Miscarriage, Infertility and Faithfulness in Motherhood
Interview with Rosie Gallagher
@illustratedbyrosie
January 11, 2021
AUSCAST
TRANSCRIPTION
Laura
Hi, Rosie, and welcome to Unsung Stories, thank you so much for joining us.
Rosie
Thanks so much for having me.
Laura
My pleasure. So just so that the listeners can get to know you a little bit better. Would you mind telling us a little bit about your family life and what your days look like and maybe some things that you get joy from?
Rosie
Sure. Yes. So I'm Rosie. I'm married to Matt, and we've been married for seven years. I have a beautiful boy called Archer. He's two. I grew up in Sydney, but Matt and I moved to the Central Coast two years ago, just before Archer was born. And we love it up here. And my week, I spend a lot of time with Archer and I work for an amazing charity called Adara. I also do watercolour drawings, illustrations on the side just for fun.
And it just turned into a bit of a business that I paint portraits of families or I paint people's houses for them, and I paint my own things, and make prints and sell them. So it's turned into a little bit of a business which is cool. It's called Illustrated by Rosie.
Laura
Oh, what a fun little hobby.
Rosie
Yeah, it's great.
Laura
Great. So Arch is two. So he's still pretty young and you're relatively new to the game. How has the transition to motherhood been for you?
Rosie
Yeah, I was one of those kids who always wanted to be a mum. I would say, "I want to be a housewife when I grow up." Though becoming a mum for me just felt like, that's what I always wanted to do. You know, when Matt and I decided to have, or to start trying, we didn't fall pregnant straight away, but we fell pregnant relatively quickly. And then I had a really beautiful pregnancy with him. A birth that's as good as expected.
Laura
Ah, so you're that woman that we all don't really like. Oh, joyous pregnancy and sneeze the baby out.
Rosie
Not quite. There was still quite a lot of... But it was I expected, you know, it was this kind of really beautiful experience. And becoming a mum felt really natural. And I really, really enjoyed that first year that I had. I mean, apart from the lack of sleep. I really, really enjoyed being a mum. And I was kind of like, yeah, this is it. I've arrived.
Laura
So motherhood's obviously had some real highs for you, but it’s also had some pretty big lows. Would you feel comfortable sharing them with us?
Rosie
Yeah, so. So Archer turned one and Matt and I thought, okay, we're ready to start thinking about number two. So after a couple of months, we started trying for number two and we fell pregnant really quickly at the start of this year. And I was like, awesome, great. Too easy. Let's do it. And then I was six and a half weeks pregnant and I had a miscarriage.
Laura
Really hard Rosie.
Rosie
And it was awful. And even though, you know, the statistics that one in four pregnancies end in miscarriage ...
Laura
Yeah, but you don't want to be one of them.
Rosie
No. And when it happens to you, it's really surreal still. And the grief of it hit me much harder than I thought it would. Yeah, it totally shook me.
Laura
So it's been a bit of an emotional journey. In what ways has it affected your faith during that time?
Rosie
Yeah, massively. I think I went through some of the typical responses to grief. At first, I was a bit in shock and I was like, "That's OK, I can do this. No worries. We'll just get on the bandwagon again. It's going to be fine." I was still posting really happy things on Instagram. So that was the first phase. And then after that it was, I think it was when we started trying again, the impact of it and the anxiety that comes with trying again after loss hit me like a ton of bricks.
And I felt really angry and really confused. And we didn't fall pregnant again. And as the months went on, I started to become really upset and really anxious about what was going to happen. When was I going to fall pregnant? What does this mean for Archer and how far apart is he going to be from his next sibling? And what does that mean for us and how many children we can have? You know all these kinds of rational or irrational thoughts and questions go through your mind.
And on top of it all, the week after or two weeks after I had the miscarriage, we went in total lockdown because of COVID. And it was a really isolating time.
Laura
So you're really stuck in your own thoughts in your own head.
Rosie
Really stuck. Yeah. When that happened, the only place I had to turn to, apart from my poor husband, who was really holding it together for me, was God. He was the one that I had to turn to. And I turned to Him in a big way, I poured out my soul to Him every day. I was reading and like scouring His word for encouragement, comfort and hope.
And I was, I mean, I feel like you can tell exactly how I was feeling by my Instagram stories throughout that time. You know, I'd post verses that were just were encouraging to me or I could relate to. You know, I'd never really gone through anything like this in my life. And suddenly all those verses about suffering, about grief and longing and trials, and they all suddenly just were, that with me right now. So, yeah, for me and my faith, it looked like just turning to God because I had nowhere else to go.
