Birth & Motherhood - "Grace Through Infertility" with Elizabeth Hagan
Shownotes:
The Church needs to be a place where it is safe to share vulnerable stories, and this includes engaging the struggle of infertility. Unfortunately, many people who face this struggle have found shallow remedies or offensive expectations within communities of faith. How can we cultivate a more caring, helpful engagement with topics of motherhood that is inclusive of everyone’s experience, including those who struggle with infertility?
Rev. Elizabeth Hagan speaks to these issues from the perspective of a pastor, but also as one who struggled with infertility, miscarriage, and adoption loss for eight years. Along with 15 years of pastoral service as ordained minister, Hagan is the author of “Birthed,” a memoir that tells the story of her struggle. She also wrote the upcoming book “Brave Church: Tackling Tough Topics Together,” a guide on how to foster conversations about challenging topics.
Hagan shares her story with us and gives us a clearer understanding of the layers of grief that come with infertility that most do not recognize. Specifically, she speaks about ways that communities of faith can become some of the least safe places for people to deal with the struggle. Even so, Hagan also shines a light on how God’s grace can guide people through the struggle and how the desires we have to create families are God-given and should not be given up on. This conversation is purposed to inspire us all toward a more loving way of coming alongside those who struggle with this weighty topic of birth and motherhood.
Series Info:
Birth and motherhood are intrinsic to the human experience, yet there are aspects of these topics that often go undiscussed in church circles. Infertility, discerning birthing options, and the experience of caring for the woman who once mothered you are conversation topics that are as necessary as they are complicated. These topics are easy to overlook until they are experienced firsthand, and it’s important for the Church to understand all of the experiences that birth and motherhood bring.
In this series, we will listen to the wisdom and experiences of women who know these issues personally. Through these conversations, we hope to provide a space to recognize how spouses, friends, family, and others can come alongside mothers on their journey in a manner that is empathetic and understanding. Join in on this discussion as we consider the weight of these topics and cultivate a willingness within the Church to engage hard conversations.
Resources:
Follow Elizabeth on the web:
Follow Elizabeth on social media:
https://www.facebook.com/revelizabethhagan/
https://www.instagram.com/elizabethhagan/
https://twitter.com/elizabethagan
Read articles authored by Elizabeth on weighty topics:
https://elizabethhagan.com/best-of/
Read her article in The Christian Century about her journey with infertility:
https://www.christiancentury.org/blogs/archive/2016-09/waiting-eight-years-be-mother
Full Transcript:
Eddie Rester 0:00
I'm Eddie Rester.
Chris McAlilly 0:01
I'm Chris McAlilly. Welcome to The Weight.
Eddie Rester 0:03
Today, our guest is Elizabeth Hagan. Elizabeth is a pastor and a writer, a mother. And that's where her story, I think, really begins.
Chris McAlilly 0:13
She wrote a book in 2016 called "Birthed: Finding Grace through Infertility," about a struggle with infertility, miscarriage, adoption loss. And that's kind of the heart of the conversation today.
Eddie Rester 0:25
We really talked about her story, but more than her story, a lot of the emotion and pain behind that. One in eight women in the United States experience infertility, so this is not an uncommon conversation. And we know that many of you who are listening today, maybe that's been part of your conversation, as well. And she really gives voice to a lot of what happens. She talks about how hidden this conversation is in the church, with friends and family and how that conversation needs to begin to emerge.
Chris McAlilly 1:06
I think, if you're a person, if you're in a marriage where these are questions that you're struggling with, Elizabeth is, I think, just a really trustworthy voice, someone who can help you navigate what you're going through, and can maybe point you to some resources or even some ways of framing the conversation. I think it's also just, she's a person that I think sympathizes and knows the depth of the layers of grief that are involved in this conversation. But she speaks with grace and hope as well.
Eddie Rester 1:41
And I think the important thing is that she helps us think through as spouses, as husbands, as friends, as family members of folks who are moving through this. How do you... How can you help? How can you help and not hurt? How can you come alongside in the journey? And for me, that was some of the most beautiful parts of the conversation today.
Chris McAlilly 2:05
And she wants to encourage the church to be a place where hard conversations can happen. She's got a book coming out this summer called "Brave Church," tackling tough topics together. And I'm sure that we'll include those and other resources in the show notes today. We are grateful for you as always, and we found that if you are really enjoying the conversation, that the best way to share it is you can help us find the people who need to hear this episode and the podcast in general. So thank you.
Eddie Rester 2:38
Yeah, particularly, I think this episode is one that I think will be helpful to be shared with folks in your circle. So share it. Chris is pointing at me.
Chris McAlilly 2:47
Yeah, it's just the beginning of this is the beginning of kind of a new series and conversation for us. And this is one, you know, that it's focused on families, on on birth, and what it means to be a parent, and how that journey of motherhood changes through time. It's a conversation that I think will, you know, continue in some ways next week, and the week after that. You'll want to stick around for it.
