This essay was originally published in the Sickness & Health Issue of The Mockingbird magazine. 

As you do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything. -Ecclesiastes 11:5

One evening in the wintry days of 2022, a group of friends gathered at our home to celebrate two imminent births. As the six women sat around my dining room table, with the dark evening just outside the windows, we toasted to the joy of lives to come. Our discussion also turned, however, to the path of death that almost all of us had walked to reach that point. Between the six of us, we had been — or rather, would be — blessed with eleven healthy children. Between the six of us, we had also lost nine babies to miscarriage. Why do we not talk about this more, we all wondered.

We live in a willful world. We wrest control of our lives through timers, alarms, exercise classes, and coffees with exactly two lumps of sugar, or by driving farther for produce we prefer rather than what the grocery store just down the road has. We climb career ladders, read the right books, and engage with the correct social media apps, and our world is designed to meet our will as it blossoms. You’d rather have a latte than a drip coffee? You want to be more fit? Here’s an Orange Theory, a Pure Barre, and a Regymen Fitness all within three minutes. The world caters to our will and rewards our will. The world never stops to tell us that our will might lead to the tomb. In the 21st century, the world appears to bend easily to our wills, but no matter the century or era, the human will has always yearned to conquer.

William Shakespeare, in the sixteenth century, explored this world of the will through playwriting, especially in his work The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. A tale of “star-crossed lovers [who] take their life,” Romeo and Juliet is a play about giving oneself over entirely to one’s will. These two teenagers take their love (and lives) into their own hands. They place their faith in their overwhelming desire, and each leads the other on a path to the tomb. Romeo and Juliet does not just end with the deaths of its protagonists, but with the deaths of four other major characters. The will, Shakespeare illustrates, charts a deadly course.

Throughout the play, Shakespeare foreshadows the events to come. One of the more significant scenes occurs in Act II, when the character of Friar Laurence arrives on stage in the ghostly light of early dawn. Friar Laurence is a father-like figure for both Romeo and Juliet throughout the play, but this scene is our introduction to him. He picks herbs and flowers, which he will later use in medicinal concoctions, and as he surveys the ground before him, he says:

The earth that’s nature’s mother is her tomb;
What is her burying grave that is her womb

These lines introduce a major theme of this tragic play: that of dual nature. In this soliloquy, the Friar comments upon the nature of the earth itself. She is both a tomb and a womb. She is nature’s mother and nature’s grave. She carries within herself the capacity for both life and death. As I looked around the dinner table that winter night, I thought about this scene as it relates to the human mother and how so many of our wombs have borne both life and death.

Friar Laurence continues:

Within the infant rind of this weak flower
Poison hath residence and medicine power:
For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part;
Being tasted, slays all senses with the heart.
Two such opposéd kings encamp them still
In man as well as herbs, grace and rude will;
And where the worser is predominant,
Full soon the canker death eats up that plant.

The flower that the Friar holds in his hands is both poisonous and medicinal. When the flower is smelled, it cheers and, thus, heals. When the flower is tasted, it kills. The final four lines of the Friar’s soliloquy are the center of Shakespeare’s play: just as the flower (and the earth) contains both poison and medicine, so mankind itself contains both poison and medicine — grace and rude will. And where rude will is predominant, death consumes.

Shakespeare is profoundly interested in this world of duality — the dual nature of the earth; of flowers as both poison and medicine; of love and hate; of young and old — but most profoundly in the dichotomy of the human heart. We have a capacity to love and a capacity to hate. As Juliet herself eloquently puts it, every human being is a paradox: a “beautiful tyrant” and “fiend angelical.” Good and evil — grace and rude will — war within us.

