(all photos by Rebecca Tredway Photography)

The Christmas season is a difficult time to be a barren woman.  Honestly, it’s kind of always difficult to be a barren woman, but Christmas is especially tough.  It is so intrinsically a time centered around family that for those not challenged by loss or loneliness or pain, you might not even realize what a hard time this could be.  Christmas is especially difficult for the barren woman because what other holiday is so pregnancy-centric?  Mother’s Day is a close second, but at Christmastime we spend a full month of Sundays in church getting together to sing songs about pregnancy and childbirth.  It starts even before Christmas at Thanksgiving where we corporately thank God for his good gifts in our lives.  For the woman grieving a very obvious missing gift in her life, this is a tough time.  We struggle to say with Job, “The Lord gives and The Lord takes away.  Blessed be the name of The Lord”, but it does not come without great emotional cost.

At Christmas we put displays on our mantle of a peaceful, reverent couple gazing into the face of their precious newborn baby.  We listen to sermons about what we can learn from a woman of faith who graciously accepted an unplanned pregnancy.  We sit around a tree decorated with ornaments depicting three kings who traveled great distances to honor a baby with gifts and then we give gifts to the children in our lives.

It is a hard time to have an empty womb and empty arms.

I felt this pain intensely for nearly a decade.  Before the adoption of our first child, I remember my husband off-handedly asking me what I wanted for Christmas one year.  I said, “a baby” and broke down and cried.  Each Christmas from the time I learned of our infertility until the time our adoption was completed, I could think of no other gift that mattered.  It became easy to feel that God wasn’t hearing my prayers and to withdraw into my protective shell rather than to feel the disappointment year after year when a baby didn’t appear under that Christmas tree.  While we could save up and buy other good gifts for each other, this was something only God could do and it brought me intense pain when He chose not to.

Adoption was a vehicle for great healing in my life.  We were intentional not to treat the adoption of our children as an emotional band-aid for the pain of infertility, but found by becoming parents much of our sadness at not being able to biologically reproduce had disappeared.  There is SUCH joy in holding your child for the first time and in hearing a little person call you “mama” that seems to magically erase years of pent-up disappointment and frustration.  With each new addition to our family, that infertility pain seemed farther away until the day my arms were full with three kids ages four, two, and one and we were faced with a choice- a new doctor thought he could fix our problem, but it would require an investment of time and money, two resources that don’t seem so plentiful when you’re raising three toddlers.  His testing revealed without dramatic intervention there would be no child born from my body.

We were not unfamiliar with this side of infertility.  A previous round of treatment several years earlier had blessed us with a brief pregnancy that tragically ended just seven weeks later.  In the intervening years we had experienced one spontaneous pregnancy that had a similarly sad conclusion.  We had known the pain of pregnancy and the joy of adoption.  The choice seemed simple enough from that perspective and we closed the door on further treatments and the hope we would ever create a biological child.  And you know what?  We weren’t that devastated about it.

That’s when we learned sometimes God has a sense of humor.

Just a few months later, in April of 2011 a pregnancy test revealed that God doesn’t always need a doctor to work through.  An ultrasound revealed this baby- unlike his two siblings before him- had found his way to a safe home in my body where he could grow for the next nine months.  A midwife appointment revealed a due date- December 19th.

For nine months I held my breath.  Having experienced loss twice before, I couldn’t bring myself to fully embrace the joy that normally comes with pregnancy.  I had found God faithful during the deepest of sadness and I was waiting to experience that again.  I wanted to enjoy this good gift from God’s hand, but my previous experience told me to take my joy in the Giver of the gifts and to hold the precious days of pregnancy very loosely.

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