Full Circle: My Journey Through Infertility and Miscarriage

By Elizabeth Austen

Anyone who has walked through the trenches of infertility will relate to the raw account of Elizabeths experience. Her passion to become a mother (before time runs out) leads to a set of circumstances that unravel her marriage, her joy for life, and her relationship with God. Desperate to repair everything that infertility destroyed, Elizabeth finds contentedness in a way that is unique to most infertility journeys.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Apr 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781490874241

Elizabeth Austen

Elizabeth Austen was born and raised in Southern California. She attended parochial school from kindergarten through high school and often incorporated her musical skills into her work with the church. Her desire to raise a family of her own flourished from an early age, and she spent her younger years working with children through teaching and producing plays and musicals. In 2005, Elizabeth graduated from California State University-Northridge with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. She currently lives in Northern California with her husband, Zach, and their menagerie of pets. After years of struggling with infertility, Elizabeth went on to birth the 501(c)(3) nonprofit foundation Fill Their Arms Inc.—the first fundraising organization for infertility and adoption in the United States. Through her organization she has been able to educate both the fertile and the infertile communities about the causes and struggles of infertility and how best to support a loved one struggling with this disorder. Fill Their Arms has become a source of support and information to many people who are unable to find it anywhere else. And donations have been used to help infertile families pay for efforts toward parenthood that they might not otherwise have been able to afford. For further information or to make a donation, please visit www.filltheirarms.com.

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Girl of my Dreams

Now I lay me down to sleep.

I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

If I should die before I awake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take. Amen.

-Childhood Prayer

O UR NIGHTLY RITUAL COMPLETE, I looked up into my mother’s soft brown eyes as she pulled the covers up to my chin. She smiled down at me with such a deep love in her eyes. For as long as I can remember, and probably since day one of my being, my mother has planted in me the wonderful message of Jesus, His sacrifice for our sins, and His devotion to us. My mom was the instrument that was used to teach me what it means to truly love Christ. My memories of my mom are of her beauty, both inside and out. At five feet, one, and barely one-hundred pounds, she was a petite, lively sprite of constant activity. Her short black hair and olive skin were at complete odds with her half English, half Dutch ancestry - a fact which would be called into question much later in her life when it was discovered that she suffered from a blood disorder that is particular to people of Mediterranean descent.

I always felt that there was a very special bond between my mom and me. I suppose almost all children feel this way, but it didn’t lessen the impact that it had on my young life. Her devotion to her children, my sister, my brother, and me, was above question. She was a constant, loving, guiding presence in our lives.

In many ways, you could say we were the picture of the American family. My father, a UC Berkeley graduate was working as a mechanical engineer at the Pt. Mugu Naval base in Ventura County. His salary was such that we were able to live in a large tract home in a nice neighborhood across the street from a park. There were vacations to Yosemite, trips to Disneyland, and private schools. But most importantly, my mom didn’t have to work. She was home with me and she was the center of my world.

My mother used to tell me what I was the girl of her dreams. And she meant this literally.

I knew you since I was nineteen. When you were still just a rosebud in heaven, God put a picture of you in my mind and I dreamed of you for seventeen years before I actually had you. It was a recurring dream with me holding a very special and beautiful dark-haired baby girl with brown eyes.

I was not my mother’s first child, or even her first daughter. In 1966, my mother gave birth to my sister, Lisa and while she was overjoyed at my sister’s birth, she also knew that this baby was not the baby she had dreamed of. Lisa had fair skin, blue eyes and was born with blond hair. In 1968, my mother gave birth to my brother, Kevin. A boy and a girl! It was a dream come true. But, of course, the baby in her dreams had been a girl and the nagging feeling that there was still another child out there, waiting to be born, stayed with my mom over the years to come.

After I married dad, I had Lisa. But she wasn’t the same girl in my dreams because she didn’t have the dark hair or brown eyes. Later, I had Kevin and the baby obviously wasn’t him because he was a boy. Kevin ended up having some health problems as a baby, so I became very busy taking care of him. But a few years later, I gave birth to you. As soon as the nurse put you in my arms, I looked at you and said, ‘This is the one. This is the girl of my dreams.’