Laura
And during that time, was there anything in particular that shifted in your perspective of motherhood? I mean, your expectations and your experience changed. And so did that change your thinking and the way you viewed your role as a mother?
Rosie
Yes, absolutely. And here I was thinking motherhood comes easily to me. It's natural. It's good. And suddenly I'm having all of these questions of, "Am I going to be able to have more children? What if I only have Archer? What does that mean for me and my identity as a mother?" And I couldn't even believe that I would think "only Archer", you know, as if he wasn't enough. It was so many feelings of guilt and confusion.
And, you know, I just would look at other women around me. And obviously, when you're in times of struggle and whatever it is, you always look at the people who have what you want. And so I would look at other women at church who had pumped out four kids. And I was just like, "Oh, you're so lucky. I want to be like that. I just, I want to have lots of kids."
What I'm going through is hard or that what they think that they're going through was hard. But I want to be having that hard experience, not this hard experience. And, you know, it really challenged me because I was like, "I'm now not the mother I thought I was going to be. The hopes and dreams of my childhood are not being realized. And who am I if not a mum?" And I am still a mum.
But who am I if not the mother I thought I would be? And yeah, that was really big because I realized that no matter what you find your identity in, in a worldly sense, those things can be taken away from you. So what are you left with?
Laura
Very humbling.
Rosie
Yeah. So, you know, in all of this, I kept coming back to God's word to find answers and asking God, you know, "What does this mean? What are You doing in my life? And I know You're probably doing something, but I can't see what it is right now. I can't see the bigger picture. Help me to see the big picture." And in particular, I came across, you know, intentionally came across the stories of several mothers in the Bible and was encouraged by each of them, I suppose.
So one of the first was Sarah, Abraham's wife back in Genesis. She's barren. She cannot have children. And yet God promised her and her husband, Abraham, that it was through her descendant, through Abraham's descendants that the nation of Israel would come about.
And yet here she is. She's like, I don't know, 80 or 90 or something. And she hasn't had any children yet. And eventually she has a son because God was faithful to His promise.
And even in Hebrews, it says that by faith, even Sarah, who was past childbearing age, was enabled to bear children because she considered Him faithful, who had made the promise. So I was like, OK, so that's Sarah. And she was kind of like the start of the genealogy of Jesus. And I mean, next comes this somewhat random Canaanite woman called Tamar. She's not even part of the Jewish people.
And yet she is married to Judah's son. Her experience in marriage is awful. Two of her husbands die and all kinds of hatred because of her association with their deaths, even though it was God who struck them down. And Judah, her father-in-law, is not faithful to her and does not allow her to marry his third son so that she can provide the family with an heir, which is her whole role in that family. And she's so heartbroken that she's been cast aside, that she ends up tricking Judah and dressing as a prostitute to sleep with her so that she can conceive sons for his household.
And it's because of her fear and faithfulness in the God of the Israelites that she does that. Through that obedience and through that crazy risk taking. She conceived a son, two sons, Prince, who also ends up being in the line of Jesus. So her journey to motherhood was really horrible. And yet God chose to use that, this random Canaanite lady. And then there's a Rahab who's a prostitute, also not a Jewish woman. And she's led a life of shame and yet has no doubt her very hard and horrible life as a prostitute. And God chose to unite her with Salmon and through her faithfulness. She becomes a mother to a son in the line of Jesus.
-Laura
And all these other women who are struggling with barrenness as well. Like Jacob's mother, Rachel, who's Jacob's wife, Samson's mother, Hannah.
Rosie
Hannah. Hannah's cry out to God in 1 Samuel was one of the biggest things that moved me and made me realize that it's OK to cry out to God for what you want. It's OK to cry out to God for the things that are on your heart that are distressing you, that you are longing for. And actually, in doing that, she's being faithful and trust in God and giving everything over to God and God blesses her with the son. So her story is amazing too.
Laura
Children were really seen as a blessing in Jewish culture. And so to have a child was seen as God showing favour of you and blessing you and not having a child was seen as like, I don't know, a curse or God not blessing you.
Rosie
Yeah. Absolutely. And in all of these stories like they're all very similar in that these women were obedient and faithful to God, even in the midst of what was culturally for them at the time, extreme hardship and struggle because they weren't conceiving or you know, they were waiting on God.