Chris McAlilly 3:17
[INTRO] We started this podcast out of frustration with the tone of American Christianity.
Eddie Rester 3:24
There are some topics too heavy for sermons and sound bites.
Chris McAlilly 3:27
We wanted to create a space with a bit more recognition of the difficulty, nuance, and complexity of cultural issues.
Eddie Rester 3:35
If you've given up on the church, we want to give you a place to encounter a fresh perspective on the wisdom of the Christian tradition, in our conversations about politics, race, sexuality, art, and mental health.
Chris McAlilly 3:47
If you're a Christian seeking a better way to talk about the important issues of the day, with more humility, charity, and intellectual honesty, that grapples with Scripture and the church's tradition in a way that doesn't dismiss people out of hand, you're in the right place.
Eddie Rester 4:02
Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO]
Eddie Rester 4:04
Well, we're here today with Elizabeth Hagan, who is a pastor and a writer and a mother. And we're just thankful to have you in the conversation with us today, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Hagan 4:14
Thanks so much for having me. Glad to be here.
Chris McAlilly 4:17
You wrote a book back in 2016 about a bit of your journey called "Birthed: Finding Grace through Infertility." I wonder, for folks who maybe don't know about, haven't read the book or know much about your story, I wonder if you could kind of just tell us a little bit about what gave rise to your desire to write that book.
Elizabeth Hagan 4:39
Well, it was something I never expected I would do. First of all, I wasn't one of those kids who grew up dreaming of being an author, nor did I ever grow up dreaming of writing about infertility, or much else experiencing it. But as my husband I began to navigate the journey and as I was serving that entire time as a local church pastor--deeply connected both my own spiritual life and the spiritual life of of young adults who were really active my congregation at the time and the combination of how all those things collided--I found that there were not a lot of resources for infertility.
Elizabeth Hagan 5:22
Yes, there was resources if you wanted to read the latest self-help book about the 10 ways to get pregnant by doing all these things. Or there were books in the Christian sphere more in the evangelical world that were like, "if you just pray harder, you'll have a baby," or "just trust God," or "maybe it's not God's plan for you to be a mother," and I just never was satisfied with either of those approaches. Although, of course, I tried them, because when you're longing for something so much, you seek out whatever help you can find.
Elizabeth Hagan 5:59
And so I began to write my own story, and it felt so... something that I went through so silently, and I hated that because I'm such a person that likes to connect with others on a deeper level, and it just felt like well, maybe if I write the story down. Maybe if I talk about what it's like to search for God in the midst of something that feels so terrible that's happening to me, that it could be use to others--not only those who are going through infertility, but those who are longing for something and want to know where is God in the midst of that struggle.
Chris McAlilly 6:36
I feel like one of the places that the American church kind of thinks about these questions is on Mother's Day, you know. Really Mother's Day becomes this celebration of your mother or mothers that are out there that already have children, and I think, you know, as a young pastor and then as a young father, one of the--or not a young father, but young and married without children--what I became aware of in a deeper way it's just how painful that day can be for so many who desire to have a family, who long to get pregnant but for whom that has not happened for them. Talk a little bit about just, you know, what that day I guess means for you or that you've seen churches maybe do that well or poorly.
Elizabeth Hagan 7:32
Well, Mother's Day, I don't know if you all have experienced this in your congregations, but in several of mine that I pastored, Mother's Day is almost like a high attendance day. It's close to Easter.
Eddie Rester 7:42
Yep.
Elizabeth Hagan 7:43
Everybody wants to come to church with their mom or show up.
Chris McAlilly 7:47
Or feel like they have to.
Eddie Rester 7:48
They have to go with grandma to church.
Chris McAlilly 7:50
Yeah.
Elizabeth Hagan 7:51
Yes, it was grandma on the pew. And a lot of times there's a lot of extra fanfare around Mother's Day for a variety of different reasons that draw people into church. But what we don't see in those celebratory moments is the person who is sitting in the pews, maybe they're silently crying or maybe they just are stone-faced, full of emotions that the day just brings up so much pain. For some, that is because they're in the middle of a journey of trying to become a parent and it is more difficult than they ever imagined, as it was for me. And for others, it's because it's just... It's a collision, like you say, of all of these cultural expectations of what it means to be a woman, what it means to be successful in America, what the church exalts as like the perfect woman.
Elizabeth Hagan 8:43
I had, in a congregation where I served, a woman who intentionally, you know, did not have children and the church at that particular Mother's Day was trying to be more inclusive, which I was happy about and they were giving giving away roses to all the women in the church, trying to make it like a women's day. Well, this particular person came up to me later and told me how offended she was about that because she said, "You're just making it weird. I'm not a mother. This is Mother's Day. Why are you giving flowers to all the women?"And so I know it's just something we just don't know what to do with in the church, and sometimes, even if we're trying, we just make a mess of it.