My mom was born outside of Buffalo, New York in 1937, at a time when our nation was solidly in the grips of The Great Depression. She was the first-born of her parents’ children and the first-born grandchild to both sets of grandparents and, as such, she was a very treasured baby. Her dad was one of the lucky ones who had a decent job and, in fact, was never unemployed during her childhood. They began their lives as a new family in an apartment that her father’s parents converted out of their attic and where she was loved and cared for by all four adults living in the household.

When my mom was fifteen, her father announced that he had been offered a new and far better paying job in California. To say that she was upset would be a tremendous understatement. Leaving her home, her friends, and most importantly her beloved grandparents was more than she could bear. It was while they were moving across the country that my Mom secretly took up the habit of smoking, a habit that would later be the cause her death.

In the 1950s and 1960s, most women did marry and begin families at a young age, and my mom had to put up with her fair share of questions as to why she was still single, as if being single reflected poorly on her. But when she was twenty-six, she met my dad. He was quite different from my mom, as well as the men she had dated in the past. He was quiet, almost shy. She went on one date with him and decided he was boring and there was no spark. My dad, to his credit, may have been shy, but he knew his heart and mind and was persistent. He continued to ask my mom out for a full nine months of rejections until she gave in and said ‘yes’ to a second date. On that date, my mom said she saw something very different in him. Yes. He was quiet. But he was honest and honorable. This time she fell hard and three months later, they were married.

My mom was twenty-seven when she and my dad got married and one year later, my parents decided they were ready to have a baby. According to my Mom, she got pregnant the first time they tried. This would be significant later for me. It instilled in me a belief that trying to conceive equaled success and a very quick success at that.

* * *

There is no specific baby that I’ve dreamed of recurrently, however, I have always had a dream, a hope, if you will, to have children. As long as I can remember, I’ve had this desire. I use these words, "dream, hope, and desire" loosely. It was more of an expectation. Motherhood was something I had always assumed would eventually happen for me. It was an expectation that I very much looked forward to.

I’m sure that many women can look back at their childhood and remember playing house with their siblings or friends. I have many of these memories. In particular, my best friend, Cindy and I used to bathe our baby dolls. My mom would make a big bucket of soapy water and place it under the large olive tree in our front yard. She gave us sponges and washcloths and Cindy and I would spend hours under the olive tree bathing our babies. I still remember the feeling of importance I had when we did this activity. It was a sense of purpose that was powerful enough to make an imprint in my mind and remember even to this day. How appropriate it is, that this activity was a precursor to the role I was destined to fill as an adult – motherhood.

I was the youngest child in my family, so as an adolescent, there weren’t any younger children near me to mentor. But I had always desired to care for children. And when I thought about my future, I pictured myself happily married in a home filled with children. I also pictured myself mothering adopted children. I do not remember when or how I even learned what the word adoption means, however, I also don’t remember a time when I didn’t anticipate adopting children. To my knowledge, I didn’t have any friends who were adopted, but the awareness of adoption and the desire to take in orphans have been in my heart for as long as I can remember.

Growing up, I had modeled to me, an almost picture-perfect example of how a typical family should look. My parents had a strong marriage and they sacrificed a lot in order to give to my sister, my brother, and me, a good life. This example made this type of fortune seem assured – as if it were a given that my siblings and I would all follow into that same destiny. As a child and adolescent, I frequently wondered how old I would be when I ended up getting married and I wondered about how many children I would end up having. Sometimes this was hard to envision, however the thought of growing up, getting married, and having children, felt like a guaranteed life that was not only meant to be, but one that would surely fall upon myself in only a matter of time.

In elementary school, there was a program that was made available to the eighth graders. Every Wednesday, we had a chapel service, and if you were in the eighth grade, you could volunteer to sit with the younger children, and assist their teachers in supervising them. I took this opportunity happily! During the summers, my older sister, Lisa, worked at a YMCA summer camp. I often went to work with her as a volunteer. I just loved the children. I enjoyed playing with them, making up skits with them, and helping out with the organizing of their activities and snacks. My favorite thing to do with the kids was teaching them academics, such as the ABC’s and counting. When I entered high school, I started my very first (paying) job as a babysitter. I made a reputation for myself and built quite a heavy clientele list. This is a time in my life when I began my first experiences with independence, accountability, and responsibility.

