Mary G Bruno

Two Balms for the Suffering Soul

Mary: It is really helpful for me to hear your perspective. I frequently share about how isolating my experience of infertility has been, and also endometriosis pain, because most of the time that suffering goes unnoticed behind closed doors. I never realized couples who struggle with secondary infertility find themselves in even stranger isolation since you have a child or children others can see. Who would fathom you were really hurting inside because you couldn’t conceive again? And if it was hard to hide your emotions at Mother’s Day Mass, you might even get strange looks! I can almost hear the older ladies cautioning you to “just be grateful,” which is just as cringeworthy as “just relax.”

Eventually you conceived and gave birth to a beautiful baby boy, but I imagine that, just like for a woman who finally gets pregnant after primary infertility, you had mixed feelings and practical fears. What was that part of your journey like? 

Emily: Ironically, the only person who ever told me to “just be grateful” was myself. Sometimes those internal lies we whisper to ourselves are the most destructive, and the words that others say that hurt us the most simply amplify the already existent lies within our hearts. It takes finding others who love us and can walk with us to help pull out those lies and speak truth into them to heal. 

I have to admit that even now I feel the guilt, because yes, we did end up conceiving our third child, our precious, absolute maniac of a child, Dominic Luke. Our story has a nice ending, and so many women with secondary infertility don’t get that. I can almost liken it to survivor’s guilt. 

My first concern was entirely practical. I hadn’t ruled out an isthmocele, and one of the issues it can cause is miscarriage. My cynicism was so deep that I figured God would allow me to have a miscarriage, thereby giving me yet one more thing gone wrong in a fertility journey that I could speak to. I truly believed at the time that God did not care what happened to me so long as, in the end, I remained faithful. 

I had to call the Napro surgeon’s office to tell them I was pregnant, and they let me know that the sonogram could not be done while pregnant. I felt plenty of guilt then, too. My husband and I had discerned not to try to avoid pregnancy before the isthmocele was ruled out, and in that moment, it definitely felt like God was nuts. 

Then there was just absolute shock. I didn’t understand why I was suddenly pregnant, as the symptoms I had seen pointing toward issues were still present. I had seen an integrative medicine doctor, learned I had low functioning thyroid and had been working on fixing that. But it still seemed surreal. I thought I was going to have to suffer more. 

To top it off, the positive pregnancy test came just as I began opening up more about secondary infertility. In fact, it was the month before seeing that positive test that I attended the Springs in the Desert retreat. I felt like an absolute fraud. The validity of my experience that I had just embraced went up in smoke. 

But in the midst of all that crazy, there was peace. It was a divine calm even though there was so much unknown, so much of which I was afraid. I asked our priest if under the circumstances it would be appropriate for me to receive anointing of the sick, to which he responded with a definitive yes. I was anointed in the sacristy after a weekday mass surrounded by my husband and children. Shortly after that, I received an incredible consolation from Jesus and the Blessed Mother, revealing to me how much they cared about what had been done to my body, healing a deep emotional wound inflicted during my C sections. I knew in my soul that God would not take this child from me. 

As my pregnancy progressed, the necessity of the healing process I had been going through became apparent. Birth trauma had robbed me of the ability to advocate for myself in the doctor’s office, and pursuing a VBA2C (vaginal birth after 2 C sections) requires some hardcore advocating. It turned out that the practice I was with was not VBAC supportive as they claimed, and at 30 weeks with my husband’s encouragement, I hired doulas who recommended I switch practices to one that truly was VBAC supportive. If I had waited another week, I would not have been able to do so. 

To experience so much support and genuine care after so much abandonment in the past gave me healing in ways I cannot describe. And when my third pregnancy ended in yet another C section, it was a healing experience, not a traumatic one. 

Mary: It’s always easier to look back and see that we could’ve trusted in God the whole way through and rested while he prepared the path toward healing, but unfortunately, wrestling with our predicament is often part of the healing and growing process. And we are all fully aware that we don’t always get what we are asking for in the way we are asking for it. What would you say to women who are in the painful waiting process for another child? And to the ones who have given up?