What was true in the sixteenth century is true in the twenty-first, and we are a people who want it all. There are angels among us, and God’s grace within us, but our tyrant wills always seek control. One of the current marketing trends is “mass customization”: companies want the ease of mass production, but they know their customers also want control of whatever they are producing. Mass customization is an attempt to marry the two. “Nike By You,” where you can design your own Nike products, even bills itself as a “co-creation service.” So we not only choose a color or a material, we participate in an act of creation. Nike aside, the True Creator does promise us the gift of co-creation. My husband and I witnessed that miracle of grace on January 31, 2021, when our son was born. The one thing God does not promise, however, is control.

After surviving months of uncertainty and sleep deprivation when our son was a newborn, when he was about nine months old, we were so in love with our little boy that we decided to have another. It was October of an already stressful school year, but I had grown up with a sister eighteen months my junior, and I was convinced our sibling relationship was the gold standard. (Funny how you can blind yourself to the years of hitting, scratching, and screaming when you’ve decided you want something.) If we got pregnant immediately, he could grow up with a sibling as close as my sister and I are. Even if it took a few months, we reasoned, they’d still be wonderfully close. Thanksgiving came, I was indeed pregnant, and we joyfully joked with my family about all the things I’d have to give up eating for the next nine months. We went on a long walk through the woods; I happily bounced our son in a carrier on my back; and the next day, I miscarried. It was heartbreaking, but it was quiet and relatively painless, physically. We figured we’d try again.

By the end of January of the new year, I was six weeks along. I had had an early ultrasound the week before and seen the beginnings of the new soul taking root in my womb. I was nauseous, as I’d been with our first, and my doctor scheduled another ultrasound for February 8 to hear the heartbeat. The last night of January, we wrapped up a wonderful weekend of celebrating our son’s first birthday. I noticed a little discomfort, but I brushed it aside. Unlike November, I was nauseous. We’d had an ultrasound. I had morning sickness. The sicker you are, the healthier the baby, they said. This time was different. Had to be different. And it was.

When I woke early the next morning, it was obvious things were wrong. Being a schoolteacher, substitutes were hard to come by, so I figured I could still go in, teach, and head to the doctor that afternoon. The first miscarriage hadn’t been troublesome, after all. I got myself ready, got our son in the car, and drove to daycare. I walked him to the door and returned to my car, only to find there was blood on the front seat. My husband and I rushed downtown to the doctor’s office where they performed the D&C, and within a couple of hours, I was back home to an empty house with an empty womb.

During the February 8 appointment we had scheduled for the fetal heartbeat, my doctor and I talked about tests I could undergo after more than one miscarriage event. We did some tests, and were saving others in the event of a third miscarriage. When all the tests returned normal, my doctor advised that we take some time off and try again. Since then, we have tried for over six months — not very long, but also an eternity. Each new month brings a small death of hope, a small birth of disappointment. I have never wanted anything more than to give my husband another child and my son a sibling — my tyrant will is crying out to be fulfilled. In a world that claims to provide every option I could wish for, I am running up against a brick wall.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, about five to eight percent of the named characters are female. Though fewer than ten percent of the Old Testament’s stories of humanity are about women, God uses six of these stories, along with one more in the New Testament, to reveal an important throughline in the Judeo-Christian faith. God uses the stories of women to reveal his power over birth. The only times that the Hebrew Scriptures use the word “barren,” or ‘aqarah in Hebrew, it is to describe women. In her article “Barren Women in the Bible,” Rachel Adelman points out that ‘aqarah is derived from the root ‘qr, which means “to uproot or pluck up.” The Hebrew antonym, “to plant,” is used in the Ecclesiastes verse: “A time for being born and a time for dying, / A time for planting and a time for uprooting the planted” (3:2). The Hebrew word for “barren,” then, is associated with the time for dying, for uprooting. Interestingly, this root does not seem to mean that there is no possibility of life, just that life does not take hold. It is “plucked up” from the wombs of seven women:

Sarai, wife of Abraham.
Rebekah, wife of Isaac.
Rachel, wife of Jacob.
The wife of Manoah of the tribe of Dan.
Hannah, the wife of Elkanah.
The woman of Shunem.
Elizabeth, the wife of Zacharias.