Elizabeth Hagan 9:27
And for me, there were years when I was in the midst of our infertility journey where I was pastoring a church, those were days I was really tempted to call in a supply preacher and just not attend. Or there were days, you know, when I was so happy I was the pastor because I knew then that stupid things would not be said from the pulpit, that I got to be the narrative and really change the day to be about God, which is what we spend every Sunday talking about.
Elizabeth Hagan 10:05
And maybe you have an opportunity to talk about all the ways in which God mothers us, if we have to talk about it, or to be inclusive of all the ways that we've been mothered, because you know, not only is Mother's Day hard for those who are longing to be parents or not parents, but it's hard because we all have varying journeys with our own mothers, right? Like, not all of us have the happy-go-lucky, my-mother-is-the-best-thing-ever-in-my-life experience. And so it can just trigger so many points of pain, if it's not handled with sensitivity.
Eddie Rester 10:41
In the conversation about the book, you talked about the long journey that you and your husband really took. For a lot of folks, when you have conversations about infertility or miscarriages, and you said it earlier, there's this kind of silent pain, this hidden pain. You know, my wife and I went through, really, five years of trying to have a child, and hard as it was, for us as a couple or me as a husband, there was really a deeper, hidden pain for her that she found hard to talk with anyone about. Why do you think it's so hard, one, to talk about it, or two, maybe to find safe places or safe people to have that conversation with?
Elizabeth Hagan 11:35
That's a really great question. And there's so many answers to that. I think one of them is the fact that we, you know, normally if someone is going to conceive a child, they are going to have sex. And that's not something that we go around talking about with our friends, you know, or much less in church on a regular basis. Maybe some people do, but it's not common. And so to have this experience, which is supposed to be a sacred, loving experience between two people, and then to have that be taken out of your home and put into a doctor's office where you're being poked and prodded and where you're being examined.
Elizabeth Hagan 12:18
You know, when you're in the midst of any sort of procedure that is medically would help you become pregnant, often it involves going to the doctor's office every single day for blood work or for ultrasounds. It just feels like you become a science experiment. And you lose the sense of connection to your body and you lose a sense of connection as to what your marriage and your family you think is supposed to be like. That's one aspect of it.
Elizabeth Hagan 12:47
I mean, who wants... I know I didn't. I didn't want to talk about having an ultrasound every day or being late to work because I had to have blood work for the 20th time when normally, that's something that most people just do once a year. I was doing it every single day. But I also think about infertility as a toxic cocktail of shame, of anger, of loss, of grief. It's like all of these things put together.
Elizabeth Hagan 13:13
Because women in particular, you were talking about your wife not being able to talk about it. I mean, we are the ones that would potentially carry the babies, in any successful pregnancy. And I think in some ways we carry in our bodies the loss of not being able to be pregnant in the same way. That it is something that is so a part of who we are. And we have the experience of having people look at us as I did when I was a pastor trying to become pregnant and finding that unsuccessful. I had people in my congregation look at me and say, "Well, you seem to be happy and married," you know, "Why do you not want to have kids? Why aren't you pregnant?" And they just don't understand how insensitive such a comment is. And so you kind of want to just bury your desires--at least I knew I did--and pretend like yeah, "I don't really," you know, "I don't really," you know, "well, we'll have a baby someday." You know.
Eddie Rester 14:16
"We'll get there someday."
Elizabeth Hagan 14:17
"We'll get there." You know, "I didn't want to tell you, like, this is my deepest longing and I'm having great pain because my doctor just gave me this news yesterday." You know, that's a lot to uncover in a casual conversation, the way that people talk about it. Is that true to your experience?
Eddie Rester 14:33
Yeah, I think it absolutely, thinking back about our experience, you know, just people out of the best intentions who saw in us maybe, you know, "Oh, y'all would be such great parents," and then there's something in us that felt that but... Just, you, when you were talking about, you know, all the trips to the doctor's offices, I'm sitting here having flash backs of all those trips to the doctor's offices and the tearful returns home. And, yeah, there just this well of emotions that live in the wife, particularly, the mother who wants to be a mother, but also in the family as well.
Chris McAlilly 15:21
I think part of what I've observed, and part of what I hear in your story is that it's not just what is happening, but it's also the breakdown of the story that you were telling about your life and about your marriage and about, you know, you. The story, it's a breakdown. It's a loss of identity, in a certain kind of way, or loss of the story that you were telling about what your marriage was going to be or what kind of life you were going to have. And there are all these expectations that are kind of put into that and this is feels like this is going to be a natural part of things. Just, this part's going to work within. There may be other things that break down, but that part is going to work. And I wonder, could you, because your story... I mean, I've got some notes here from your book, but I wonder if you could just... You guys went through a lot. I wonder if you could just maybe spell that out for those who have not yet read the book.
