“Miracle” Child (Non Miraculous Version)
[This story is about the birth of our child told from the perspective of someone who doesn’t believe miracles are possible. If you *do* believe miracles are possible, this other version has the same events told from an alternate perspective.]
The text came through on May 18th at 8:07 AM.
It was from a usually trustworthy source — my wife. But I didn’t want to believe it.
We’ll come back to the message soon. But let me first tell you why I hoped it was wrong.
After years of infertility, Paula had gotten pregnant under circumstances that seemed almost unbelievable. Like, some pretty wild stuff.
My wife actually said that she considered it a real “miracle.”
I knew it to be a statistical anomaly, but I did agree with her that if there was such a thing as “God” it would have made for a win for his PR team.
Here’s why.
Reason number one. We had dealt with infertility for years and years. Technically, infertility begins after one year of unprotected sex without the ability to conceive. We were somewhere around 6 years of trying unsuccessfully for another child. That would be 7 years less the 1 year when we were debating whether our family was in a healthy enough place for another child.
Getting pregnant now, without IVF or therapeutic treatment, was a long shot. My work has always involved collecting and analyzing data and interpreting trends, and the long term trend didn’t give much reason for hope. But it had happened nonetheless.
Reason number two. My wife, despite being an otherwise sane and high-functioning person, occasionally has interruptive thoughts that she thinks are messages from “God.”
This is, of course, nonsense.
But I tolerate them because they are rare and because by all other accounts she is otherwise smart and capable.
She is a doctor. An OB-GYN as a matter of fact. She’s actually kind of a superwoman with skills in everything from painting to refinishing furniture to solving unsolvable household problems. She can even pick locks (no kidding). Don’t ask me how someone like that can believe as she does. Ask her if you want.
Maybe it will make more sense to you than it does to me.
In any event, my wife had one of these intrusive thoughts earlier this year. She said she thought God wanted her to write down her prayers.
It’s weird, I know.
But she actually ended up going through with it.
She found this old journal she had previously written her prayers in. And when she did, she started reading those old prayers she had written before.
To hear her tell it, there was a lot in there that had turned out as she had hoped. She gave credit to “God,” which is of course convenient for those who believe in something like that.
The one thing that hadn’t turned out in her direction was being able to get pregnant again. That was the thing she had written about and prayed about the most. She said she felt sad and disappointed and kind of mad at this. That she didn’t understand “God” but that she was nonetheless convinced it was all real.
I thought that was going to be the end of it. Time to forget the intrusive thought and move on with life.
But things got more complicated when she took a pregnancy test the next day.
Yea, you guessed it. She was pregnant.
She wrote the whole story down. You can read it at the link below if you’re interested.
I told you it was weird. It certainly was for me.
You see, I know her to be a smart and logical person. But she gets these concerning thoughts. Not often. But maybe once or twice a year they come. And they seem to almost have truth in them.
Like this one did.
But I know that statistical aberrations happen and you can’t get bogged down in outliers when you’re looking at the data set of life. She knew that’s how I saw things and we tacitly agreed to maintain different perspectives.
But even though the two of us had a very different understanding of the situation, I was still happy. I was happy for her. And I was happy to find that I was truly excited at the prospect of getting to be a dad again.
We were making plans and re-imaging our lives with an unexpected return to the diapers and interrupted sleep stage.
We were thrilled.
We could not wait to expand our family and go on this new adventure.
And that was why I didn’t want to believe the text message from 8:07 that was staring up at me.
“I’m pretty sure I’ve miscarried.”
Gut punch.
Terrible news for my wife. The worst. Sad and disappointing for me. Devastating for our seven year old who was perhaps the most excited out of all of us.
I was destroyed for that kid. She wanted nothing more in the entire world than to be a big sister. She had been the one who had reminded us every day to pray for the baby.
Before we started eating dinner each night she would add the same postscript to my wife’s prayers, “And don’t forget about the baby.”
It was the same story right before she went to bed each night when she was getting tucked in: “And the baby.”
She had actually started crying when she first found out that Paula was pregnant because she was both so excited and so afraid that this long-hoped for sibling might not arrive.
But as the days and weeks had passed by, she had been getting over her initial fear and was firmly in the realm of anxious anticipation.
Telling her about the miscarriage would be brutal. That poor kid. I felt awful for her. At least she would know what “prayer” was now. She would wise up up faster than I had when I was a child.
Back in those days, I had once believed in prayer too.
I had prayed for only one thing. For the ability to play sports that was taken away by a genetic heart condition. But as much and as hard as I prayed, there was never anything that changed. I kept it up for year after year before I realized that no one was listening. Or maybe, someone was listening but didn’t care all that much.
Either way it meant the same thing.
No more fairy tales. I knew then life was up to me and what I could make of it.
