Maybe Baby #5: Dissolving futures and surrendering control

This is the fifth in a series of posts reflecting on our [in]fertility journey and how it intersects with the assumed scripts of life and faith.

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In my last post I discussed the tension that emerged during each round of fertility treatment between the need for hope and my understandable search for some kind of self-protective emotional distance. 

And despite my renewed desire to sustain some kind of hope for each round of treatment and embryo transfer, an understandable change in my overall mentality did begin to emerge. We had entered into our final round of publicly funded IVF in the second half of 2017 and a pregnancy was the immediate result. For this pregnancy, however, the clinic was tentative with their assessment of the blood tests. The indicators were measuring a little low and they were waiting to see whether the pregnancy would last beyond the first few weeks.

This was a profoundly different experience from the naivety and unbridled joy of our first pregnancy in 2015 (although we were to find out later that the initial indicators were actually very similar). This time around we, along with the doctors and nurses, were tentative as to whether or not this pregnancy would proceed and, in the end, these cautions proved well-founded. A blood test 3 weeks into the pregnancy (and 2 weeks before Christmas) showed that the little embryo was not progressing as it should, and a short time later the miscarriage ensued.

For me, the shape of grief this time was different to the first. The grief of that first loss was like a sudden and violent shock that arrived with full force, but this time - though the grief was intense - it was layered with weariness and a lingering sense of resignation. 

Until this point the fundamental assumption that sat underneath the surface had still been a sense of conviction that this would happen eventually. I had wrestled with grief, hope and a much longer road than anticipated, but I had not yet genuinely imagined a future without children. Despite how long the journey had been by this stage, I somehow felt like we were still near the beginning of treatment but here we were, close to the end of our funded treatment options and we had just suffered another loss. It felt like the possibilities were quickly and quite suddenly fading.

Over our summer holiday break I came face-to-face with the idea that this might in fact be the way this whole thing turns out, that the long-hoped for baby would not arrive. And this was a new kind of grief to negotiate. I found myself thinking about all of my friends who had children. It felt like they had entered into the next phase of life while we were still stuck on the previous stage; a stage we weren’t supposed to be in anymore. Their lives were filled with children’s birthdays and school drop-offs and sports – all things that I had assumed my life would be filled with by now, but it wasn’t.

I also began to think about the years to come, about the decades of my life that I had imagined would be consumed with raising kids, who would become teenagers, and then sending them off to university, before welcoming them home for Christmas. About growing older and having grandchildren and buying them too many sugary treats while I sat in my favourite chair and watched the clouds race across the sky.

And I began to consider what life might look like now? I’m not saying that life without children isn’t meaningful - it quite clearly is - it’s just that I had not genuinely imagined it before the start of 2018. But now I found myself thinking about it constantly. What would we do with our lives, where would we go, and how would we spend our energies? 

Grief from loss or tragedy, from something that has happened, is one thing. But it’s a different thing entirely trying to figure out what to feel and how to process grief when something hasn’t happened. In many respects it’s a less distinct thing to grieve as you’re unable to point to some definitive experience and say “look at this terrible thing!”

This is one expression of what psychologists call non-finite loss; a form of loss that can defined as “grief that persists and changes as aspects of life continually fall short of expectations” and the resultant “painful and constant clashes between aspirations and reality.”[1] Sometimes this comes through an accident or illness that causes permanent disruption to one’s present and future life, or as in our case, the potential loss of a future with children that would have a significant impact on our lives for decades to come.

In many respects it can be a challenge to feel like this form of grief is valid; either to yourself or to others. The consistent but indirect nature of the loss feels ambiguous and vague; hard to define and with accompanying feelings that can feel difficult to justify. But I was wrestling with the reality of a script that had changed and illusions of control that had been stripped away.

When I was younger there was lots of talk about surrendering to God, lots of talk about how we should learn to trust in God’s faithfulness. But I haven’t found this conception of surrender and trust particularly helpful in recent years. Perhaps it is because this version of surrender always includes the rejoinder that God knows what is best and if you trust God then things will work out in the end. Even though the intention to this cliché is often well-meaning, it implies that somehow it is God who has held something back, God who has some mysterious purpose in giving you an experience of undeserved pain.

But I have also come to understand what surrender might mean for me now. At its heart it is about a relinquishing of control. It is a realisation that this sense of control we live with is often an illusion, and we are less able than we think to manage and manipulate the present and future of our lives. Sometimes the things that we plan and plot do, in fact, turn out as we desire. But often life does not follow the script, it does not play the game we thought we were playing.

In this sense, surrender becomes a deep and significant recognition that I cannot control all aspects of my life. I cannot control what happens today, let alone what happens in the future. And while my belief in God does not provide me with a magic being who can click his fingers and make it all better, there is deeper sense of trust that comes with the process of letting go. Surrender of control invites me to recognise that my life will not be ‘made complete’ once things have turned out as I planned.  

The Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard said that “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” 

Control is typically about trying to solving “the problem”, but even if you manage to solve it there will always be another problem just around the corner. If we spend our lives waiting for things to turn out as we planned, we can miss all of the subtle and complex ways that life can be experienced in the present. This is not to romanticise the present, as if all I need to do is pretend that all is well, instead it is quite the opposite. It is to acknowledge life as it truly is, and then seek what it might look like to find meaning, beauty, and love amidst the jumbled, complicated and often painful reality that we wrestle with in day-to-day life. 

Surrender is an invitation to dive deeply into the present, to find the divine at work in the wild and fragile reality we inhabit, and to find beauty hidden in the cracked and crooked earth.

Click here to read the final post in this series.

[1] Bruce, E. J., & Schultz, C. L. (2001). Nonfinite loss and grief: A psychoeducational approach. Baltimore, MD, US: Paul H Brookes Publishing.