#UseYourVoice
Guys are not hardwired to truly understand the depth of despair a woman feels when she goes through infertility. There’s some Biblical hints:
“When Rachel saw that she was not bearing any children for Jacob, she envied her sister. ‘Give me children, or I will die!’ she said to Jacob Genesis, 30:1
This is definitely the heartbreaking desperation I felt when we experienced the miscarriage of a our first bonafide positive pregnancy. It was right before our 10th wedding anniversary. We had planned a trip up the coast of California, thinking we’d be celebrating our first decade of marriage with the excited energy of pending parents.
Instead we were refugees from a horrible infertility nightmare, and every bathroom stop for Lisa was a reminder of what we had lost.
I didn’t know what to say, know what to do. There were no words. Nothing I could do or say was going to take that pain away.
When she fell apart, all I could do was give my shoulder to her.
I watched her tears fall when we got the news about the miscarriage, and like some slow motion movie scene they dropped down to the cold hard ground. I could feel the impact, see her pain, and felt the strongest urge to give those tears a softer place to fall.
A few years after that miscarriage, I was playing back and forth in Nashville, I still saw the pain in Lisa’s eyes when she would see a child running up to her mother. Or any scene in a movie between a mother and child.
If I could have made a deal with God to trade my soul in exchange for taking that pain away I would have.
But I couldn’t.
I could only be a soft place to fall.
That is the most that men can be for spouses during infertility I let those tears fall on my shoulder, and felt them seep onto my skin, and somehow I was absorbing some of her pain, if even in the microscopic way.
I’ve attached the song I wrote about this, A Soft Place To Fall above. It’s dedicated to all the guys who don’t have the words when the losses are the worst.
You can always be a soft place for tears to fall.