Laura
Oh. So I find it pretty amazing that there's these multiple examples in the Old Testament about how God was working through these women, struggling with infertility. Like not only was He refining them through barrenness or using their grief to demonstrate His power and glory by allowing them to be pregnant or even how He's faithful and generous in answering his prayer. But it was all part and a pretty miraculous part of His plan of salvation.
Rosie
Yes. And not just what happened to these women and the experiences they went through, but who they were and who He chose. He chose the foreign prostitute who had lived a life of shame to be part of his family, or He chose the woman who David had an affair with outside of wedlock to be part of his family and His people. He chose the 14-year-old virgin girl from some nothing town to be the mother of the saviour. And she was totally humiliated by the fact that she had fallen pregnant outside of marriage.
Laura
He has just, taking these really human experience and human suffering for God's ultimate plan for salvation. It's just a bit mind-blowing.
Rosie
Yes. And it's comforting too because, you know, it's not necessarily the amazing women with the amazing lives and all of the material blessings or whatever it is that are chosen by God to have His great purpose done through them. It's often, yeah, the ...
Laura
Ordinary unexpected women.
Rosie
And so then I came to this passage in Luke 11, where Jesus is driving out demons and He's amongst this crowd. And there's a woman in the crowd, a Jewish woman, and she calls out to Jesus. She recognizes who He is, I suppose, and she calls out to him.
Laura
Yeah, which is pretty bold. I mean, if people were arcing up saying, you must be a demon, you're driving out demons. And then these women spoke out.
Rosie
Yeah. Especially for a woman, right? In that culture. She calls out to Him and says, "Blessed is the mother who gave you birth and nursed you." Because in Jewish culture, obviously, to have a child is of great importance, to have a boy is even better, and to have a boy who goes on to be a successful preacher and teacher with crowds following you is really special. Your mum is blessed.
Laura
What is your formula? Teach me.
Rosie
Your mum came to motherhood. You know, like
Laura
In scorn and shame.
Rosie
Totally. And don't we do that now? Even today? It's blown me away. So she said, "Blessed is the mother who gave birth and nursed you." He replied, "Blessed, rather, are those who hear the word of God and obey it."
Laura
Not what you'd expect.
Rosie
Yes. And all these women that I'd been reading about in the Bible, that's what they had done. They weren't blessed because they were a mum. In fact, most of their lives they spent not being mums or the motherhood has not been the blessing, but their obedience to God and His call in their life and His plans and purposes is what is ultimately brought blessing.
Laura
It's that faithfulness in all.
Rosie
Yeah, and their trust and their hope in God. And I mean, even for me, I think back on the last few months and I think, "That's what God has been teaching me, that I'm not blessed by being a mum. Motherhood isn't it. Motherhood isn't the goal, but rather being obedient to God. Who I am in relation to God is what defines me and not whether I'm a mum or not, whether I'm a good mum or not, how many children I have, how close together they are, how well-behaved they are, how beautiful they are. But that I am a child of God. And He calls me to obey him and trust him in all circumstances. Through that, I am blessed."
Laura
So it's not your children, it's that living faithfully obedient to Jesus. So we've got to the point that motherhood isn't the goal, but what does it actually look like to be faithful and obedient to the word? And how do you think this would look in motherhood?
Rosie
I think we can look at these mums in the Bible and see how they responded in faith. They were patient in times of waiting to conceive. They were patient and they trusted God when God decided to use their children in different ways. You know, Hannah for example, after she'd longed for a child and pleaded with God to give her a child. And she said, “I will dedicate him to the Lord.” And as soon as he was weaned, she took him to the temple.
And there he lived for the rest of his life. Like she didn't even get to be with him. And yet they trusted God with what He had planned for them and for their children. So what does that look [inaudible 00:17:03]?
Laura
Like what is having faith? It's just that abandoning trust in everything we have or can do and throwing yourself onto the mercy of Jesus. So I guess in motherhood, it's just relying on everything that He did to gain our salvation and living in full obedience to God from that.
Rosie
Yeah, which is hard sometimes because there are lots of distractions and motherhood can be really exhausting and tiring. And yeah, I think from reading these stories and being in God's word has shown me that to obey God's word, you need to be in His word. You need to have that as the sole text on which you, and truth on which you rely. And knowing what God says in the Bible, it only helps you to be obedient.
