Faith and My Father
How can we access the inner fortitude that can carry us through darkness?
On the streets of New York, it’s raining babies. Infants and children are everywhere — in strollers, carriages, front carriers, back carriers. The ache under my ribs, that familiar, grasping feeling, urges me toward the babies I pass on the street. Or, rather, toward just one. A single infant reaching for me, who nuzzles for my breast, one whose eyes meet mine.
It’s been almost a year since I gave birth to a stillborn daughter. The cavity it carved in the middle of my being still throbs. I feel it as I stand in bright sunlight, angry as thunder, waiting for the empty place to be filled.
It’s November, and all over the news is one story: Princess Diana is pregnant. People are falling all over themselves–an heir, an heir! The television reports capture the dewy mother-to-be from every angle. She is constantly surrounded by admirers reaching out their hands, photographers snapping photos as she ducks her pretty head for meager protection against the constant whirr and flash.
I stare at the television, listening to incessant details — her due date (summer of next year), her morning sickness (or lack of it), where she will deliver the baby, the baby. I wish everyone would shut up about the royal fucking baby.
It’s just one more woman who’s gotten pregnant while I sit waiting. “Wait a year before trying again,” the obstetrician had instructed. “Give your body a chance to recover.” A year that yawned before me, a disappearing horizon. I felt like a racehorse, trapped behind a faulty starting gate while the rest of the field thundered ahead.
Using birth control to prevent a pregnancy, when all I want is another chance to do it right, to do it sober, is an inflammation, a runny sore I know I shouldn’t scratch. Secretly, against doctor’s orders, we have stopped using birth control. But after trying for months, my womb is still empty. Not even a period, which might reassure me that something inside is working.
Desperate and stupid with longing, I seek out a fertility doctor. His rates are dizzyingly high, and our paltry health insurance won’t cover his fee. Still, I grasp at a thread of hope that he might have answers.
The nurse takes blood and urine, temperature and blood pressure. The doctor listens to my fretful heart. We talk. I tell him what happened, holding back my guilt, longing, and regret. This man could hardly understand my dreams: a little girl with dark curls, standing on the caboose of a disappearing train. When the exam is finished, the doctor instructs me to meet him in his office.
“Things have a way of working out.” I’d heard my father say it before, often enough to become annoying.
I sit on the examining table, trying to muster the will to get dressed. Have faith, our friends have said. It’ll happen. What does that even mean, faith? Growing up, the nuns taught us about obedience, sin and sacraments, heaven and hell. But they remained tight-lipped about faith, revealing nothing of the way to the secret door that opens into some bright meadow of inner fortitude to carry you through the darkness.
Instead, I learned it from my father.
When I was a teenager, my father once came upon me sitting in the dark, sobbing, my hand resting on the telephone in its cradle. He didn’t ask what had happened but laid a gentle hand on my back and said simply, “Things have a way of working out.”
I’d heard him say it before, often enough to become annoying. What about being passed over for cheerleading? What about all the trouble in the world — the unwinnable war that was taking my classmates, the assassination of beloved leaders? My father’s folksy phrase seemed as thin as a sheet covering a body on the pavement.
Though my mother insisted Dad was fine, hardly a scratch, there was much evidence to the contrary.
One afternoon I arrived home from school to find my mother standing in the kitchen, her eyes vacant and strange. She said, “Your father’s been in an accident.” The floor swayed beneath me. Was my father dead? Paralyzed? Did my life just change in an instant?
Though my mother insisted Dad was fine, hardly a scratch, there was much evidence to the contrary. My father’s car had been totaled. He spent the night in the hospital, arriving home the next day with a bandaged shoulder and angry red scrapes on his arms and hands. Though he kept his face averted, I saw bruising about his eyes and nose. What were my parents keeping from me? While I had little use for either of them in those days — their failure to understand me, their many restrictions — the thought of losing either of them terrified me beyond comprehension.
That night at the dinner table, I watched my father as he gingerly picked at his meal using his left hand. I couldn’t stop staring at the cuts and bruises on his face. Though it was my job to clear the table and start the washing up, my mother silently did it for me. My younger sister and brother went off to do homework and play in their rooms. I lingered at the table, not looking at my father but unable to leave.
I longed for him to put his arms around me, but he remained seated. In our family, expressions of affection were tender yet fleeting. My father would fondle locks of my hair as I sat on the floor next to his armchair while he read the evening paper. He’d rest a hand on my shoulder as we stood at Mass.
Sitting at the table that evening, I tried to stifle my panic. Choking back tears, I said, “I can’t lose you, Dad.” When I raised my head, I saw his brown eyes returning my gaze. Quietly, he said, “If anything ever happened to me or your mother, you’d be all right. Things have a way of working out.”
Now, seated in the fertility doctor’s office, I straighten my spine and face the doctor with resolve. “I’ve made some mistakes,” I begin. “But I’m ready to do anything that will improve my chances of getting pregnant again. We don’t have the greatest insurance coverage but I’m sure we can afford…” my voice trails off as I notice the doctor regarding me oddly.
His office chair squeaks as he leans back and says with a smirk, “You’ve just had the world’s most expensive rabbit test.” At first, I’m confused by his crude mid-century euphemism. Then light dawns, and I stare at him in wonder.
“You’re pregnant,” he said. “You should see an obstetrician.”
My father’s words come to me then, burnished like a talisman. Things have a way of working out. I wish I had told him, while he was still with us, that his simple wisdom would sustain me all my life.
