Mrs. Bush is one of us!

I am now going to procure a copy of LB's book. There are supposed to be several interesting threads about infertility. Her mom suffered from recurrent miscarriages and early loss of infants. Laura was the only child that survived. Laura and George Bush tried to get pregnant for a long time before the twins were conceived. They were pursuing adoption with an orphanage in Texas, when LB started doing “hormone treatments” When Laura did finally get pregnant, she was so afraid of losing the babies that she did nothing to prepare. She was on bedrest in the hospital for a long time at the end of the pregnancy, and friends set up the nursery for her while she was in the hospital. LB had concerns she might have a miscarriage, doctors did a procedure where they stitched her cervix closed.

I came across this passage from Laura Bush’s new autobiography, Spoken from the Heart. It is powerfully written, an amazing reflection of the thoughts and feelings that someone struggling through infertility goes through. Mrs. Bush is spot on when she says most of us are wordless when it comes to trying to convey these thoughts and feelings to others.



For some years now, the wedding invitations that had once crowded the mailbox had been replaced by shower invites and pink-or-blue-beribboned baby announcements. I bought onesies or rattles, wrapped them in yellow paper, and delivered them to friends. I had done it with a happy wistfulness, believing that someday my time, my baby, would come. George and I had hoped that I would be pregnant by the end of his congressional run. Then we hoped it would be by the time his own father announced his presidential run, then by the presidential primaries, the convention, the general election. But each milestone came and went. The calendar advanced, and there was no baby.

 The English language lacks the words to mourn an absence. For the loss of a parent, grandparent, spouse, child or friend, we have all manner of words and phrases, some helpful some not. Still we are conditioned to say something, even if it is only “I’m sorry for your loss.” But for an absence, for someone who was never there at all, we are wordless to capture that particular emptiness. For those who deeply want children and are denied them, those missing babies hover like silent ephemeral shadows over their lives. Who can describe the feel of a tiny hand that is never held?