I remember very clearly how I felt, walking along a sunny side-street in Ravenna, Italy, when I felt the first mild cramping that signaled the beginning of my period.
I told Taylor we needed to head back to our hotel so I could lay down and take some pain meds, and he held my hand the whole way there. When we got to the room I took my medicine and then we sat down on the couch together. I sat close to Taylor and he put his arms around me while I wept softly into his shoulder.
No honeymoon baby.
Perhaps I can’t describe it for women who don’t know the feeling, but menstruation each month is particularly sorrowful for those struggling to conceive. Each month is a little death. Not the woman’s death, and not the death of a conceived child, clearly. It is the death of a could-have-been, a longing. Vital life support for a child-who-wasn’t-conceived, leaving my body alone again. That takes a toll on Hope.
Taylor and I so very much wanted children, I thought for sure God would readily accept our willingness and bless us with an abundance of family, and soon. Even though we had only been married five weeks that day in Ravenna, that’s plenty of time for conception, I thought, just by the numbers.
But five years later, we still wait.
So, I have had much time to think about what it means to be happily and wonderfully married, to want children, and to be childless.
Lately, I remember Hannah and her husband, Elkanah. [1 Sam 1]
Elkanah loved his wife, but they had no children, despite their intense longing for a family. Hannah would weep openly at her misfortune, “Because the Lord had closed her womb.”
Elkanah, who loved her dearly, asked her, “Hannah, why do you weep? …Why is your heart sad? Am I not more to you than ten sons?”
How often I have wept, as the tangible evidence of my non-motherhood makes its appearance right on schedule each month. I know those tears that Hannah shed. I know her longing, her solitude.
But Elkanah–I too often forget him in the story. His part takes me very much out of myself, out of my own struggle and longing and loss.
As the priest told me during the vows at my wedding: “Look at him.” Look at your husband, I hear him tell me. See the goodness and the Love God has given you in him. Is he not worth more than your vision, than your plans?
You see, it’s not that a husband or wife is more important than a child–there is no hierarchy. But the spousal relationship is primary. It came first. Taylor loved me before any of my sons and daughters will. In many ways, he loves me more than our children will.
And as fiercely as I do desire them, I do not want children except to have them with Taylor. I do not want motherhood without Taylor’s fatherhood. It would not be full for me without him. And in that way, he truly is worth more to me than ten sons. I never cried when I started my period before I was married to Taylor. That time of the month meant nothing to me before he loved me as his wife.
And so I am learning, that even the suffering that comes with marriage–indeed, with any relationship–is still the more enriched and strengthened by Love.
I have come to understand that I wouldn’t even want to cry in any one else’s arms.
