Editor’s Note: This blogpost touches on miscarriage, failed adoption, and conception after infertility and loss. If your heart is too tender to enter into these topics today, please be gentle with yourself. We will see you in the next post.

“Behold the handmaid of the Lord: be it done unto me according to Thy word.” (Luke 1:38)

Over our seven years of infertility and loss, I would repeat Our Lady’s fiat with mixed emotions: hope for the future, fear of what God might ask of me, a desire to trust and surrender like Mary, and pain after a loss, or difficult news I was being asked to offer back to God. 

When Mary said these words, she did not know all that God was calling her to: she did not yet know the crosses she would be asked to bear with and for her Son, or the immense joys in store for her. She spoke her yes with trustful abandonment to the loving providential care of the Father and said yes to life, the Life, Jesus. Mary offers those of us walking the road of infertility an example of how to be open to life by offering a surrendered “yes” to the unknown – but good  – story God is writing in our lives. 

When my husband and I first married, we dreamed of having a house full of children and wanted to be open to life right away. We conceived our honeymoon baby, but lost the baby in an early miscarriage. That loss was the first time God asked us to surrender to Him our plans for our family, to trust His plan, and entrust our first child into his hands.

Over the next five years, we experienced infertility, unable to conceive again despite surgeries and Napro-Technology fertility treatment. In each cycle we actively optimized for conception and during each season we decided to stop and rest, we knew God was asking us to give Him our own fiat: our family is yours, Lord. May your will be done in our family even when it breaks our heart. 

Those surrenders to God were some of the hardest prayers, especially as we watched friends and family experience multiple pregnancies over these years and welcome new life in a visible and joyful way. We wondered why God was asking us to say yes to our cross of infertility when we so eagerly would welcome children, and many of them.

However, these hard yeses I can now see were shaping us and changing us in ways we could not see at the time. God knew we were open to life, and He was teaching us how to trust Him in the unknown, when none of what we were walking through seemed to make sense and preparing us for even bigger acts of surrender and trust in the future.

We pursued adoption and were in the process of adopting twins when the adoption failed. A failed adoption feels much like a miscarriage in that you loved and dreamed of your life with these children and yet you must give them back to God and their family. 

Then we conceived again, our second child, months later, and suffered a late first trimester miscarriage. As we stood at the grave burying our little baby, I viscerally felt that I was walking in Mary’s shoes. She said yes to the gift of her Son, which also meant standing at the foot of the cross. In our openness to life, God asked us to surrender a child back to Him yet again. 

Finally, after seven years, we conceived our daughter, our miracle baby. After two losses and now a high-risk pregnancy, God was asking us to trust Him each week and each month of the pregnancy, rejoicing in the gift of her life and making an act of trust and surrender of her to God each day. 

Openness to life hasn’t looked like what we thought it would when we first married, dreaming of lots of kids and easily getting pregnant. Yet in a mysterious way, God has and continues to teach us that being open to life can look different and be beautiful: it can look like every fertility treatment and surgery whether successful or not — that’s an act of openness to life. It can look like conceiving, knowing miscarriage is possible but trusting God and surrendering our babies back to Him, learning that He is good and for us and for our families even in the darkest moments. It can look like adoption or fostering, loving these babies for the time they are with you or welcoming them into your family as God has welcomed us as His adopted sons and daughters. It can look like high-risk pregnancies after loss and years of infertility and daily acts of trust and surrender to God for this precious child’s life. It can look like loving and serving families around you, caring for your godchildren or your students, supporting in-crisis expectant mothers, or serving your community using your unique talents.

Throughout our infertility journeys, openness to life will look different for each of us. Just because it isn’t the visible openness to life that children in the church pew reveals, your acts of trust and surrender to God of your family are bearing much fruit in your hearts, in your marriages, in your families, in your communities, and in your relationship with God. He sees each tiny act of trust and surrender and He blesses it. We may not see the fruit right now in the midst of a hard and painful season, but God is working. He is always working for you and your families as our good as a loving Father.

Lenore and her husband Bobby were married in 2017 and are parents to two in eternity and one on earth, living in a small town in Ohio with their Australian shepherd, Augie. Lenore cantors for her parish and loves to bake, read, dance, and hike with their dog.