Tag Archives: miscarriage

In Search of the Happiest Ending

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11

I was writing a post titled “Why I Am Not a Food Blogger” when the phone rang.

It was Tarica’s doctor, and we talked about brain surgery.

I hung up, all my laughter gone.

Call me blind, call me naive, call me a towering monument of faith, but for the first time, I realized that our epilepsy story might not have a happy ending.

I’ve shared maybes and what ifs and questions and fears, but always, rock-solid in the back of my mind, I believed everything would come out right in the end. I’ve prayed “Thy will be done,” convinced that His will meant a seizure-free daughter.

But what if she will always have seizures?

I’m sure you thought of this possibility, from a detached distance, with the advantage of having the facts without the emotions. I’ve even said it is a possibility, said she might not ever be seizure-free, but I didn’t feel it as I did this morning, as a blow to my mother-heart.

She may never be healed this side of Glory.

I do not know if I can bear the thought.

* * *

I heard a story recently of a boy whose parents asked God to take their son Home while he was young if he would grow up to defy God when he was older. The boy died in a freak accident sometime after that. All his peers grew up and rejected God. The father professed that he never regretted his prayer.

That story hit me hard. We have three children in heaven by miscarriage, and it’s my greatest prayer that the rest of our family would someday join them. I have prayed, in a more innocent past, wincing slightly, “whatever it takes, God.”

What if it takes seizures?

What if seizures will make the difference between heaven and hell for our daughter? For our other children? For…for me?

After hearing the story of that boy, I had begun to pray, “God, if seizures help my daughter get to heaven, then help us to accept them with grace.”

But I was still convinced that God would heal her. And not just no-seizures-while-on-medication healed. I meant healed healed, as in no more seizures ever and no more medication. Ever. I hate what drugs do to her.

This is not too much to expect from a God who can do anything.

But what if He doesn’t do this?

* * *

Again and again, God has worked good in my life through hardship. Without pain, I am crusty and independent and proud. Pain turns me to God, and God turns pain to good.

What if living with this particular pain will keep us soft toward God and compassionate toward others?

It could. It might. It has.

To those of you who yearn every day for the child(ren) beyond your reach, this might sound unthinkable, but it was easier for me to grieve a miscarriage that it is to imagine my daughter living with epilepsy till death do them part. Miscarriage was only my pain, softened by the knowledge that my child is safe in Jesus’ arms. It hurts more to watch my children suffer than it does to miss them because they are with Jesus.

(And if my words hurt you, I am sorry. I’m not belittling your pain. If you’ve read the book I wrote on miscarriage, you know I know how great and terrible that grief is. Those of you who have emailed me to share your stories are daily in my prayers. I wish I could take away your pain, but I trust that God can also turn it into good.)

I hate the thought that my children need to suffer, but what’s been good for me will surely be good for them. God can do this for my children—turn their pain into good. I know this, but it feels a little like those times when the children pile into the wagon and fly down the lane.

I don’t want to watch. I don’t want to see them get hurt.

What if God knows we will be better off with seizures than without them?

Achieving seizure freedom has always been the happy ending I envisioned for us. But if that freedom would come at the expense of the happiest ending ever, then no, I do not want it.

I choose heaven over healing.

And it shatters my mother-heart.

How To Be Not Bitter

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15

“How do you keep from being bitter?” she asked, leaning on my kitchen counter.

This was no idle question. The woman standing in my kitchen was living a life far different from her girlish dreams. This I know, even though she has not told me. Who dreams of being a mother to a little girl with seizures? Neither of us had. Both of us were.

She and I could count our time together in mere hours, but it felt as if we had known each other for years. Our lives ran on parallel tracks in areas far deeper than the breezy connections of new friendships. On the surface, we had little in common—she is vivacious and impulsive; I am reserved and deliberate. But underneath the inconsequentials, we share two passions: the jagged-edged love for a daughter with seizures and a consoling love for our art. She writes stories in watercolor, and I paint canvases with words.

No, this was not an idle question.

When I stared down into the kettle and said nothing, she started backpedaling. “Maybe that’s too personal—”

I broke in. “No, no, it’s not. I like asking personal questions, so why would I mind answering them? It’s just that I’ve been thinking about this very thing lately.” I put down the spoon and leaned against the counter, unconsciously mimicking her pose. “Last summer, after the seizures returned, I struggled with some anger and resentfulness toward God. I don’t know if I was bitter exactly, but I was headed there.”

I stopped, aware that I was rambling, but she didn’t seem to mind, so I went on. “There have been other times in my life when I felt bitterness. The miscarriages. There was a huge property ordeal involving a right-of-way that dragged on for over two years after we moved here. And other things, like misunderstandings and injustice and good people who mean well but blindly hurt others.”

She nodded. Yes. She knew. We all have these stories.

“The turning point for me,” I said, “has always been when I started asking myself ‘What can I learn from this?’ When I began to see a situation as something that could make me a better person, it somehow took the bitterness out of it.”

* * *

I’ve come to recognize it by now, after several years of feeling the shift happen inside me each time I move from anger/pain/frustration to teachableness. I stop asking God “Why?” and start asking “What?”

What lesson do You have for me in this?

What am I forgetting that You want me to remember?

What can I learn?

What should I do with this lesson?

When pain becomes something that helps me grow, the bitterness in it fades. And eventually, the pain even becomes—dare I say it?—sweet.

Not at first. It takes time. It takes trust. It takes surrender. Over and over again.

* * *

“You know what I find the hardest to accept?” I asked my new friend. “It’s the things done by other people. With miscarriage and epilepsy, I could more easily trust that God could make good come from it, including in me. But when people hurt me or those I love, it’s hard to accept that God allows such bad things to happen. There is no redemption in the evil we do to each other. Only God can redeem that kind of pain.”

But when He redeems, the waters of Mara turn sweet.

* * *

Not long ago, my friend emailed me a copy of a painting she had just finished, a piece of representational art she titled “You Will Never Walk Alone.”

What I say in words, she says in watercolor, only better. Isn’t a picture worth a thousand words? With her permission, I share it with you.

You Will Never Walk Alone

She knows about bitter and sweet.

She knows about redemption.

She knows.

And we all tell our stories in our own ways.

* * *

P.S. It’s been a little heavy and deep around here. Look for lighter fare next time, when I introduce you to the new member of our household, The Box.