Tonight, my heart is heavy for my friend who, with her husband, is unable to have children of her own. I know how much she would love to have a child. I imagine that she dreams of having her own children when she is standing in line at the grocery store, watching another mom wrangle her overtired or hungry children. I imagine that she designs nurseries in her thoughts while she rearranges the furniture or re-purposes an extra room. I imagine that sometimes she must ache to feel the growth of a child in her womb, to hold her own baby in her arms, to nurture, cherish, raise up one of her own.

Tonight, my heart is heavy for my friends who, with no explanation, lost their youngest son, their baby. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, nothing else to say for it. I remember attending a heart-wrenching funeral. How does a mother ever prepare to say goodbye to her baby? I imagine how the mother must have walked into different rooms afterward, expecting to see her baby, expecting him to be there. How long does it take to quit the motions of caring for a child who is gone when you go to pick him up? I imagine she sometimes thinks that she hears him crying in the nursery, that she must go get him. I imagine her heart breaks a little, every time she remembers what he could be now, what he would be accomplishing this year.

Tonight, my heart is heavy for my friend who has only been able to carry a child in her womb for weeks before miscarrying. I know the thought has crossed many miscarried mom minds, Is my body a baby-killer? And then to have to be strong, to answer friends who ask how the pregnancy is going. To have to say without completely falling apart that her baby has died. The heartbeat she heard has gone silent. I don’t believe that anybody who has not miscarried can even begin to know the silent torture this mother goes through. To smile at the baby showers of others while silently mourning her own death of a dream. She wonders if she should give up. Perhaps her body was not made for this life. Perhaps the choice was not hers to make after all.

Tonight, my heart is heavy for my sister who waited, prayed, searched for a cure, was told it could never be, before she was finally blessed with her sweet young child. Born early, taken immediately into surgery, diagnosed with a terminal disease. I know that my sister fights every day for her boy. That she fights against herself when he cries. It would be so easy to smother him with every possible thing, but she wants his life to be as good as it can be, and so she is strong, and she cries when he is not looking. She sits up all night when he is ill, and she watches him, to make sure he continues to take in the oxygen he needs. She prays and asks God to continue his gift to her. And when he is well again, she raises a well-mannered, intelligent son who knows how to be a total goofball and who dearly loves to laugh, who dreams of being a musician someday like his daddy and his uncles.

How many more women are out there tonight, feeling beaten to their very core by the belittlement pouring down on the holy gift of motherhood? A gift they have not received. A gift that has been stripped from them. A gift that came different than what was expected.

My heart aches and breaks for you.

I cannot even begin to describe the emotions that ran through me when someone who had met my sweet nephew; who had smiled at his antics, had enjoyed his company; told me, on learning that he had Cystic Fibrosis, that they maintain he should have been aborted. There aren’t words. There isn’t a person in my family who my nephew has not touched. There isn’t a person in my family who is not personally invested in his life and well-being.

How many women tonight feel silenced by the barrage that has demeaned their very heart and soul? Who can understand the value you place on life, just how much you are ready to give in order to have it again, or maybe for the first time?

I am thinking of you tonight. I am praying for you tonight.

What can be said when the world has lashed out and you have been swept into their venom? How can the pain they are inflicting even begin to be communicated? They cannot know how they are piercing and wounding and tearing down. It can’t possibly be fathomed.

I know there are hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of women who are grieving a loss, grieving a hope deferred, grieving a lack of a child. I know that getting up and facing a world gone mad can’t be easy.

I just wanted you to know that you’re not alone, you’re not forgotten. I remember you. I don’t think I need to say that God is upholding you even now.  But he is. He will hold you tonight. He will hold the child you’ve had to give up. He will hold the millions of babies who have been given up before they had a chance to choose. He will hold us all.

“Do not be afraid or dismayed because of this great multitude, for the battle is not yours, but God’s…You will not need to fight in this battle. Position yourselves, stand still and see the salvation of the Lord, who is with you. Do not fear or be dismayed; tomorrow go out against them, for the Lord is with you.” – 2 Chronicles 20:12-17