Kiss Your Miracle

Sky’s favorite food right now is Cheerios. This is probably because she hasn’t yet tasted pizza, brownies, or warm, salty French fries with ketchup. For now, Cheerios make her happy. Eating them is a big production for her. She’ll pick them up in her little fists and then spread them out again on her tray, roll her arms over them, and throw half of them on the floor. Sometimes she crams as many as she can in her mouth. Sometimes she’ll delicately eat just one. She almost always sings a little tune while she eats them. Every now and then she’ll come across a stray Cheerio while crawling on the floor and immediately pop it in her mouth. (Though I guess that doesn’t mean a whole lot since she eats carpet yarn and lint occasionally, too.) I like Cheerios because a handful on her tray usually means twenty minutes of free time for me. Thank you Lord, for the little blessings in a typical day.

I LOVE CLUTTER. Okay, that’s not true. It’s what I try to tell myself when Skylar’s toys are scattered all over the floor. In reality, Adam and I both like things clean and simple. There’s this place here in Florida that sells yard ornaments – statues and fountains and little gnomes to put in gardens. They keep the merchandise outside and whenever we drive by it, one of us usually says “panic attack” and we both take a deep breath. We’re what you’d call the opposite of pack rats. We love throwing things away. Extra stuff (like yard ornaments) stresses us out.

Every now and then it goes a bit too far. The other day Ad deleted something off the DVR that I wanted to see. When I asked him why he said, “We had over forty shows on there! I was cleaning it up!” to which I replied, “It wasn’t messy! It was full of good stuff to watch!” For the most part though, we agree. Clutter is bad. Clean is good.

Now we have a baby, and babies equal extra stuff and extra mess. But most of the time, I don’t mind the clutter as much as I thought I would. The infertility probably plays a big part in that. I’ll never forget the days when I would have given anything to have baby gear messing up our house. And it makes sense to me that there is a price to be paid for close relationships. The more people you love, the more mess naturally follows – whether it’s the actual stuff that comes with kids or the emotional junk we pile on each other as adults. I really don’t love clutter, but it’s an easy choice for me: I prefer the messiness of relationships to the neatness of an isolated life.

In 2006 my doctor removed a bit of skin cancer from a spot beneath my eye. He guessed it was basal cell cancer, the least serious kind, but the biopsy later showed it was squamous cell cancer, which falls in between basal and melanoma in terms of severity. As I drove home from his office that day, I called my friend Jen. “How do you feel about it?” she asked. “Just add it to the list,” I said dejectedly. In a month’s time my Grandma had died, our IVF cycle failed, my kitten disappeared, and now this – skin cancer. I remember thinking that God probably wasn’t trying to kick me while I was down, but that’s definitely how it felt. As the weeks passed my face healed, but when I looked in the mirror I would sometimes stare at my skin and wonder when the next spot would appear. I was twenty-nine. If I had a spot removed once a year from now on, what in the world would I look like at fifty? If I already had squamous cell cancer, how old would I be when I got melanoma?

This morning I was back at the dermatologist’s office for a routine check-up. The doctor examined my skin and pronounced me “all-clear.” After my first round of skin cancer, I assumed that regular treatments would forever be a part of my life, that my one little spot was just a preview of more to come. But it’s been three years now and I’m still without any new cancer. I’m not saying I’ll never deal with it again – my fairest-of-the-fair skin and history of sun damage mean the odds are pretty high that I will. But that doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll be at the dermatologist’s office every six months, getting new spots of cancer carved out of my skin. I might go another decade without needing any treatment at all, much less treatment for melanoma.

And as I consider that, I’m reminded of a saying my brothers use every now and then: “If possible, avoid hysterical thinking.” When your thoughts, like mine, tend to fall on the side of pessimism more often than optimism, this is very helpful advice.

My whole life I’ve wanted to be two things: a writer and a wife-mom. (Okay, I guess that’s three things. But wife and mother always went together in my head.) I’ve always written, but sharing my work is something entirely different. It’s scary. What if the person I show it to thinks it’s shallow and awful when it’s full of my deepest, most personal thoughts? That’s why I decided to be a novelist. A fiction writer doesn’t have to give anything away. She tells the thoughts of imaginary people, characters she’s created in her mind. A novelist can be guarded and mysterious. But here’s my problem: I can’t seem to write fiction. The things I have to say all come from my real life. So I would write and keep it to myself.

Then during the middle of our infertility this verse jumped out at me from Psalm 71. “My mouth will tell of your righteous deeds, of your saving acts all day long – though I know not how to relate them all” (v. 15). As I read it, I had this overwhelming feeling that one day God would end our infertility, and I would write about the whole experience – both the pain and the blessings – and actually share it with people. The thought was terrifying to me. At that point we were just starting to talk to people about what we were going through and I couldn’t imagine writing for an audience about such a private thing.

A year later we found out I was pregnant and I immediately thought of the verse. The idea that I would have a miracle story to share astounded me. How could I ever find the words to express what God had done? I felt like David, unsure of how to relate it all. But the Giver of every good and perfect gift had blessed me with exactly what I wanted. How could I keep it quiet? I guess I could write about just the fun baby stuff and leave out all the difficulty. But why would anyone want to read it? I’m not interested in fake perfection and I don’t think anyone else would be either.