Elizabeth Hagan 16:18
Well, and I want to add one more thing to your list as well. It's also a loss of community. And that really hit me hard. Because I had, I don't know, if you guys think about this a lot, the way I do. You know, you grow up, and you're in the same grade every year, you know, with certain friends of yours. We're now in eighth grade. Now we're in high school. Now we're in college, and you just think, "My life is just gonna go along this pattern, and I'm going to get married, and then I'm gonna have kids, and then we're all going to be friends, you know, married with kids."
Elizabeth Hagan 16:47
And here I was, my friends were getting pregnant. My friends were having baby showers. My friends were having mom's groups or play dates. And I was not welcome. I mean, just the sheer fact that, I mean, I was... I didn't have a kid. I didn't have a kid. I have a child. And so they were all, my friends were doing mom things or our couple friends were doing. And we felt like we lost years with some of our close friends, because it was awkward. It was painful to be around them. And it just was triggering of our own loss and grief of the children that could have been for us.
Elizabeth Hagan 17:29
And that was just... It created a lot of complication. And in fact, when I published my book, there were several people that I hand gave copies to that were in our friend circle. And many of them I wrote apologies to them is I signed the book saying, you know, "I'm sorry that I wasn't able to be there for you during this time, but you know I love you and I hope that we can continue to be in each other's lives." So that was a big deal.
Elizabeth Hagan 18:01
But as far as the things that we went through, we, you know, started the way that most people start, you know, you say you're starting. You're trying. You're really timing your monthly cycles. You're trying to conceive, and in that part of our journey, I experienced some early term miscarriages. My doctors were baffled because I was young. I was under 30. Everything seemed fine medically. They were like, "Well, you know, this just happens." Like, "Don't sweat it too much." But, you know, to feel like you're pregnant, and to have that experience of like, "oh my goodness, something is in my body that is different." And then to have that be gone all of a sudden, that was really the early part of our story.
Elizabeth Hagan 18:48
And so because after a year or so we weren't successfully keeping a pregnancy, we went to see a fertility doctor. And again, they kept saying, "Oh, you're fine. You're fine." You know, they discovered we had some male factor infertility part of our story early on. Okay, fine, no problem. You just do these things. And we'll fix it in the lab, no big deal. And so it was just this ongoing cycle of like, our doctors and we even changed doctors to figure out, well, maybe we're getting bad information.
Elizabeth Hagan 19:22
But it just felt so hopeful every time we kept trying, you know. I didn't want to be one of those people beating my head against the wall, like, you know, wasting time and money and energy. But everyone was always so helpful medically for us until they discovered toward the end, when we had done IUI, when we had done IVF--which many of you are familiar with the term in vitro fertilization, where an embryo is actually made outside in the lab and then put back into you--until we realized, and maybe this is, like, I don't know, like the seventh or eighth procedure. They did one more test on me and discovered that I had a genetic problem, which was I had a reversal in my chromosomes, which, under some circumstances meant I could have been born with Downs syndrome, which is an interesting fact to essentially know about your life, but I wasn't.
Elizabeth Hagan 20:19
And because of that, that's why my miscarriages happened early on, and that's why it would be difficult for me to become pregnant with my own child. And then the last part of our story, kind of like the one last push, was that I had a dear friend, I write about this in the book, who saw our pain, had been like a sister to me for many years and volunteered to be our egg donor. And we did IVF again, with her contribution to the process, which is one of the most loving acts of friendship I've ever experienced in my life. But we did not become pregnant.
Elizabeth Hagan 21:04
And in the midst of that had become aware of the possibility of adoption. And we're pursuing that, ended up being very moved by a situation that we encountered in the country of Kenya, and said, "Well, maybe this is just our path." And went 100% full-force down the path of like, this is our step. Yes, we're going to adopt from Kenya. We put our life on hold. There's so many things when you're going through an adoption that you can't change anything about your life. You've got to keep everything very organized for your home study to be intact. And we put all our eggs in... well, that's a bad joke about fertility. But we put all our energy into this and only to find after two years of that adoption process that the country of Kenya shut down all international adoption, which was a devastating blow.
Elizabeth Hagan 22:02
And so it was just like, Well, you know, every time something bad happened--at this point, I was really writing the book--and I said to my husband, "Well, this is making the book better." Like, okay, right, you know, this is like, that was my solace. Like, every time something, you know, worse happened. It's gonna be good story one day. If you can imagine I was quite angry at the end of all of that and had to go on my own sort of spiritual journey to deal with my anger at our situation, at God. And I began to re-envision my life, maybe with or without being a mother to an actual child.
Eddie Rester 22:52
So part of the writing of the book was really about finding grace in all of that. And I know there was a lot of anger and a lot of tears, a lot of frustration. Where did you find grace? Where did you encounter God? How did God begin to work in and through all of that for you?