Emily: I don’t think I would say much. The most healing thing I experienced was being listened to, and knowing that the person interested in my story simply wanted to understand what I was going through. They didn’t offer a fix in an attempt to make all the discomfort, mine and theirs, go away. The crosses we carry are not things that anyone can take away. 

So I think I would do a lot of listening. When I hear women’s stories in my coaching space, I’m always in awe of what they experience and process, and what they endure alone. Sometimes I offer a bit of my story in solidarity or practical recommendations if requested, but that comes after listening and lots of questions. Beautiful things happen when people know they are heard and seen in their pain, and that someone is willing to sit with them in it. It gives them the freedom to live fully and bear their crosses with renewed strength. 

What I will offer to those reading is that all of my crosses taught me that my deepest hope and desire has always been God. It wasn’t a particular reading on a pregnancy test or birth outcome. It has always been God. God with me. With me in my suffering, my anger, my frustration and loss of hope. With me letting me know I am not alone, that I am seen and known and loved. That is my heart’s desire. And my crosses have given me that. 

Mary: Would you also add that God is with you in your joy? How does it make you feel to hear that God wants good things for you and that it brings him joy to see you happy?

Emily: Hah, yea that is strangely a hard exercise. Cynicism is so hard to recover from. I had to challenge a very deep-seated lie that God delights in our suffering because suffering is sanctifying. It was all rooted in a twisted view of suffering and pleasure. Joyful saints were the ones who carried heavy crosses with a smile. If I’m being honest, sanctity was a performance, and my view of God was that of a sadist. 

But Satan is the father of lies and loves to sow doubt in us about who God is. I asked God to help me notice when he shows me who he is. He has not disappointed me. 

Our friend Bridget [Busacker of Managing Your Fertility] shared that quote from St. Irenaeus: “The glory of God is man fully alive.” I tried to start taking that to heart. As a sanguine, I just want to have fun, but fun was something, perhaps unintentionally, presented as antithetical to holiness. I had the perception that fun and pleasure were too dangerously close to hedonism, and therefore weren’t good. I wasn’t taught that pleasure is very good and created by God, but needed to exist within the boundaries of virtues in order to remain rightly ordered. 

I started meditating on God delighting in me and joining me in those moments when I felt pleasure: eating a good meal, good conversation with friends, feeling united with my husband, watching my children, working, planting flowers. I started to look for these moments of joy and pleasure and to be fully present in them as I noticed. Fr. Jacques Phillipe wrote that God is the eternal present, so being in the present moment is to have God, which is to have everything. Thanksgiving has become a far more common prayer.

What happened was my joy became amplified. Whatever we focus on becomes big. If we focus solely on suffering or lack or loss, that is what will take up all the space in our life. But if we start looking for God in every single moment, we will find him and his goodness. The suffering doesn’t go away or get minimized, but it becomes properly situated in the tapestry of our lives and therefore more bearable. Because Christ became man and by his own suffering made it possible for suffering to be fruitful, suffering ceases to overwhelm and exists at ease alongside our joy. 

– End –

No matter what our life experience is, I think we can all agree that infertility just hurts. It does not discriminate between zip codes or the amount of children one has. It is a cruel, dirty thief that wreaks havoc on whomever it sinks its claws into. The details matter for giving context to a physician or friend, but what matters most is that our sisters with primary and secondary infertility endure unique struggles and need support.

We all deserve to feel seen and heard – two healing balms for every suffering soul. Whether it is something like survivor’s guilt, the lie that you are ungrateful, a false sense of being a fraud, anger boiling over, feeling dismissed or tired, overcome with treatments – know that you don’t need anyone’s permission to feel exactly the way you do. And if you struggle with primary or secondary infertility, I hope you get an opportunity to share whatever that is with someone who feels safe.

Regardless of the nature of our struggles, what matters is that we are all doing our best to listen to the hearts of others and learn from their experiences. There is room for all of it; for emotions and experiences of all kinds of different shapes, sizes, and colors. There has to be. If there wasn’t, we couldn’t truly call ourselves the Body of Christ. And finding some relief from a friend’s open arms delivers its own little glorious snippet of heaven.

Find “Secondary Infertility, Part 1: A Strange Kind of Purgatory” here.