[Laura
So is there anything practical that you could offer to help a mum in their own journey towards faithfulness and obedience to Christ, especially if they're feeling worn out and exhausted?
Rosie
I think it is when we're worn out and exhausted, when we're at our wit's end or when we're despairing or crushed. It's in those muments that God is reminding us that we can't rely on our own strength. Our strength will fail us every day in ways, and that we can only get through because of His grace and we can only get through because of His strength that carries us. And so it's okay to be worn out and exhausted because it's God's reminder to us that we need him.
Laura
And it's really in those muments when we are humbly on our knees that we can look up and see God, and it's such a gift.
Rosie
Motherhood is so fraught with pain and struggle. And it's from the day you start conceiving, trying to conceive. It's full of anxiety and fear. And I mean, obviously it's full of great stuff too. You know, it's so much blessing in it, too, but. Yeah.
And isn't motherhood the perfect, perfect experience through which to go through that will teach you to let go? And let go of control because you cannot control what happens from the day you start trying to conceive.
You're not in control. And sometimes it's really confusing, like, why did I lose that baby? Why is it taking me so long to conceive? Why is my child doing this? Why have you given me a child with special needs? You know, the questions are endless, and we don't always know the answer and we can't always see the plan.
And I think, so even when it says in Hebrews about Sarah, who is past childbearing age, she was able to bear children because she considered him faithful, who had made [crosstalk 00:19:50]. She had gone through all this stuff and could not see the outcome.
Laura
Yeah. And I like that it said that she could see him as faithful. As Christians, and we know God and we know He has these promises. God is the one who's faithful first. Sarah knew God said that Abraham would be the father of all nations.
And so she knew that that was to be the case. And she just could rest in that and trust in that. And I mean, she's just totally abandoned logic and trusted in the promises of God.
Rosie
Yeah.
Laura
I still feel like we do today. It's just relying entirely on Jesus and what He did to gain our salvation and trust that our children are God's, and that He's going to take care of them and He's going to love them. And you know that their relationships between them, it's not actually to do with us.
Rosie
Yeah, and it's not ours to control.
Laura
We just need to be faithfully obedient in what God's given us, in caring for our children and stewarding them well and point them to Jesus. But we cannot make them.
Rosie
Yeah.
Laura
That's their relationship and we can trust in God.
Rosie
So even though motherhood is fraught with disappointment and longing and unmet expectations and hardship and struggle and suffering and loss. Even though it's all of those things, it's also a great blessing because it does force us to relinquish control and hand it over to God. And God uses motherhood to draw us nearer to him and to make us more like him, to sanctify us. And He's keeping His promises to us in all circumstances, whether we're mothers or not, in any kind of season that we're going through, God is faithful to us and keeping His promises to us to make us more like Jesus.
And we can rest in knowing and trusting that God is doing His good work in us, whatever the circumstance, even if it's one that we don't understand, we don't want. We can trust He's going to continue doing His work in us and He will follow it through to completion because that's what He said.
Laura
I find what you were saying in Hebrew is really encouraging. And so Hebrews 11 is just by faith, by faith, by faith this person trusted in God. And Hebrews 12 then says therefore, [inaudible 00:22:24]. Since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.
For the joy set before Him, He endured the cross. Scorning its shame and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, that you will not grow weary and lose heart. In your struggle against sin, you have not resisted to the point of shedding your blood. And have you completely forgotten the word of encouragement that addresses you as the father addresses his son? My son, do not make light of the Lord's discipline and do not lose heart when He rebukes you because the Lord disciplines the one He loves, and He chastens everyone He accepts as His son. Endure hardship as discipline. God is treating you as children for what children are not disciplined by their father.
Rosie
No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. How true is that? Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. And it's so true. I mean, I have a very short, I've lived a very short life and my experience is really limited and my experience of suffering has been somewhat limited too.
But even I can see, looking back on this year, that the discipline that God was doing in me through the time of painful hardship has later on produced harvest and peace.
Laura
And God is a good God who we can trust and come to. Come to me all who are weary and burdened. And I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
Rosie
I think had I not had God, you know, in the dark months of this year. It wasn't that I was just clinging to God because nothing else was working, although nothing else was working. It was that I clung to God because I fully trusted him even in the midst of pain, even though I didn't know what He was doing because He's promised me these things.
He's promised me He's good. He promises me that He is working for my good, that He is sanctifying me and He's making me like Jesus. He's refining me because that's a good thing. Yeah.