When Life is Derailed by Life

Unplanned, unforeseen, and sometimes unwanted

Mondays are my favorite. I also love January but September a bit more. If there are new notebooks or pens or planners, good, if there are plans and quips and goals, better. My inner adolescent loves a vision board (What’s that they say about being in your forties? You finally make your 14 year old self proud?) and don’t get me started on post-its and their myriad uses. Leuchtturm1917 for life, Uni-ball Signo 207 for work, stickers for fun, and the Notes App for almost literally everything. I love a do-over, second-chance, begin again, and even a begin again again.

I had big plans for April and they petered along into May and then May was a total crapshoot and then you guys shocked my socks off by ordering hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of copies of my book and so I spent hours and hours signing and packing them at Nooks, plus May was my first official month of being actually employed by Nooks to do actual work. And because childless couples have to find ways to have fun, Nate and I launched The Matter Matters Club and that was a helluva lot of work (and fun! and work!). And then the most terrible thing I could imagine happened, something so terrible I never imagined it would happen, and then it was just grief, grief, grief upon grief. And then my mom turned 70 and most of her progeny (5 of 8) surprised her by converging upon Florida to celebrate her which meant we loaded up our Subaru and our grieving pup and our grieving selves and stuffed ourselves into suitcases and our sadness deep down and drove the 32 hours roundtrip to Georgia to see Nate’s aging parents and then Florida to surprise my aging mom and meet the newest few babies my brothers and their wives have graced the planet with and adore the ones they already have. And yesterday afternoon we got home and today I will pick up Harper’s ashes and sign more books and work a shift at Nooks and hang out with friends and my inbox is a mess and my text-messages are so overwhelming I’m ignoring them and my chronic illness is flaring and it’s supposed to be 100 degrees tomorrow but “feel like 113.”

What is it they say about best laid plans?

I keep thinking to myself, When am I going to be able to get the things I want to get done done? I have so much work to do, friendships to prioritize, gatherings to plan, projects to complete, books to finish, and life just keeps interrupting it all.

Don’t worry, as soon as I think it, I laugh at myself because life is getting interrupted by life. Granted, it’s the unplanned life, the unexpected life, and in some ways the unwanted life. If you had asked me at 20 or 30 or even 40 if this is what I envisioned for my life, my answer would have been different. I had a different vision board for the life I thought would be mine.

My brothers and their wives are building beautiful houses and filling them with beautiful babies. My friends are marrying their kids off or sending them to college or therapy or both. My mother’s home is flanked (literally) by her children’s and grandchildren and my in-laws live next-door to theirs too. I know how rare both of those scenarios are and how good they have it, and sometimes it’s hard to bear witness to how different our aged lives will be.

Nate just interrupted my writing of this with the sum of what’s in our (oft ignored) retirement accounts because he turns 50 next year and I’m not too far behind and the plan most of us have for aging is to be taken care of by the ones we’ve raised, but our plan for retirement is to try to take care of ourselves as best as we can because there will be nobody else to do it.

Not on the vision board. Not the life we planned for.

But the life we have.

I have been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be childless by choice once you have been made childless by circumstance. In other words, when infertility or pregnancy loss has removed the ability to make the choice, is there still a way to choose this life, the one we have? Is it still a choice if it’s not the first or second choice you would have made?

It’s been a long time since I’ve mourned our inability to have children of our own, but that mourning is different than mourning the children we hoped to have. One is coming to terms with what is and the other is a coming to terms with what will never be. It’s two different griefs and I didn’t know that for a long time.

There are so many things I love about our lives and the space and freedom with which we move. I don’t begrudge any of it. But it’s not the life all of my friends and family are living, nor is it the life I would be living if the choice was all mine.¹

Most of my friends—the ones who aren’t divorced or divorcing—are celebrating twenty or twenty-five years of marriage this year. They married young, as most did in the evangelical culture of our youths. My oldest friend is still unpartnered and childless, and my life looks more like hers than it does like my long-married friends. This morning I read an article about a group of elderly women who have created a sort of commune where they all live together, aging in place with one another, ages ranging from 70s to 90s and I thought to myself, I’d like that, I think, but I know enough now to know I can’t plan for it.

Wendell Berry said, “We live the given life, not the planned,” and I used to hold theology that said this life, the one I was living, was given just exactly as it seemed, predetermined, ordained, nothing more, nothing less. But I believe differently now, that we still live a given life, but it’s given by God and given by us to one another, given to other, given to ourselves in some ways.

I used to make excuses for the predestined life and the God who designed it for each of us, dolling out health, wealth, beauty to some and sickness, poverty, blight to others. I used to say that what I had was good whether it seemed good or not, and that if I didn’t have it, it wasn’t good. But I don’t believe that anymore. I believe life is what we make of it and sometimes we don’t have the resources or energy or vision or the right notebook and pen to make more of it than we can.

We do live the given life, but life interrupts that too, and I guess I’m learning to roll with it, move through it, absorb it, flow with it, become soft and tender toward it, but also strong and resilient with it. To welcome the blows and breathe through the losses and stare down the future as it is, and not just as I wish it would be.

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I wanted to say thank you to all of you. I know you’ve helped bear my burdens in the last month and a half in ways I never imagined. Your kindness about The Understory and then double kindness in the loss of Harper—it has not gone unnoticed by me. Your flowers and cards met us in a moment of excruciating grief. I’ve read every single comment you left on every single post and held them all in my heart. Thank you.

Some of you have asked for our address and so I wanted to offer that up to you now if you still wanted it. It’s PO Box 103, Lancaster, PA 17608.

Thank you for bearing with me as I navigate this season of double losses—one much more potent than the other 🧡

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1. I have many thoughts on IVF, adoption, and fostering, but especially as regarding the latter two: a child going through profound rupture from their birth family is not mere material to meet my fantasy of a family. Too often the gut response to a couple’s inability to birth their own children is to suggest filling that empty space with someone else’s child. Adoption and fostering are holy, holy endeavors and should never be used to meet some couple’s dream of a family but instead to willingly enter into the brokenness of someone else’s family for the rest of the child’s life. That’s a separate calling and one we don’t take lightly.