Elizabeth Hagan 23:15
I think the true answer to that is in relationships I write a lot about in "Birthed," the friends that refuse to give up on relationship with me, even when I was curled up in a ball in their house, crying because something bad happened again. I talked about several really significant people in my life that kept showing up. I had one friend in particular, a dear pastor friend who was just upset that I was pushing her out of my life, that she wanted to be present in my grief and had me make a list of things that she could do to be helpful. And one of them sounds kind of melodramatic now. But I was picking up rocks in our yard, because we needed to have a new driveway and needed the rocks to go, and she ended up coming over and sitting with me in the dirt and picking up rocks. And that was beautiful.
Elizabeth Hagan 24:11
And sometimes we just need people to show us how loved we are, no matter what is going on in our lives or how terrible we feel about ourselves. That, that for me was God. You know, the book is about a lot of tears. And I had one reviewer of the book say "I think Hagan was needs to just... I can't believe she cried so much." Which I hear. You know, maybe it's a bit difficult to stomach, but I didn't want to sugarcoat any of the story. But he went on to write he said, "I know that the real point of this book was to illuminate God and how God was present for her in the struggle. But I think that the real hero of this book was her husband," which of course, my husband thought was amazing that somebody said this online about him. But it's true.
Elizabeth Hagan 25:06
He, our relationship had to grow, you know. We had to get, we were together at that rock bottom place, you know. There was a time in which he said to me, "I wonder if you want a baby more than you want to be married to me?" Which was oh, wow, okay. And we had to do a lot of work to tend to our relationship in the midst of our deep sense of grief and to find collective energy toward why we chose to be married in the first place, which is we thought that God had brought us together because we were better together and what would that look like, even in the midst of our own pain?
Eddie Rester 25:53
As you talked about that reviewer writing about, you know, there's so many tears in the book, one of the things that you point out in an article I read, you know, one in eight women experience this journey. And so the gift of your book is that is gives voice to a lot of women and a lot of couples who, their journey is a lot of tears and a lot of frustration. And I'm very, very thankful that you have gifted other people that journey so they can know they're, one, they're not alone, and two, it's okay, that journey that that they're on. One of the things... Chris is actually pointing at me now. So he, that...
Chris McAlilly 26:39
Yeah, I want to come back to your husband, because I think what I... So I'm an adoptive father, and we kind of had our own journey, you know, deep desire to have a family and adoption. So adoption was a path for us. We've since had biological children as well. So we kind of have been through kind of both sides of the journey. But I think what I remember about, it's just so much fear, and for me as a husband, just helplessness. I wonder what your husband would say, if he were in the conversation. Or I guess another way to frame it would be what would you say to husbands who are out there and feeling helpless in offering support to their wives in this particular moment?
Elizabeth Hagan 27:36
Well, I think the answer to that is as unique as any person or any couple's relationship is. I am the kind of person when I go through something difficult, I just need time and space to kind of work through it on my own. And so there were times in which I was pulling away from him. And it took him a long time to not take that personally, to not think that I hated him. It was just, I was in so much pain that I could not be present with any other person. I mean, I longed, I desire to be present, to sit and to tell him all the things on my heart and mind and to cry with him. But there were some times I couldn't even do that.
Elizabeth Hagan 28:18
And I think, just to be sensitive to the fact that, you know... I think--and this is not just about infertility, but I think any grief that takes root in someone's life--sometimes I think that grief is just so big and so large, that someone's got to deal with that thing. And that means that they're not going to be able to show up for others in the way in which maybe they would love to or hope to or have in the past. And it's good just to give people some space and some time and to realize that it's not because you've done anything wrong or that you're not doing a good job of showing up, but just the grief is just that intense.
Chris McAlilly 29:05
We were watching a kid's movie, I can't even remember the title. It was about a squirrel. This is with our children recently. And it's about this daughter who, and this squirrel who becomes a superhero. I'm sorry, Eddie. Eddie's looking at me. He's got older daughters.
Eddie Rester 29:22
Yeah, my kids are now... I'm not in those movies anymore. So I'm very interested.
Chris McAlilly 29:26
I'll have to look it up after I tell the story so I can at least say the name of the movie. But what the daughter... So this marriage has has kind of broken down and the parents are separated and the daughter is in the midst of it. And at a certain point that the husband who is separated from the wife goes to see...
Elizabeth Hagan 29:45
These are all squirres, by the way?
Chris McAlilly 29:46
What's that?
Elizabeth Hagan 29:47
These are all squirrels?
Chris McAlilly 29:48
No, no, no, these are...
Elizabeth Hagan 29:50
Oh, okay. [LAUGHTER]
Eddie Rester 29:50
The squirrel hasn't entered the story yet.