Even though I knew that this loss would put the “miracle” conversation to bed, I was surprised to feel something like grief for my wife’s faith. She had believed so earnestly. She had actually believed that “God” spoke to her and wanted her to know he knew her and saw her through the infertility journey.
I looked back at the phone.
I read the next message from my wife.
“I’m going to go for a formal ultrasound at 11 to confirm at high point”
I called my wife.
It was painful. She was matter-of-fact. She had her own patients to see that morning. She was in the middle of seeing them at that very moment. I could hear her suppressed devastation behind her businesslike tone.
She had long desired another child more than I had. Before this pregnancy, one child had felt pretty good to me. But the surprise pregnancy had allowed me to see how much I too wanted another. And I realized I was disappointed for myself as well as for her. And as foolish as she was for believing what she had, I felt for her. I was angry for her.
I was mad at the idea of a “God” that gives people unfounded optimism and sets them up for destruction. Real hope should be measurable and firmly grounded in reason. On probability. On calculated odds.
I was mad at her for being credulous enough to get caught up in it. For letting our daughter get swept into it. For being so certain that she had almost brought me into her delusion in my weaker moments.
I asked her how certain she felt about the miscarriage. Was there any chance she hadn’t?
99% odds of miscarriage, she said.
I know my wife is not prone to exaggeration or dramatics. That seemed pretty certain.
But still, she had left a 1% chance that maybe everything was fine. I didn’t get my hopes up but couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe, just maybe, she was wrong. A 1% chance was not impossible, after all.
We met for the ultrasound. My wife, looking sad but still resilient. Still tough. Still looking like a superwoman.
She told me she had revised her estimate of miscarriage up from 99% to 99.9%. Less than a 1% chance.
The ultrasound didn’t take long to take away any remaining doubts.
I saw the look on the technician’s face. I saw my wife’s face.
No heartbeat.
We left the building and spent a few moments together, holding one another. Finally, my wife could let out some of the emotion.
There were only a few minutes before my superhero wife needed to go back to work to take care of her own patients again.
Before she left she said something to me. As we stood outside those glass doors on that concrete walkway, she looked at me with a fierce determination in her eyes.
“This is still a miracle.”
That set me back on my heels a bit.
She was wrong, of course. She was delusional. But man, I almost admired her stubbornness in that moment. Her persistence in her fantasy world in the face of facts.
I decided that if it helped her go through the hard times coming ahead, then good for her. She would need all the help she could get.
In the days ahead, I saw her try to cope. We were both kind of numb about the whole thing. Talking with our daughter was horrible. If possible, she was even more upset than Paula.
My wife had got her a book that was supposed to help her deal with it. To show her that it was possible that somehow there was a “God” who loved her even when bad things happened. Something about the moon always being the same shape, regardless of what phase it’s showing in the sky at night.
It just made our daughter mad. She would storm out of the room when my wife tried to read it to her. She would get angry if she just saw it lying around.
Smart girl.
Those days hurt. We both grieved the loss of the baby. We grieved for our seven year old daughter.
My wife continued to go to her church after the miscarriage. Kind and well meaning people offered prayer and support. They provided meals. Made themselves available for anything. But she didn’t really want to talk much with anyone there about it. She said it hurt too much to say the words out loud.
She wasn’t saying much but she did do something that was really odd.
She sent out a group email telling the whole miscarriage story, delusional experiences with “God” and all. To call this out of character for my private and introverted wife is a understatement in the extreme.
She said she wasn’t looking for compassion or messages. In fact, she made it clear that she still didn’t really want to hear from anyone. She certainly didn’t share because she wanted people to know. She would have preferred that no one knew.
But she did it anyway.
Why?
She told me that she thought “God” had put it “on her heart” to do so. That made me more angry. Angry at the idea of a “God” (if you can be angry at a harmful fiction) for being so cruel. Angry at her brain for trying to find meaning in her pain and confusion by constructing a fairy tale narrative full of boxes to check.
But she wrote the email. And she sent it 12 days after that ultrasound.
You can read it if you want. There’s a PDF linked below.
It didn’t seem to make her feel any better. She seemed kind of annoyed at doing it. But the email went out. And then, we did our best to get back to life.
We heard from friends who have their own painful stories of miscarriage and loss. Some stories end with another baby that is carried to term and a safe delivery. Some stories end with more miscarriages or other tragedies. Some stories end without any other positive pregnancy tests. We were grateful for all of these friends and their compassion.
There were hard days for me, but I knew my pain was nowhere near as as visceral as my wife’s. She was the one who had carried the baby. I was crushed, but Paula felt it with more intensity.
The worst part was that there wasn’t much I could do to help her. She usually didn’t want to talk about it. And when she did I didn’t have anything to respond with.
