There is No Place in Church for the Infertile Woman

There is no place in church for the infertile woman

She sits in the service, quiet, joyful, sorrowful.

She hangs her head during the moments of praise of which she finds it hard to participate.

A cloud of shame surrounds her when a new child is dedicated to the Lord,

For she has no child to dedicate. Her role in church is unfulfilled.

She’s a mother to no one and a wife to a childless husband.

Her place in church is one of an empty space, a listless wanderer, a rootless spirit, floating between two worlds: those with children and those without.

Who is she? She does not know. She wants to belong to a place, a group, a tribe of women who hold the hands of their children, who wrap their arms around the tiny bodies of their babies whose hearts beat close to theirs.

But she cannot hold her children. Her children reside in heaven. Each of their souls, taken away before they reached the earth. They live quietly in the heavens above us, far out of reach of their mother’s arms. They are not hers, yet they are, yet they’re not. They belong to God, as all of God’s children do, but these are children whose faces have never been seen or celebrated or known by their parents.

So she sits in the midst of a crowd of people who rejoice in God’s love and mercy, however, at times she feels beyond His love and mercy. Who is this God who could take a child from the arms of a loving mother who prayed and yearned and pleaded for? What God would strip a mother of a love that throbs within in her heart, pulsing through her veins, flowing to the fingers of the hands of the arms that remain empty?

Still she arrives on a Sunday morning with her smile widely available for others to see; but inside, her smile drips like a poison into her empty bosom, daring her to allow the church to see the writhing, wretched, seething, ugly beast who resides within her.

There is no place in church for the infertile woman.

There are no celebrations for her mourning. There are no moments of prayer to commemorate another failure, another year lost, another piece of her heart ripped away as she loses the hope of becoming a mother.

The coos of the babies in service are like thorny vines that creep through the floor. They writhe their way to beneath her chair, slowly slithering up the legs, wrapping their spiny arms around her body, gripping her tightly with their noose. No one sees her suffocating under the weight of these vines. They ever so silently take her breath away, piercing her skin, bleeding her life onto the floor of the church.

Her pain is invisible. Untouched. Unmentioned. Misunderstood. Ignored. Restrained. Rejected. Patronized.

There is no place in church for the infertile woman.

Who should she be? A childless mother? A wife? A woman? A lie?

She hangs her head as the people pray, but she does so, not out of worship, but out of shame; for she knows not where she belongs. She only knows that there is no place in church for an infertile woman.