The Children Question Without An Easy Answer

On pregnancy loss, "We Are Seven," and the gifts hiding in our voids

Brotherly Affection, originally Affetto Fraterno (c.1900) by Gaetano Chierici. Wikimedia Commons.

“How many children do you have?”

This is a question that I’ve heard for nearly twenty years, and every time I hear it, I feel a twinge, a sharp stab in my heart. The question makes me both thankful and sad. I’m grateful, so incredibly grateful, because God has blessed us with many living children. I’m sad because I have, or possess, none of them—I am a caregiver, and my care runs as long as God ordains that they live. I’m sad because the question reminds me of the children who are not in our midst.

Writing or talking about pregnancy loss is sort of like pulling off a band-aid. Most of us cringe at the thought and immediately want to turn our attention away. And that’s understandable. Death is not natural in the sense of it being part of God’s original plan for humanity, and it is not pleasant. When our youngest brothers and sisters in Christ pass away in the darkness of their mothers’ wombs, it reminds us particularly sharply of how agonizing and terrible death’s sting actually is.

Tomorrow, October 15, is National Pregnancy Loss and Infant Death Remembrance Day. Since 1988, the whole of October has been designated as an awareness month for these kinds of death. You can read about both the day, the month, and how to support those grieving their unborn children in this Lutherans for Life post from 2018, “When Death Comes Before Birth.”

I’ve been thinking about this topic since the spring, when we lost our fourth unborn child.

I’ll be honest; even writing the above sentence is hard. It’s hard for the obvious reason—that a child we loved for a brief time will not be one that we can hold and cherish. It’s also hard because I know it will provoke sympathy from many of you who I know personally who didn’t know about our early miscarriage. I’ve experienced the gamut of compassion over the years when we’ve publicly shared about our pregnancy losses (you can read one post I’ve written about this here). The love and care of other people is a balm; it is also a burden. This is not to discourage Christian sympathy at all! It is merely to say that I have learned that grieving takes stamina, and sometimes, the thought of receiving this kind of love can be exhausting. Sometimes people expect you to be a mess and to be perpetually sad; others expect you to acknowledge it once and then not speak of it again. The expectations and social norms can be an extra bulky suitcase in the luggage of grief (and again, if you want to know some ways to show loving sympathy, see the Lutherans for Life article linked above).

Like most kinds of pain, the grief of pregnancy loss runs like a tide—the waves can be consuming and heavy, crashing expectedly or not, or they can be small and even peaceful, with an entire spectrum in between. That’s why I’ll never say that there’s one way of sharing about the gift of pregnancy or of loss other than to encourage parents and families to tell their pastors, at the very least, about their unborn children.

All this is to say that, in the midst of Holy Week, we experienced both great joy over the knowledge that I was again pregnant and also the deep sadness that we would not hold our child. It was actually a great comfort to me that our child was taken to Jesus during the very week that our church marked His suffering and crucifixion: it left no doubt that God knows us and how incredibly much He loves us.

I was very thankful to be able to speak about this loss and our others with Kate through Penelope’s Loom in our second podcast episode together. You can listen to our discussion here. What a comfort it is to turn to God’s Word to comfort us and to speak out loud about our children whom we can’t see or hold now.

And this leads me back to the original question: “How many children do you have?”

The answer can be varied, of course. Over the years, I’ve found that saying “We have been blessed with (appropriate number) living children” satisfied my conscience. I don’t want to bring up our losses in contexts where the topic would be abrupt or misunderstood, but I also don’t want to ignore the children God had given us in pregnancies that ended in death. So saying “living children” allows people to ask or comment about those children. It also gives a conversation window to those who hear the unspoken meaning—we have children who are not living—and who want to ask about our losses. This might not be an answer to this question that every parent who has lost an unborn child gives, but it works for us.

I also appreciate when people, especially children, go right for the full-throated truth when they answer this question. I was thrilled to read Anthony Esolen’s commentary on William Wordsworth’s poem “We Are Seven” in his wonderful Substack Word & Song (I’d highly recommend subscribing; it’s free!). The narrator in the poem encounters a little girl and asks her about her siblings. She says she is one of seven siblings. The narrator inquires further and starts to question her answer, for two of her siblings lie buried in a nearby churchyard. But she is insistent, even upon repeated questioning.

“How many are you, then,” said I,
"If they are two in heaven?"
Quick was the little Maid's reply,
"O Master! We are seven!"

"But they are dead! Those two are dead!
Their spirits are in heaven!"
'Twas throwing words away, for still
The little Maid would have her will,
And said, "Nay! We are seven!" 

“We are seven” is the loving sister’s answer. Her insistence highlights the stubborn fixedness of her understanding of life as well as of the narrator’s literal thinking. For she is not wrong, as Esolen writes.

…[Consider] the poet’s attempt to prove to the girl that she has the number wrong. Is he then the one who is simple, and not in the best sense? Are we to judge — it is a gentle judgment — that the little girl has the foolishness that is wiser than men?

We humans, even believing Christians who put our hope in the resurrection, sometimes hide our hope in attempts to look wise to the world. As I mentioned above, giving a discerning answer to the “how many children” question is not the same as hiding this hope, but it certainly makes us think. Can we acknowledge the irreplaceable souls that God has given us without being fearful or embarrassed about the world’s opinions? I think we can, and the little girl shows us one way to do this. She loves her siblings, the ones living nearby, those “at sea,” and those sleeping in their graves. Her simple acknowledgement of them is a gift. Does life only count in people when they are breathing and speaking and walking among us? It doesn’t, as she also demonstrates. Our dead children are still real. They exist, and they were and are valuable to us. Ripping off the band-aid of loss shows us a scar, one that is a tangible sign that someone happened, and this both hurts terribly for the voids in our lives they leave and for the wonderful knowledge that they were once given to us.

So when the opportunity arises for me to speak about our children now with Jesus, I am thankful. Each one is unique, each one an incredible gift. And I’m humbled, very humbled, that God has given us so many gifts of life. Though no living child is ever a replacement for the ones that are in the gaps, they make us that much more aware of the pricelessness of every person in our family.

With this, I can say with joy that my children can answer the question “how many are you?” right now with “We are twelve”—four souls in heaven, and eight living here on earth. Yes, that means I’m currently pregnant! We await meeting our sixth living son around the New Year, God willing. And we covet your prayers as we cherish this little boy’s growth in my womb, and his kicks which he’s giving me now, and every moment God has written for him and for us together.