All of these women’s stories are stories of barrenness. Of wombs that have been uprooted, of desire for children left unfulfilled. There is no earthly power that can help these women, and they know it. When Elisha prophesies over the woman of Shunem that she will bear a son, she says to him, “Please, my lord, man of God, do not delude your maidservant” (2 Kgs 4:16). She has been so beaten down by the world, by grief and disappointment, that her instinctual response to Elisha’s word of prophecy is one of fear, doubt, and unbelief. Sarai famously laughs when she hears that she will bear a child. She is too old, Abraham too old; physically, earthly, they cannot conceive. And yet, for every single woman:

Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age, at the time of which God had spoken to him. (Gen 21:2)

Isaac prayed to the Lord for his wife because she was barren, and the Lord granted his prayer, and his wife Rebekah conceived. (Gen 25:21)

Then God remembered Rachel, and God heeded her and opened her womb.  She conceived and bore a son. (Gen 30:22-23)

The Lord remembered her. In due time Hannah conceived and bore a son. (1 Sam 19-20)

The woman bore a son and named him Samson. The boy grew, and the Lord blessed him. (Judg 13)

The woman conceived and bore a son at that season, in due time, as Elisha had declared to her. (2 Kgs 4:17)

And lest we think that this promise of birth comes only to those women of the old covenant,

After this his wife Elizabeth became pregnant and for five months remained in seclusion. “The Lord has done this for me,” she said. (Lk 1:24-25)

The names of these sons, conceived miraculously by God at various points in Scripture, are familiar to us all. Isaac. Jacob. Joseph. Samuel. Samson. John the Baptist. Even the son of the Shunammite woman, though he remains unnamed, is one of three people in the Hebrew Scriptures who are raised from death. These women have prayed and grieved and often lost hope, but God’s promise comes not just with sons, but sons whose stories will change the course of history. Seven women, seven sons — the number of divine completion. God does not just promise life; he promises it abundantly.

In our 21st century world, where a shoe company promises to make us “co-creators,” these stories of ancient women feel old and faded. If we have control over every other aspect of life, why can’t we have control over creating it? We have many friends and family who have been blessed with children through the incredible gifts of 21st-century science — in-vitro fertilization, donors, surrogacy, and the myriad of other options spread before the modern couple who has trouble conceiving — but we also know those who haven’t. Medicine and science can enact life-giving wonders, but the tests and the procedures and the injections are still the work of human hands, and whatever the marketers promise, there is only one who can truly create. When we reach a point where our will fails, where our desire burns unanswered, where this fallen world can only whisper disappointment, there is only one place left to go.

These stories of ancient women are important because each of these seven stories is a promise. A promise that there is still one who has dominion over life and death. A promise that a barren womb, a flower that has been uprooted, can be healed. The God of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Bible is a God of promises. There are over seven thousand promises in the Word, after all. And what he promises to the women of the ancient world, he promises to the women of the modern. He promises life eternally (Jn 3:15), abundantly (Jn 10:10), and life to our mortal bodies (Rom 8:11).

As Christians, we claim this promise of life instead of death. When Romeo arrives at the tomb, at the end of Shakespeare’s play, he despairingly calls it a “triumphant grave.” A society that claims to fulfill our wills, the co-creation that Nike promises — these are part of the world that is passing away (1 Jn 2:17). As we are drawn, inexorably, towards the tomb, God’s promise reveals a different path. Where we see barrenness, God offers a child. And though our desires may not be met in the ways that we will it, in the ways that we want it, the child that God offers is, in fact, his own son. The child that God offers is one who, with his death, conquers that “triumphant grave.” The child of God — Jesus Christ — enters the empty, echoing tomb and transforms it into a womb, bursting with the promise of life. I do not know what course God has already charted for our family’s journey or what the years ahead may hold. I do know, however, that the song of the Hebrew prophet Habakkuk is also my own song:

Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines … yet I will rejoice in the LORD; I will take joy in the God of my salvation. -Habakkuk 3:17-18

 

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