Chris McAlilly 29:53
[LAUGHTER] That's a terrible, terrible entry into the story. But the the husband goes to this friend and says, you know, "Do you have any advice for me?" And he says... The movie is "Flora and Ulysses," Eddie, that's the name of the movie, and it's really interesting.
Chris McAlilly 30:08
But it's this moment where the husband goes to a friend and says, you know, "What am I supposed to do?" And she basically says, "Always turn back. Always turn back to your spouse."
Elizabeth Hagan 30:19
Yeah.
Chris McAlilly 30:19
And for me, that, I think that's because when you don't know what to do, there there are two options: you can turn away, or you can turn back.
Elizabeth Hagan 30:29
Yeah. That's really great.
Chris McAlilly 30:31
Thank you, I appreciate you saying that, Elizabeth. Eddie's still looking at me cross-eyed about the squirrels. Not a good intro, but I landed the ending.
Eddie Rester 30:38
Where's the squirrel enter?
Chris McAlilly 30:39
You have to watch the movie, man. It's actually really, really good. I was skeptical, but my kids wanted to watch it. But I think, turning back, I think especially grief, just talking about grief and I think infertility and miscarriage and failed adoptions is a particular kind of grief, and layers upon layers of grief, and I think this is something I think is broadly difficult to deal with. We don't know what to say.
Chris McAlilly 30:42
So what I think, you know, there are friends that are like the core anchor point, but I also think when people are experiencing grief ,particularly this kind of grief, the community--you know family members, etc.--they have no idea what to say, so people say a bunch of, I mean, frankly it's just a lot of stuff that...
Elizabeth Hagan 31:23
Stupid stuff.
Chris McAlilly 31:24
Yeah, stupid stuff. I was gonna say BS, like just stuff that doesn't...
Eddie Rester 31:28
Help.
Chris McAlilly 31:29
Help. So what would you say to folks that have people in their life that are maybe experiencing these things but they're so scared of saying the right thing or the wrong thing, what is a good thing for people to say to someone who they know is experiencing some of these kinds of grief?
Elizabeth Hagan 31:49
I think, you know, any grief can be so isolating and so lonely because you... And pain can be so intense, right? In a room, sometimes pain is like the third person if there's two people having a conversation, and there's a fear of it. And I think that's the thing that people going through this type of struggle most want, which is just someone to come and sit with them in their pain and to just listen to their experience. Like, "Come let me tell you about what it was like to go to the doctor today." And, "They did this to me and the doctors was weird, and I can't believe this, you know, this thing happened." And, or you know, "I got invited to a baby shower today and I just was in a ball of tears, because I can't possibly go." You know, it's just practically hearing, hearing what is going on so it doesn't feel like I'm banished from the community because I'm not like everybody else.
Eddie Rester 32:50
One of the things, the new book that you've written is called, "Brave Church: Tackling Tough Topics Together," and that's coming out I think this spring, is that right?
Elizabeth Hagan 32:59
Yeah, June first.
Eddie Rester 33:01
June first, so in the summer. It connects to something, I think, that you wrote in a Time Magazine article a couple years ago where you said, "Many couples say that their faith communities are the least safe place when it comes to their fertility woes." Why is the church the least safe place for folks facing this?
Elizabeth Hagan 33:26
Well, not every community probably is that way, but so many couples experience that, and my new book, "Brave Church," comes out of my experience of having a book out in the world and marketing it the way that you have to when you have a book that comes out. And I was doing a lot of speaking engagements in churches and I had people tell me, "Please don't talk about infertility," and I'm like, "Well that's what my book's about and one in eight couples struggle with this." They're like, "Well it's just a little too personal," or "Maybe the old people won't really like it." Talk about something bigger.
Elizabeth Hagan 34:06
And I want to tell you two stories that I encountered and that kind of propelled me to create a bigger conversation around why we can't talk about certain things in church. One of them was, I encountered a young couple in the midwest who recently started attending a church. They were just the two of them, did not have any kids, and they felt like they had really, they loved the church but had trouble assimilating into the church because all of the couples that were approximately their age that they would normally hang out with after church, they would all hang out in the children's area of the church. They go pick up their kids from the nursery, and that's where they would kind of mingle. And they felt like, well, you know, it was just assumed that because they were a certain age, they would hang out with a certain people because there wasn't this greater vision of intergenerational ministry at this particular congregation. And so because they didn't fit with everyone else who seemed to have kids, they felt very lonely and isolated in this church experience, even though they loved the preaching and service, and that was really a sobering story for me to hear.
Elizabeth Hagan 35:15
Another story I heard when I was out talking about birth, I was in a small congregation in North Carolina and someone came up to me--and it was the demographic that I was told would be completely unimpressed in my book--a woman who was maybe in her early 60s and said to me, in tears, "I just appreciate your presentation so much. My son was conceived through IVF, one of the first in this country, and I never told anyone about it because I was ashamed. Thank you so much for using the word IVF in the church. I've never heard it before."
