From Barren to Blessed: Finding Mary in my Infertility

Our Blessed Mother has been tirelessly seeking me out over the last year. In the past, I always shied away from her. Wounds from my early life distorted my vision. I saw her as cold, distant, judgmental, untouchable. 

The first time I began to truly see her was when my husband and I lost our baby, Oliver Francis, at nine weeks in utero. I remember being curled up on my bed after the ultrasound appointment, feeling like my grief would crush me, body and soul, when the image of the Pietà came to mind. It occurred to me that, in that moment, Mary understood me. She knew what it was to hold her son’s dead body, as I did now. That moment didn’t completely undo my mistrust of the Blessed Mother, but it was the first time the walls I had built to keep her away began to chip and crack.

I found consolation in the thought that my heart resembled Mary’s in a special way because I had loved and lost a child. 

Fast forward one year and my husband and I have been trying to conceive for almost a year. It’s the week before Oliver’s birthday. Emotions are running high as we begin the always-unthinkable task of deciding how to remember and honor your baby- your baby whom you’re keenly aware you should be holding, playing with, and caring for instead of honoring and remembering. Around this same time we had both undergone some fertility testing, but hadn’t thought much of it. Our doctors assured us we seemed very healthy, and we both thought of the testing as a sort of formality. In our minds we were “just ruling out infertility”.

Just six days before Ollie’s birthday, we got our results back. We received them in a PDF and I remember the panic building inside of me as I read through them the first time. I frantically scrolled back through again and again, willing with every ounce of my being for it to be wrong, for me to have read wrong or missed something. 

“You have folded up my life like a weaver who severs the last thread.” (Is. 38:12)

The words of Isaiah echoed through the terror and the emptiness that were beginning to grip me. In the same week as the anniversary of our baby’s death, we were being confronted with the possibility that we would never have a living child. All I could do was watch helplessly as my entire future, all that I had envisioned for my life and my marriage, turned to dust and slipped through my fingers. 

This loss was nothing like losing Ollie. When he died, my love for him anchored me, comforted me. Of course it was the cause of my pain, but I would always find strength and meaning in reminding myself that to wish away the pain would be to wish away my love for him. I could embrace pain that meant love, but this pain- there was no love to tether it. I was simply plunged into a cold, black, emptiness with nothing to hold on to, nothing to orient me. 

Cursed! Barren! - the words seemed to scream themselves at me, to point cruel fingers at me in accusation. I felt like my body was defective, like my marriage was defective. I would lie awake at night going through my life with a fine-toothed comb, counting all my sins and wondering which one had earned me this fate. This fate of being so terribly, so irrevocably empty. I begged the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and every saint and angel in heaven besides to somehow save me from this all-consuming emptiness that was swallowing me, mind, body and soul. 

It wasn’t just the emptiness of my body that caused me such anguish, it was the emptiness of my heart too. I longed to lose myself in the love of a child, to give every moment of my life poured out in love for them. I wanted a life full of a mother’s responsibility with all of the sweet little daily inconveniences of loving a human soul into flourishing. Mary was hidden from me during this time. I couldn’t seem to make anything about this relate to her. I was empty- she bore the Savior of the world. I was cursed- she was highly favored.

It wasn’t until I started reading Caryll Houselander’s The Reed of God that I found the Blessed Mother once again. 

The first chapter of the book is entitled “Emptiness”. Houselander describes Mary’s virginal emptiness as the special disposition of her whole humanity that made it possible for her to receive Jesus into her heart and body, and to bear Him into the world. In my journey with infertility, Mary’s motherhood had felt like something I could never relate to. I felt estranged from her because I might never fully share in this huge portion of her life and identity.

I had never considered that what made her motherhood possible was first and foremost her emptiness. I began to wonder how Mary’s emptiness might relate to mine. How was it different, and what would it mean for my emptiness to become like hers? 

Houselander is very careful to distinguish Mary’s virginal emptiness from the emptiness of a meaningless life, or the emptiness of despair- two forms of emptiness that had oppressed me over the course of my infertility. Mary’s emptiness was different. It was intentional, radically receptive, and trusting. Mary said yes to her emptiness in complete trust and hope that God’s goodness would overflow precisely through it. Her emptiness was anticipatory. In the same way we might prepare a guest room in our homes, Mary faithfully prepared a special place within her heart and body before she even knew how it would be filled!  

In this first chapter, Houselander encourages the reader to consider the “shape” of their own emptiness. She explains that the nature or form of our particular emptiness is indicative of how the Lord desires to love us, and to love others through us. Our emptiness is precisely where and how the Word will be made flesh through us.

Those of us who carry the double cross of infertility and child loss are uniquely privileged in that we do not have to “figure out” the shape of our emptiness- we know it oh so intimately, because it is the shape of our children.

What a heartbreaking and holy mystery that God desires His love to overflow in us precisely through the “shape” of our children- the shape of emptiness they have left in our arms, our hearts, and our lives. What would it look like for us to let this deep, aching emptiness within us receive Jesus’ gentle and humble presence? 

Mary teaches us how to do just this. She is always inviting us to see with the eyes of faith. I have already talked about how our natural eyes see infertility— a curse, sure rejection, bitter barrenness. What if the eyes of faith- Mary’s eyes- see it differently?  She whose emptiness became “the reed through which Eternal Love was to be piped as a shepherd’s song […] the flowerlike chalice into which the purest water of humanity was to be poured, mingled with wine, changed to the crimson blood of love, and lifted up in sacrifice […] the warm nest rounded to the shape of humanity to receive the Divine Little Bird” (p. 7). Could it be that she sees our emptiness in the same way?

I know it probably feels impossible to embrace infertility or loss, especially if you are early in your journey, but if you cannot yet find hope, know that our dear Mother holds onto hope for you. She does not see your emptiness as an abyss, or a failed crop. She sees your emptiness as the stillness out of which God created every good thing. She sees in your emptiness her own emptiness.

When I bring my infertility to Mary in prayer, it sometimes seems as though she places one hand on her own womb and the other on mine as if to say, “see how we are the same.” Could it be that the similarity in our bodies is an invitation to make our hearts more like hers? 

I firmly believe, dear friends, that this cross which so often feels like a curse, so often feels altogether unbearable, is precisely what enables us to imitate Mary in a way only we who are empty can. And what does it mean to imitate Mary? To let the Lord in his unfathomable love pour Himself into us, to let Him bless and fill our emptiness with His presence, to let our emptiness become the very place where we hold the sweet presence of Jesus.