Faith, hope and love. Those words have been strung together into a platitude, one that the mind skims lightly over. It sounded lovely. I’ve mouthed it myself, over and over. I thought I knew what it meant, but it has a new meaning for me now, and it has little to do with religion.
Over the past few years, I’ve felt I was having a crisis of faith at times – faith in myself, in my abilities and my intrinsic worth. When you don’t have faith in these things, it’s nearly impossible to have hope. Since my teen years, I knew there were five things that I wanted in my life – to find a wonderful man, get married, have children, live on the family farm, (homesteaded by my great (x 5) grandparents), and write for a living.
In my early twenties, my wish to live in the house came about under less than happy circumstances. My grandmother passed away and the house sat empty over the winter while I finished my master’s degree nearly two hundred miles away. Then spring came and I moved in.
As I moved into my thirties, I came to believe that the other things were never going to be part of my life. There was no man in my life, writing for living seemed like an unrealistic goal and it seemed rather unlikely that I would ever be able to have children.
I had undergone two operations for endometriosis. After the second one, the doctor told me he had removed a grapefruit sized endometrial tumor from my uterus and that the surgery would make it very likely that my uterus could rupture around the six month if I got pregnant. I would not want to be five minutes from the hospital if that happened. Was it worth the risk?
I was lonely and miserable, without much hope for the future I had always envisioned. But having hope is critical for happiness. If you focus on fear without believing that good things can happen, you’re going to be just plain miserable. You might think you’re being realistic, when really, you’re not. (Good things are just as likely to happen as bad.) Pretty soon that rubs off on other people. You become miserable to be around. That can make it hard to give or accept love from others. It’s a downward spiral.
Then I found a book that changed my outlook, The Joy Diet: 10 Daily Practices for a Happier Life by Martha Beck. I decided to start figuring out what I wanted in life and take steps in that direction. Just having a plan helped alleviate the misery I was in. Taking steps did even more for me. I met friends, including men, who assured me that there was someone out there for me, that I was innately lovable, as we all are.
So I put myself out there and met someone. We got very serious, very quickly. A little too quickly. We started talking love, a future and children, making plans to move in together. After five months, I realized I was pretty miserable. He just didn’t seem as connected to me as we would need to be to make a life together. I said a prayer that the universe would show me the way.
The next day at work, I received an email from him breaking up with me. I was at once distraught and outraged. An email? Really? After all the talk about our future just a couple weeks before? Anyone who has ever had the experience of falling out of love, knows that it’s a feeling which is hard to get back once the break has been made. The break was happening for me. I came to realize that it had already happened for him and that was why I had been miserable.
I went home that day and found a gift from my brother and his girlfriend, a late Christmas present. It was on my kitchen table when I arrived. Between bouts of tears I opened the giant box. There was a heavy piece wrapped in newspaper. Opening it, I found a stained glass lampshade comprised of dragonflies. The dark glass, veined with thick seams of leading, didn’t seem very pretty but once it was put together and turned on, the colors were rich and vibrant.
Dragonflies seemed to keep making their way into my life. It started when I moved into my old farmhouse fourteen years ago. There’s a swampy bit of land across the dirt road and around September iridescent dragonflies begin showing up for a chat. Many times I’ve taken the dog out for a walk when a winged soul zoomed past. If I speak to them, they often double back, hovering as if the vibration of my voice is a fascination. Once, at a personal writer’s retreat at a bed and breakfast, I went out to sit near the pond. It wasn’t long before a crimson dragonfly joined me. I held still as he hovered nearby then landed on the grass just a couple feet from my chair. After a moment, he flew up and around in a circle then landed on my foot. I studied how the sunlight shown on his deep red body. Once again he flew up and around in a circle then landed on my knee. We sat companionably for a time. I had my camera but was too afraid of scaring him off to chance the shot. Now, a dragonfly lamp had entered my life.