Chris McAlilly 35:54
Yeah, it's hard to find resources and it's hard for them to know...
Elizabeth Hagan 35:58
Well, I'm glad! Great, you know, and it's just, like, to think that this woman who, you know, is a very faithful church person had been carrying this story that she just
Eddie Rester 36:08
For decades.
Elizabeth Hagan 36:09
For decades didn't feel like there was an opening for her to talk about it because, you know, no one ever said the words "infertility." You know, I spoke at a lot of churches where I'm maybe the first person who's ever preached a sermon that had some illustration connected to infertility, which I kind of got tired talking about it, but you know, when there's no one doing it, like, how important it is to say those words, to say, "I long for a child. This was my journey. It was painful." You know, but we're in the hope-making business, right, in the church? So that any story can find hope, can find healing, and that's why I tell my story now, because of that.
Chris McAlilly 36:55
I think testimony is the thing that I hear, that your testimony is hope-making, you know.
Elizabeth Hagan 37:01
Yeah, absolutely.
Chris McAlilly 37:01
There's a sense of if you hear somebody's story that imbedded within that story is the gospel, you know. From a place of orientation and things were great and everything's wonderful, to we went into the wilderness and we were in the darkness and we were completely disoriented and our story completely broke down. And there was a path that was kind of opened up, and it was one that we would have never expected, and it made us a family, and it led to amazing joy. For the couple who's out there that's navigating these questions about IVF or other medical interventions or maybe you're actually a bit fearful of adoption, that's a whole unknown world that just feels... There's a lot of research and paperwork in domestic versus international and all the rest. Talk a little bit about the the joy that comes on the other side of that process or kind of an openness towards adoption as a possibility for somebody who may be kind of running into dead end after dead end in the world of infertility treatments.
Elizabeth Hagan 38:11
Well, I think the real question that anyone needs to ask themselves on a journey to become parents is you discern every point, which is what we did. You know, do we want to do this? Is this the next right thing, you know? And the question, the bigger question is do you want to be a parent, and if so are you okay... Being a parent can look like so many different things. And adoption, yes, can be a scary alternative because there's so many unknowns in terms of how long it takes, how poked and prodded you feel by paperwork and social workers and fingerprinting and what your child that comes into your home will be like, and their story and the complexity of their background and yours.
Elizabeth Hagan 39:02
But I believe that God is in the business of making things beautiful and making families in all different ways, and there is no one way to make a family. And so our story is such that we became adoptive parents. The third time worked, and I have a four-year-old daughter from domestic adoption, and let me tell you, the joy of being a parent is present every day. I mean, of course there's the whiny bedtimes and all the things that go on with having a preschooler, but I've loved every minute of it. You know, from the moment we had her come into our lives and we were taking care of her the same way that anyone takes care of a child that's birthed of their body, the connection was there for us, and we just adore her.
Elizabeth Hagan 40:00
And I'm so grateful that our story intersected with hers, and we are now her forever family. And that adoption is a beautiful story and I could talk to you all day about that. The Pentecost story of how God comes through the Spirit and haves people feel connection to each other that otherwise would have never felt a bond, I feel like I'm living a Pentecost family, you know. Not only in the daughter that I have, that's officially, legally my child, but through the work that I've done with a foundation called Our Courageous Kids that connects students who grow up in international orphanages to be able to go to college. We just had a student from Kenya become a part of our family, lived with us while she was attending college in the US for the past five years and I felt like I got another daughter from that experience. And, you know, it's a beautiful, beautiful thing to open your heart to how God is going to fill your home with love, and how God is going to use your desire to parent, to show up in the lives of kids, to bring good into the world. So I'm totally a fan of adoption, both officially and unofficially and having one more seat at your table for whoever God is going to bring into your family.
Chris McAlilly 41:31
Amen to that. And I just want to echo that. I mean, during the midst, when I was helpless, I didn't feel like I knew what to do as a partner and as a husband. I also had a master's in in theology. So I went and did the the, you know, the deep dive into these questions theologically, in the biblical resources. There are just so many resources in the Bible. I mean, what you notice is that the Bible is so full of stories of people who are family who are not blood relation, you know...
Elizabeth Hagan 42:02
Yeah, absolutely.
Chris McAlilly 42:02
That, you know, you have...
Elizabeth Hagan 42:04
One of my favorite sermons I preached was Joseph as like, I mean, Joseph was an adoptive father.
Chris McAlilly 42:11
That's right. The day that I realized that, I remember, it was...
Elizabeth Hagan 42:14
Whoa!
