good Christian, and then have kids! That’s the way it happens - so easy and straightforward. We had never considered the possibility that this journey would get complicated at some point. It’s not that we were so naïve as to think that life was never complicated for anyone, but we still had that sense of assurance that this kind of thing wouldn’t happen to people like us.

And that’s the second part of the impulse: “people like us.” 

We were both people for whom things usually worked out, regardless of our religious beliefs. We were raised well, we were educated, smart, and reasonably successful [white] people. We would usually get the jobs we apply for, had good friends and were surrounded by people who were also “successful”. We were entirely used to things going our way. Again, this was not a denial of challenges, or even a claim that our lives had been smooth sailing prior to this, but whatever had happened thus far was not enough to dim our optimism and unconscious sense of entitlement. 

Things have a way of working out for people like us.

These two paradigms do, of course, have a symbiotic relationship; they feed off each other. We had a reasonable amount of privilege that often meant things did work out for us. And we had lived for a long time with a spirituality that told us that these things worked out for us because of our beliefs and devotion. Perhaps without the privilege that our upbringing and education afforded us, we would have come to different conclusions much sooner, but perhaps not. Everyone likes to be told that things will work out okay in the end. So much so that it’s almost a compulsory line in every Hollywood script: “everything is going to be okay, I promise”. It is more than a line in a movie to reassure a troubled character, it is a mantra that we want to hear repeated to us over and over again to ease our suspicions about the way the world really is.

The end result of all of this in our experience was avoidance. We refused to confront the reality that things were not working out. When the feelings of concern and worry came to the surface, we were quick to bury them, to reassure ourselves, to busy ourselves with work and friends and supporting others in their challenging circumstances, but not to pay attention to our own story, to the challenges that were emerging so closely to us that we could not see them. It was an understandable defence mechanism, and one that functioned for us. It kept us “safe” from the unwanted reality that was beginning to make itself known.

I think this is something that many of us are familiar with to some degree. Our modern Western lives and accompanying spiritualities are determined to pursue a life that tiptoes around pain. We will often do whatever we can to avoid it, to look the other way, to convince ourselves that there’s “nothing to see here.” Pain is a reminder that we are mortal, that we are not in control, and that life will not always go as we would like.  

I don’t like pain either. And I may be a theologian but I still can’t construct a satisfactory rationale for suffering. But I also know that life doesn’t always give us a choice about what comes our way. And if we want a spirituality that will be meaningful and enable us to live with a real sense of aliveness, it must be capable of meeting us in our pain. It must resource us, not with solutions, but with presence. There is no glamorising real pain, no way to make it appealing, nor to give it purpose; although what it does remind us of, is the fragility of the human experience.

For many, fragility is seen as something negative to resist, and to overcome. But perhaps fragility is an invitation into the places where a deepening sense of life can be found; where vulnerability, dependence and trust can emerge and find their voice. Maybe it is in the fragile places that we are most human.

Click here to read part 2.