She said that the hardest part for her was not knowing what “God” was doing. I tried telling her, as gently as I could, that this was her first problem. There was not an unseen spiritual world that mysteriously interacted with the realms of biology and chemistry and psychology. This miscarriage was a devastating loss, but devastation happens in the world. Just look at nature.
The sooner she could give up trying to account for a “God” the sooner she could get on the path to feeling better. I tried telling her how I had gone through the exact same thing as a child. Wanting desperately to believe that there was something out there that cared about me, about my suffering. But ultimately accepting the reality that was before my eyes.
She listened to me but she didn’t seem to understand. She said she was just going to be mad at “God” instead.
She is one stubborn woman.
I wanted to ask her how she could torture herself like that. But I knew it was fruitless. Whenever we’d get into it, she’d tell me how it was a medical school textbook about the complexity of the cell that “proved” to her that there needed to be a “God” in order for the intricacy of life to make sense.
And over the years she had become more convinced. She talked a lot about the need to account for the beginning of human existence, the fact that the universe seems to be mysteriously fine-tuned in way that science alone doesn’t explain. She would ask me whether I thought things like murder and child abuse and oppression were objectively wrong or just my own subjective feelings. And if I thought the former, how I could account for an actual morality that existed outside myself without God. They were interesting considerations no doubt.
But my own reasons felt much stronger.
I reminded her that the world was filled with suffering. That the Bible is hopelessly out of date. Most of all, the people who say they are Christians often don’t seem to live anything remotely like that Jesus guy told them to.
She was undeterred. She said she had decided to believe in all of that and that nothing could change her mind. She said that Jesus was betrayed by his friends, was tortured, and died on a cross. She said that suffering is part of life for everyone and that thinking of his made it easier for her to manage hers.
We ended the conversation with the same joke that we always used to help ease the tension. I told her I was glad I was smarter than her in at least one thing and we both smiled and moved on to other things.
At least, I moved on and tried to focus on other things. But I could see her still reading her Bible despite the expression on her face that made me think she kind of hated it. Still talking to the “God” she said she was mad at. Persisting in the face of facts.
She said she thought maybe “God” was teaching her to trust him in both good times and hard times.
I thought it was kind of sad. But again, I couldn’t help but find there was a part of me that felt something close to admiration for her dogged determination to still believe. I just wished that she wasn’t making things so complicated for our daughter, who I hoped could be free from fantasy.
But then, something else happened.
It actually happened shortly after Paula had healed physically from the miscarriage. But we didn’t know at the time.
We didn’t know until the next month — July.
And that summer morning, Paula walked into the kitchen holding a pregnancy test.
“Ummm…this technically says I’m pregnant.”
The test was faint, but she knew what it said. She just didn’t seem to believe it.
I didn’t either.
Pregnant.
I just sort of looked at her. I didn’t know what to say or think. Neither did she. My mind just kind of went blank.
Later, she told me that some people think that it’s “easier” to get pregnant after a miscarriage but that the medical data doesn’t back that up. Well, clearly it was easier in our case. It sounds like those doctors should probably study it more.
It was confusing.
In the days and weeks and months that followed, we got ready for another baby. Paula, still reading her Bible and going on about “wondering what God was up to.”
It looked like she was going to be stuck with that personality quirk. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to talk her out of it now.
She is absolutely convinced it’s all real.
Sometimes there’s even a part of me that wishes it was real too.
Paula tells me that believing in God is hard and that it doesn’t work like praying to Santa Claus and being good so you can get the things you want.
She says it’s more like investigating the full argument and then making a decision to believe.
And once you do, you stick with that belief through the good times and the bad. Kind of like a marriage I guess, but one where you never see the other person.
It still sounds crazy to me.
But at the same time, as I sit here holding our new baby, something is a little different. I think about everything we went through. About everything that will doubtless be coming down the road. And even though most of me knows all the reasons that God can’t possibly be real, there’s a part of me that rejects that this is all random.
There’s a part of me that believes that this story matters in a way that’s not just temporary. And that all of our friends and family who have suffered through miscarriage and death and tragedy and joy also have stories of real significance.
My brain tells me that at the end of life the sun probably just burns out, or we get flooded by sea level rise, or humans all kill each other and life on earth fizzles out and then the earth just floats around empty in the solar system.
Maybe that is how it all ends. Maybe none of this does really matter in the long run.
I can’t really say.
But maybe I’m starting to believe that it should matter.
That if my stubborn wife is right and that there is some supernatural “God” looking down on us, maybe I’ve been thinking about it from an upside down perspective.
Perhaps he’s not focused on giving us what we want so we can be happy as much as he wants to help us find meaning and purpose life in both the suffering and the joy.
[Hello there and thanks for reading. If you’re interested in reading this same story as told from the perspective of someone who does believe miracles are possible, you can find it here.]
