Infertile couples can find other ways to share love

My husband and I can't have children. You have no idea how long it took me to put that into words, because I knew saying it would make it more real. We're both early 40s, and we've spent the last eight years seeing doctors, doing test after test, spending more money than I want to think about. Our sex life has turned us into lab rats instead of lovers. And nothing has worked. My heart is breaking, and I don't know what to do.

-- C.L., Fort Smith, Ark.

Good woman: My heart goes out to you. Your loss is real. This is no small matter.

The grief of infertility is a tricky thing. Hard to get your soul around. No one has died; rather, you are grieving someone never born.

If you're like most couples, it's no easy thing to keep separate the malfunction of your reproductive organs from the sense that something about you is broken. Something about you is wrong. You are alien and alienated. It's no accident that ancient Hebrews interpreted fecundity as a sign of God's blessing, while interpreting barrenness as a sign that something was not right. Something about my life is not in harmony with the way things ought to be. God is, perhaps, for reasons unknown, withholding his blessing.

For both men and women who long for parenthood, who spent their entire childhood simply assuming that one day they would be parents, infertility does more than disappoint and sadden. Infertility attacks us at the level of identity.

Fertility is not, strictly speaking, separable from the symbol of marriage. Oh, sure, individual couples are free to decide against parenthood, but these couples must then be intentional to not get pregnant. Meaning, the possibility of pregnancy is in the very fabric of the symbol of marriage. Always. And both having children and deciding not to have children have consequences for the union.

You often see this immutable presence of fertility in redemptive second marriages. By "redemptive" I mean second marriages not only thriving but providing redemption from mistakes made in the failed first marriage. A chance to be and do better. In redemptive second marriages, couples frequently find themselves surprised to be putting into words and grieving the fact they will never make a baby together. And not because they want to have a child. In fact, in the case of mid- to later-life second marriages, the second-marriage couple expressly does not want a child. Or medically/biologically cannot conceive and bear a child.

Yet, still, they feel the longing. But of course. It is in the very nature of marriage and in the very nature of great love to ceaselessly long to progenerate. When you grow great love and intimacy, something in that love and intimacy longs to "give birth," to become bigger, more and finally other than its participants.

I don't mean to scare you, C.L., but when couples choose not to have children, or, as in your case, cannot, or because they have met later in life find the possibility untenable and inadvisable ... well, these couples either find an alternate path to progenerate their love or something in the couplehood is threatened with atrophy. With no place to go, the growing love sometimes collapses back onto the couple, like a doomed angel food cake rises only to collapse back into the pan.

You say you don't know what to do. That's not true. You're doing the only thing you can do right now. You're grieving. Grief, courageously faced, is a sublime marital intimacy. Grieving husbands and wives must be vigilant to let their hearts break together, lest the grief "shape-shift" itself into the darkness of accusation, bitterness and estrangement.

Then, acknowledging and honoring the loss, faithful couples find another way for their marriage to be fertile.

They adopt. They become licensed foster parents or informally welcome a troubled teen into their home. They acquire dogs, a bunch of dogs, in fact. They become passionate philanthropists with their time, energy and money. They conceive, bear and give birth to a cause of charity, a cause of social justice. They volunteer at family shelters. They become especially present and participating uber-aunts and uber-uncles. In the case of second marriages, they become stellar stepparents and grandparents together.

An angel might say it this way to you and your husband:

Fear not. Make tears. Then make love. Lots of love. And in the love you make shall be conceived and born a blessing to the world.

Originally published in View News, Dec. 14, 2010.