by Katie Schuermann
I promised in my last post on IVF that I would write more about the unexpected, unimaginable gifts God has given to me in my barren marriage.
First, please understand that this post is not to be read as one, big brag. Nope, this is a “go and tell what He has done” kind of sharing, so please do not compare your own days and vocations with my own. Remember, I am recounting some of God’s unexpected, unimaginable gifts to me in my barrenness, so they are going to be personal and specific to my own existence.
Second, as you celebrate with me, remember that this post does not serve as a promise that God also will give you the same kinds of blessings. This post is simply a blog-psalm, and I am inviting you to sing it with me.
Third, this is not an exhaustive list of gifts, for my finite brain cannot recall all of God’s infinite blessings over the years. (Isn’t that in itself marvelous? to be so blessed amidst trials and tribulations as not to be able to recount all of the blessings?) Though I do hope this list encourages you to reconsider waiting on the Lord when it comes to receiving the gift of children rather than trying to give yourself children through IVF. For surely He blesses, regardless of the size of our families.
Now that we are clear on the purpose of this post, here are some of the unexpected, unimaginable gifts God has given to me while also withholding the gift of children from my womb:
+ Because I have no children of my own to keep alive from minute to minute, my eyes and hands are free to attend to other people’s children. This means that I am able to make full eye contact with one child at a time and often for longer periods of time than their own mothers. Which also means that the bond between us forms fast and strong. I then nurture that bond over time with music and stories and catechesis and laughter and tears and long conversations and shared experiences. The result? Often, I am a child’s favorite person in the world (or so that child believes in the moment), and I am rarely in a room with that child for long without also receiving the full force of their attention and affection. This is true of hundreds of children — God be praised! (Dear, hardworking mothers, I know that my freedom in life to pour this kind of attention onto your child/ren is a gift, and I do not take this gift lightly. I see you. I am in awe of the ways you die to self every day for the sake of these children who love me. The distribution of affection is not fair, and I thank you for your grace and mercy in sharing your children with me. xo)
+ Whenever I walk out my door, the precious neighbor girl across the street wants to be with me in my yard rather than with her family in her own. I repeatedly have to remind her to ask her parents’ permission before vacating her own home.
+ Children sometimes ask to have their birthday parties at my house instead of their own.
+ I was blessed to spend six months of my life caring for another neighbor’s infant during the majority of her daylight hours. I helped form her brain and her culture and her sense of being through stories and songs and affection while her mommy worked. I was blessed to teach that infant to sleep peacefully in my house, and that was an exercise in trust I thought I would never experience in this life with a baby.
+ Over the years, I’ve driven a niece, a nephew, and a godson to their first days of school as well as picked them up at the end of the day. Their mommies let me be present for these formative experiences, bonding me further to their children.
+ Children often tell me that they wish I was their mom. What they mean is, “I love being with you right now and want it to last as long as possible.” They just don’t have the words, yet.
+ A young boy staying in my home with his family went on to write the following words for a school assignment: “I like the touch of her house because it is like ours … Her house is wonderful.” A young girl visiting my house was silent the entire visit until just before she left. She stopped short of my front door and, without turning to look at me, said, “Your house is both colorful and comfortable. I like to hear you sing.” And yet another little girl calls my guest room “her” room. I cherish the opportunity to be a home-away-from-home to children from all across the world.
+ Michael and I have been blessed to open our home for weeks at a time to sojourning teens in need of rest from trauma in their own homes. This is a kind of formation that supports families and helps them stay together during their weakest seasons, and I am continually stunned how God takes my empty nursery and fills it with other peoples’ children, working my barrenness for their good as well as my own.
+ I’ve been invited to witness the wedding dress shopping of two daughters in the faith. I thought I would miss out on these kinds of experiences in life, but …
+ Another dear daughter in the faith is wearing my wedding dress down the aisle of her own wedding and …
+ Yet another precious daughter in the faith wore a necklace on her wedding day that I gave her. I didn’t know she was going to do that until I showed up at the wedding. These mother-daughter exchanges are small, giant experiences in the heart of a barren woman.
+ On Mother’s Day, I receive more cards and gifts than actual mothers. This is not fair, I know, but I am always deeply moved and comforted to be remembered and appreciated by so many.
+ My own table is filled with the most wonderful, intelligent, gracious graduate students, international students, and sojourners on Thanksgiving and Christmas. This means that their own parents do not get to enjoy their children on these feast days. The loss experienced by these parents at the expense of my gain is something that moves me to prayer every holiday.
+ Thus far, I’ve been blessed to teach eight children to recite the Athanasian Creed from memory, an accomplishment that is always months in the making with each individual child. So much time spent contemplating the faith with any child results in the most extraordinary conversations, memories, and relational trust, and those relationships continue to bear joyous fruit in my daily life.
+ In my own home, I’ve been awakened by two different sick children on two different nights in need of my special attention (read: clean up all the vomit) as well as administered insulin to a sleeping Type I diabetic teen whose blood sugar was spiking. I thank God for these opportunities to 1) give their mommies a break, and 2) to be a mommy in the night for the briefest of spells.
+ Grown-up children in the faith “come home” to me for entire weekends simply to eat my cooking and tell me all the things.
+ I get to be the first one to hear about the first date experiences of so many other mothers’ daughters.
+ After years of teaching Sunday school children to sing their first hymns, I have hordes of hymns memorized. And so do they.
+ I can get practically any baby to fall asleep in my arms at any time. It is because I am special. God gave me a mother-like bosom, but I never smell like mother’s milk. That, and the vibration of my humming carries with it the promise of music in their dreams. But seriously, the real reason is that God is merciful to me in my barrenness. He blesses me in this little, substantial way.
+ In my barrenness, I have written and published eleven books (twelve if you count second editions) in fifteen years. It is the absence of children in my home that enables such an output, and I know it. I grieve it, but I also rejoice in it. It’s complicated.
+ Another one of my neighbors spent over a year of her life crossing the street to enter my front door and write her doctoral thesis beside me. Just because.
+ Instead of setting money aside for our wished-for children’s college educations, my husband and I get the honor of passing that money directly on to other peoples’ children now, specifically to seminarians and missionaries and church building funds and service organizations and whomever and wherever God needs it.
+ I have the time and availability to sit with women whose mothers are absent or have died, and I get to listen to them like a mother. Repeatedly.
I could go on and on and on … Isn’t that wondrous? Isn’t God merciful?
But I’ll end for now with this.
Michael and I have the joy of being a father and a mother in this life, not through pregnancy as we prayed, not through adoption as we hoped, and not through foster care as we tried, but through the simple yet extraordinary means of attending a church, of living on Clark Street, of working as a pastor and a writer, and of being fatherly and motherly to the people God sends our way. It is the most unexpected of blessings, the most unimaginable of joys!
We are barren but blessed. Truly, our cup overflows!