The next time I spoke to my brother’s girlfriend, I found out the lamp was a gift to her late husband from Father Dennis Kelleher, a co-founder of the Marion ministry and known for faith healings and blessing couples who wanted to have children. Ironic, I thought, as my hopes of a family left with the ex. Still, I liked the lamp and put it in the living room, turning it on regularly.
Meanwhile, I did what I had always done to get me through tough times – I read. This time, instead of reading books, I turned to looking up articles online about breaking up and getting over it. Reading and journaling helped. After two weeks, I signed back into a dating web site, not really looking for anything particular, just putting myself back out there, and came upon my future husband.
His profile was simple and the picture wasn’t the most flattering but the quote from Pinky and the Brain intrigued me. I saw hidden depths. We wrote back and forth, instant messaging and eight weeks later, we got together for the first time. We were both sick with colds but we met for Chinese food and made a date for a few days later. That time we went to a diner, where an older gentleman I knew from a library kept stopping by our table cracking wise, “you’ve got to watch out for those librarians,” he told my date. It got us through that awkward period.
The following weekend we drove out to Corning, New York. We took a walk on historic Market Street and had lunch at the Brew Pub. We’ve been together nearly every weekend since. It wasn’t long before we realized he had grown up just a country street over from my farm, less than a mile as the crow flies, and his parents still live there.
At the same time, things were taking a medically odd turn for the better. I had been on birth control for the past fifteen years due to the endometriosis but my doctor decided I should try a different one and it shot my blood pressure up. We had to discontinue the pills, at least until the blood pressure was under control. My doctor ordered an updated ultrasound and out of curiosity I asked how the incision looked from my surgery seven years before. The incision wasn’t even visible. It was as if I had previously had a c-section. That was a lot better than thinking my uterus would be likely to rupture around the sixth month of a pregnancy.
Still, with my age and thyroid problems plus the extra weight, would it be wise for me to get pregnant and would I be able to? My relationship with my boyfriend was gradually growing more serious and we talked about the possibility of children someday. He was not averse to the idea of adopting so we left it at that for the time being. We weren’t ready to get engaged. Working opposite shifts, we only saw each other on weekends. We hadn’t even said I love you yet.
One night that fall at a restaurant, he said his father had asked when we were getting married. “Well, there’s the matter of those three little words that I’m not supposed to say first, before we get to marriage,” I told him.
The very next weekend, he worked himself up to it. Just over a month later we got another little surprise – I was pregnant. I called my doctor to have the home test confirmed. They told me to come in. If a test came up positive they’d test me again in a little bit to make sure. After the first test results came back, they called me to have an ultrasound.
” What about the second test?” I asked.
” Oh, there’s no doubt. You’re definitely pregnant,” she replied.
At the ultrasound, the tech asked if the separation in my uterus had simply righted itself or if I had it surgically fixed.
” You mean it’s gone?” I asked. Yes, it seemed it was.
The roadblocks to what I wanted that had once seemed insurmountable seemed to be spontaneously disappearing. If the first three things could happen, why not the other two? Should I just be content with so much in my life? Or should I set my sights on my goals, figure out what it would take to get there, and get moving? Sometimes I still get discouraged and find it difficult to keep my focus but I keep coming back to that thought – why shouldn’t I have what I want in life? I believe good things are as likely to happen as bad so if I work toward a goal, I should be able to tip the balance in my favor.
Over the past year I have learned skills that make sustaining faith, hope and love possible under trying circumstances. I feel like the Universe has converged in ways to teach me things I had never dreamed of. Faith, hope and love are gifts that have taken on a new dimension for me. Faith is belief in myself which makes hope for the future possible and love is a state of mind, a way of being in the world.
Just a few years ago, I did not believe that life is a gift. Now I get it. Like applying to a competitive and difficult graduate program and being granted a place, life is a chance to learn, an opportunity. It may not be easy, it shouldn’t, or what would we learn?