To be honest, this blog is a stretch for me. Several people have read it and said things like – You wrote about ovulating and your fallopian tubes and your infertility and anyone can read it! And that’s true. When I think about it too much I’m tempted to delete it. It’s never easy to be vulnerable. But I feel like I’m in this place lately where I don’t see the point in keeping a fence up around my life. I’ve tried that before and it’s a lonely way to live. Being open about my pain, my mistakes, and the things I’m really facing has connected me to my friends and family in a way that guarding my life never did. It’s not that I plan to tell the world every detail of every situation. I still believe in discretion. But there’s a big difference between maintaining a level of privacy and keeping everyone at a distance. I find it hard to relate to someone who appears to have no problems. I’d rather put myself out there, as messy as I am, and say something authentic. It’s worth the risk involved.

During our first visit to the fertility clinic back in 2005, Dr. K immediately asked if I worked out regularly.

Me: “Well, I like running.”

Dr. K: “Really. How often do you go?”

Me: “I don’t know… four, maybe five times a week? But I should probably call it jogging – not running. I usually just go two or three miles at a nice, easy pace. I don’t time myself or anything.”

Dr. K: “And you are 5’6 and weigh 135 pounds?”

Me: “Yeah.”

Dr. K: “I think you should stop running and let yourself gain fifteen pounds.”

Me: “What? Why? My regular doctor said weight wasn’t a factor in my fertility problems. He said I’m right in the middle of the normal range for my height.”

Dr. K: “According to the charts you are in the normal range. But every woman is different. You’re not ovulating. You may be slightly below the weight necessary for your hormones to function properly.”

Me: “Fifteen pounds?”

Dr. K: “Fertility treatments are very involved. They’re expensive. They’re painful. If it’s at all possible for you to avoid them, you should.”

I glanced sideways at Adam. He smiled and touched my arm.

Dr. K: “It’s a nice problem, really. I wish I had people telling me to gain weight.”

Adam: “Me too.” And they laughed.

I frowned.

A woman’s weight is not a simple thing. I used to eat for comfort. I gained twenty pounds my freshmen year in college. The day I ripped out of my biggest jeans I decided I had to do something. I started jogging – just five minutes at a time in the beginning – and stopped eating so much junk. Soon the weight began to come off. People noticed and complimented me. Suddenly, losing weight became addictive. I started working out twice a day and living on coffee and Nutri-grain bars. I was always cold. But the day I fit into a pair of size two jeans I was so happy I was actually able to block out the hunger and dizziness I felt most of the time.

Thankfully, I joined a missions organization after graduation and came to my senses. A few years of traveling in and out of third world countries was enough to give me a little perspective. I was finally able to let go of my obsession with eating or not eating, and by the time I got married a few years later I felt like I’d found a good balance. I ate when I was hungry and felt generally comfortable with my size. Now the doctor was asking me to purposely grow out of all my clothes.

As we left the clinic that day Adam told me I’d look good with a few extra pounds. “Why do women think men want them to have rock hard bodies? We don’t. A woman’s body should be soft. It shouldn’t feel like a man’s.” Well I do love ice cream, I thought to myself. And if gaining weight was all it took to get pregnant, it would of course be worth it. With Adam’s encouragement I stopped running and over a year’s time, let myself gain fifteen pounds. I did have to buy new jeans, but no one aside from me seemed to notice I’d put on weight.

At first the extra pounds didn’t seem to help with the fertility problems. After a year of gaining weight I’d only ovulated one time and I still wasn’t pregnant. At that point a test revealed I had no working fallopian tubes in addition to my hormone problems, so we decided to go ahead with IVF, our only treatment option. When that didn’t work and we found ourselves waiting, I wondered how to handle things. I considered running again. Losing weight actually sounded like fun, a nice distraction from infertility. I couldn’t control whether or not I got pregnant, but my weight – that was a simple mathematical equation. Eat less, run more, and the pounds would come off. But we were still hoping to get pregnant. What was the point of losing weight first? I decided to leave things as they were.

And then an interesting thing happened. I started to ovulate on my own. Not regularly, but every couple months or so. I still had no functioning fallopian tubes, but at that point Adam and I had started praying for a miracle baby anyway. A year and a half after our failed IVF cycle, I was pregnant. Considering my combination of problems (even the doctors said we couldn’t conceive without medical help), Skylar Grace is a miracle – heaven forbid I should explain away any part of what God did for us. But I do believe my weight was a biological factor in her conception.

Why is it that one woman can be my height and weigh thirty to forty pounds less than I do without it affecting her fertility at all? For me, ovulation apparently requires a Body Mass Index just under 25, the highest number possible before I’m considered overweight according to the National Department of Health. If we want the chance to have another baby, my BMI should probably stay where it is. To be honest, I liked myself better at 135. I miss running in the Florida heat, coming home tired and soaked in sweat. But I also have to admit that gaining weight has been good for me in terms of perspective. Clearly, God likes variety and he intends for people to be different shapes and sizes. Whenever I start to feel irritated by the weight issue I immediately feel a sting of guilt and think to myself, really? You’re bothered by fifteen pounds, with everything else that’s wrong in the world? And then I tell myself something I need to hear at least once a day: don’t take yourself so seriously.