During my twenties, I worked many jobs in childcare and child education. But as I grew older, I wanted more. There was a feeling of emptiness. I very much desired to start my family. While my soul flourished as I cared for the children I worked with, there was a part of me that envied the mothers who came in to pick up their little blessings at the end of each day and bring them home. I wanted to have children of my own. It was time.

After a difficult marriage and divorce, I became even more ready for children. I don’t know if this was due of my age or my circumstances or even a combination of both, but at this point, I desired a family so much more than I had in the past. I wanted a husband who was devoted to God, hard-working and loyal. I wanted babies and I wanted to adore, nurture and mold these babies of mine into amazing human beings. I had so much love in my heart, but my heart ached because I had no children to give this love to. It became my passion and my very strong desire to be married and start a family.

The Persistent Widow

A FTER I WENT THROUGH MY divorce, I turned to God and I immersed myself in the Scriptures. For socializing, I surrounded myself with other Christians and I went to church and attended Bible studies and church functions as often as possible. This was cathartic for me because I needed support from people who placed God as the most important matter in their lives. I did this because I needed to get my focus back onto Him and once again, place God as the center of my own life. I rededicated myself to Him and was baptized.

While I was able to feed my hunger for God, finding the right man to marry and build a family with remained elusive. For six years, I plead with the Lord. I very much wanted to get things moving in my life, so to speak, and time was starting to progress faster than I wanted it to. There were many hiccups along the way, however, in this journey through singleness, I learned that God commands husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church. Who is the church? We are. Why do we love Christ? Because He first loved us. This led me to believe that if God intends for marriage to be by the same model, then what better way for a courtship to start out? I wanted for my husband to first love me as Christ loved the church. In essence, I wanted to be pursued. I didn’t want to find a good man, but rather, I wanted a good man to find me. The problem though, was that this was not happening.

Maybe this was meant to be. Perhaps it was God who was closing the door on marriage for me. It could be that I wasn’t ready yet and He was protecting his sons from me. Or it could be that God was protecting me. Maybe both. But through all of this, I could not pretend the desire wasn’t there and I almost constantly found myself in prayer that I would be provided a husband and granted children. I became a persistent widow.

I realize that a widow is a woman who has lost her husband. I was not a widow by the definition of what a widow is. But I was drawn to the parable of the persistent widow and during that time there was no other character in the Bible that I could relate to more. The parable of the persistent widow is a story about prayer. The widow goes to a judge and asks for justice but the judge refuses to help her. The widow continues to seek justice and after repeated attempts, the judge finally helps her. The reason the judge finally helps her is because he is tired of the woman asking him to help her over and over again. The lesson in this parable is simple: It is a lesson to pray continuously about the desires of your heart. God is full of love and compassion; how much more will He bless us than the judge did for the widow? So this is what I did. I prayed daily, multiple times a day for God to bring my husband to me.

There were times I cried out to God because I felt like He had forgotten about me. Sometimes I even became discouraged and upset. I begged, God, if you don’t intend for me to remarry, then take this desire away from me because I can’t handle it! Take it away from me completely and I will stop asking You to provide me a husband!

The desire did not go away. So I continued to leave myself open to whatever God had planned. For whatever reason, I had to kiss a few frogs along the way, however, something surprising ended up happening: In doing this I learned exactly what I wanted in a husband and what I didn’t want.

This process of muddling through and waiting on God also taught me how God intended for me to be as a wife. A dear girlfriend suggested to me that I make a list of every quality I desired in my future husband. I heeded her advice and I made my list. I wanted a man who adored me - but first and foremost loved God. I wanted a man who desired children, one who was responsible and could provide for me and our children. I am musically gifted; I didn’t necessarily desire a man who was musically gifted, but I wanted him to be someone who would be supportive to this and encourage me to use this gift to my full potential. These are just a few of the many qualities I put on my list and throughout those six years, I added more items to the list.

Lastly, and as I mentioned before, I had always been passionate about the idea of taking in orphans. This is something I had wanted to do since I was a child and it was a calling I felt was mine. To this day, I can’t tell you exactly where this desire came from so I can only assume that it was God who planted the desire in me. This was a very important quality that I added to the list: a man who desired biological children and desired to adopt.

One day while I was on a break at work, I was socializing with some single female friends and we got on the topic of marriage. We were talking about being single and we shared our desires to be married. I mentioned my list and I talked about how I came to make the list and how I prayed over the list daily. Another