Chris McAlilly 42:15
Yeah, it was like a spring day, and I was outside and I called up my dad, and I was like, "Dad, Joseph is an adoptive father!" And it was just this amazing moment when I found a point of connection that I'd never seen in the Gospel story, and that I was going to be able to live into, you know. And for me, that was huge. But it's also, I think about Ruth and Naomi. I think about all of these stories of families that are put together in ways that are not, you know, the blood connection or the biological connection. And that love, the desire we have to create families can take so many different forms. And in fact, is, in some ways more beautiful. Not more beautiful, okay, beautiful in its own kind of way. And I think that it, I guess I would just encourage people to take those desires and those longings back into the Bible and ask those questions of the Bible once again. And I think you find a lot of resources for living into that particular kind of story.
Elizabeth Hagan 43:23
Yeah, and I never wanted someone to tell me, you know, because when you're writing something, people say, "Okay," you know, "what's your bio for the back?" You know, and I had trouble in the beginning when I first was putting my book out, the manuscript out in the world, they're like, "Well, can you tell us?" like, "Well, did you have a kid? Or have you made peace with not having a child?" And it was like, neither of those were true. At the time, when I was shopping my book around, like, I never wanted anyone to take that longing away from me. Because that would have been terrible, because it was so a part of who I was. And I never gave up on that longing. And that's how adoption, I think, eventually worked in our case, and motherhood came to be a part of my every day.
Elizabeth Hagan 44:16
And that's one thing I would really encourage people: don't give up. If you have that longing to parent, to be a part of a child's life, name it. Be it. But be open to how that's fulfilled. It may be that you are just a mother figure in some intentional way in a variety of different capacities. It may be adoption, it may be that, you know, one day you're pregnant, and you would have never thought, like, you've totally given up hope. I don't know how people's stories are going to end. It's incredible to see what hope looks like in so many people's lives, but just don't give up. Don't have anyone tell you that it's... If you've got the longing to parent, stay true to that. It's important.
Eddie Rester 45:09
So thankful for your story. And I would encourage folks to really dig in the book, "Birthed: Finding Grace through Infertility," but also I think, as a pastor, I'm sitting here thinking about how do we need to do? How can we open space? And I'm looking forward to your next book, "Brave Church," coming out, because I think... It's about churches being safe spaces for really hard conversations. I think back to a Sunday, when we really talked about the mental health crisis in America, prior to the pandemic. And you know, a senior adult walked up to me afterwards and shared the story of a child and he said, "I've never had a church ever talk about mental illness before. I can't believe we've done this." And so, for pastors out there, church leaders out there who are listening, I think, you know, I think what you give us permission to do, Elizabeth is to just be real, to step into those places where people are already living.
Elizabeth Hagan 46:21
Absolutely. We're all there in some capacity. We're all dealing with stuff. And I just, I want to be a person that helps facilitate conversations at church that help people feel less lonely, because I want to feel less lonely. And I know that others do, too, if we do the work together.
Chris McAlilly 46:40
If somebody is out there and kind of encouraged about this conversation that you've kind of initiated with us, where would you point them to go next? Where would you say this is a place where you can find my work, or this is another resource for you that that has been really helpful?
Elizabeth Hagan 47:00
Well, I'd love to connect with folks at elizabethhagan.com. I am a regular writer there. I have a series I do every Sunday called "Word of the Week" where I provide spiritual encouragement for this kind of real-life conversations that I hope you would go and connect with. It's a great place to find community of people talking about these sorts of things. But I would say is, as far as the larger infertility community, there's a couple of resources, I'll just name real quickly that I know. One of them is called Moms in the Making. It's a Christian infertility support group that has sort of a national audience. Check them out, see if there's a group in your area that might be meaningful to you.
Elizabeth Hagan 47:51
I really love the organization Fertility for Colored Girls. It is run by a pastor Stacey Edwards-Dunn in Chicago, but it provides a real resource to the story in the Black community about infertility and how that's even more silenced. Some really great resources there. And then also, I would say, talk to your pastors. Talk to your church leaders. I, in the writing of "Brave Church," I interviewed several church leaders who were doing some innovative work in the area of infertility ministry and miscarriage, talking about these things. So please, please don't be afraid to start that conversation in your local context, because it just takes one brave person to mention these things, and some beautiful things can happen.
Eddie Rester 48:49
Well, thank you, again. The books are "Birthed" and "Brave Church" that's out this summer. We just appreciate all of your time today and for your willingness to share your story with us.
Elizabeth Hagan 49:00
Thank you so much for having me. This has been lovely. And thank you for your courage to bring this topic to light. I know that many will be just so thankful just to have heard the words "infertility." So, thank you.
Eddie Rester 49:15
[OUTRO] Thank you for listening to this episode of The Weight.
Chris McAlilly 49:20
If you liked what you heard today, feel free to share the podcast with other people that are in your network. Leave us a review. That's always really helpful. Subscribe, and you can follow us on our social media channels.
Eddie Rester 49:31
If you have any suggestions or guests you'd like us to interview or anything you'd like to share with us, you can send us an email at info@theweightpodcast.com [END OUTRO]