Writer’s Note: This blog is about more than just love stories – it is about dreams being delayed outside of just the desire for marriage. In this case, our subject’s desire was to become a mother. This sucker is a long one. But it is probably the piece I am most proud of that I have ever written in my life – and I’ve been writing since I was 14. Read the whole thing. Take breaks if you need to. But read it. Lean into it. And remember, everything is happening on schedule and because it needs to. Your dream has not been forgotten by a God that adores you. Enjoy.
Rock bottom. A place no one wants to be. But yet, haven’t you noticed most all of the most beautiful stories begin there?
Chelsey Stephenson’s rock bottom looks like this:
She’s in Alabama in late 2012. (Which is ironic, because Chelsey and I met as high school students in Kansas, and we have both had tenures as residents of the Yellowhammer State – hers has ended, and mine is in full swing.) She’s married to her second husband and they are trying desperately to get pregnant.
“A lot of my infertility journey happened in Alabama,” she said. “Life was so hard, and I was trying to fill the emptiness. I was so far away from my family and I was just trying to survive a very lonely and isolating period. I thought, If I could just have a child and achieve motherhood, it would be all I needed.”
After living in Alabama for only a few short weeks, she found herself in the emergency room at the Regional Medical Center in Anniston, Alabama. She had been bleeding exponentially for months, a never-ending period. She’s just 25 years old.
“You’re never going to get better,” the doctor told Chelsey. “You need to have a hysterectomy and just get it over with. You’re never going to have a baby, so you need to do yourself a favor and just get the hysterectomy.”
What’s the point of life now? Chelsey thought.
“I’ve wanted to be a mother since I could remember,” she said. “It was the beginning of a downfall for me. I spiraled into a food addiction and gained a lot of weight.”
Sixteen months later, they began seeing a reproductive specialist at UAB Women and Infants Center in Birmingham, where they underwent three rounds of intra-utero insemination, or IUI. During the first round, Chelsey had a chemical pregnancy – hope that was quickly stripped away. Her home pregnancy test came back positive, but her blood test came back negative. She did this for three months. It wasn’t working.
“I was sent into a depression,” she said. “I was isolated from my family. It was a really dark place.”
A few weeks after their final round of IUI had failed, Chelsey learned her husband had begun having an extramarital affair. They’d only been married for 10 months. When Chelsey asked why he strayed, he said he couldn’t handle her sadness from her infertility.
Though it would be another six months before it was clear that the marriage was broken without repair, any hope of becoming a mother had slipped through her fingers. It was rock bottom.
I read this somewhere: Sometimes, when you’re in a dark place, you think you’ve been buried, but, actually, you’ve been planted.
Eventually, Chelsey bloomed. As I write this, she – the one who was told she would never carry her own child – is seven months pregnant, due in July with a baby boy.
***
Ever since Chelsey’s periods started at age 12, she knew something wasn’t quite right. They were nightmarish every time. She attributed it to being a teenager, but, after high school ended, her cycles started lasting months at a time. In April 2006, at 18, her OBGYN suggested she have an exploratory laparoscopy to check out what was going on. They discovered the next month during surgery that she had endometriosis – a disorder in which tissue that normally lines the uterus grows outside the uterus. This can cause irregular periods and infertility. It is, unfortunately, quite common – Chelsey’s mom and many other women in her family had it. During surgery, doctors removed what they could. She was only 18 at the time, so infertility was not amongst her thoughts at such a young age – mostly, she said, she just wanted to stop having these God-awful periods that were interrupting her quality of life.
She got married for the first time in June 2006, and they started trying to conceive straightaway. Most 18-year-olds, when trying to conceive, can snap their fingers and get pregnant. It’s a peak time for fertility. Not Chelsey. After trying for a year she had an ultrasound, which found polycystic ovarian syndrome, or PCOS. PCOS is a hormonal disorder causing enlarged ovaries with small cysts on the outer edges. Both of Chelsey’s ovaries were coated in cysts. She wasn’t ovulating, and, if you don’t ovulate, you can’t get pregnant.
So, the focus shifted from let’s try to have a baby to let’s help me ovulate. She is 19 years old now and started fertility medicine to help her ovulate on her own. Six months later, it wasn’t working – she didn’t respond to the fertility medicine. Shortly after, in 2009, her husband was diagnosed with stage three cancer.
“That obviously put a halt to everything,” she said. “Before he got sick we were fighting so hard to have a family, and now we were fighting for him to stay alive. Your entire life looks completely different than it ever did.”
Infertility changes a person. So does cancer. In 2011, Chelsey and her husband divorced after five years of marriage. (Her ex-husband beat cancer and is still alive and doing well.) When she and her first husband started trying for a baby, she collected baby things in boxes. Now, those boxes were a reminder of broken dreams that felt further and further away.
“I thought ‘Now who am I?’” she said. “My entire identity was stripped. I started a four-year spiral of trying to fill the void within me. I started making crazy, weird choices. I up and moved to Alabama for someone I hardly knew. The whole time I was trying to fill the emptiness. I had no grieving period for the loss of trying to achieve motherhood, or even the loss of my marriage. Every identity I had dissolved. I was out in limbo for a long time.”
She calls this her self-destruction, her gray period. After she and her second husband divorced, she turned to food to medicate the void, eventually topping out at over 300 pounds on her tiny 5’5” frame. She moved back home to Kansas from Alabama. It was this time, for the first time, she prayed that God would remove the desire to be a mother.
“It truly defined me,” she said. “I thought ‘If I’m not going to be a mother, then I’m nobody.’ I decided for the first time in my life, when I moved home, to make myself a priority. That’s impossible when you’re a people pleaser, but I learned to say no, and I started to take care of myself. I faced my hurt head on. I struggled in my relationship with Christ – why did I have such an overwhelming, strong desire in my heart to be a mother if it was going to be kept from me? I would beg God ‘Just take the feeling away.’ I never wanted to feel it again.”
She continued to have issues with her menstrual cycle, and made the decision that if, by 30, her fertility issues had not worked themselves out, she would take that doctor’s advice and just have the damn hysterectomy.
Maybe moving forward would release me, she thought.
“I felt imprisoned by wanting to be a mother,” Chelsey said.
Oh, haven’t we all felt that – a dream we have, the deepest desire of our hearts, the one dream that we would do anything to see come to fruition – yet that doesn’t seem to be one that will ever be fulfilled. It seems hopeless. The joy of the dream coming true becomes the prison of the dream not working out quickly, not coming to pass fast enough. I know I feel that way in my own life all the time with my deepest desire and my deepest dream. Hell, that’s why I started this blog in the first place. Maybe a hysterectomy would be the key that unlocked this prison Chelsey was in. At least then she would have an answer instead of the obsessive questions running through her mind. She’d have peace – finality. But that operation was not to be. Chelsey was emerging out of the soil, out of the rock bottom underworld, and blooming.
She just didn’t know it yet.
***
Before I was a writer I was an educator, and at a conference I went to, I heard a phrase that peppers my thoughts over and over: “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”
Had you told Chelsey in this period of her life that very soon she would meet the love of her life, marry him, lose 150 pounds, and conceive a healthy baby by the time she was 31 – well, she probably would have laughed in your face. It all seemed so improbable, if not impossible.
But in the improbable, in the impossible – well, that’s where the Lord loves to show up. That’s where He works magic.
In 2015, she met a man. Jeremy Stephenson. For the first time in her dating life, she felt that if it were ever only just me and this man sitting across the table from me, I would be okay. For the first time, she wasn’t obsessively chasing her dream of motherhood.
“I found somebody that loves me so completely and makes my life so full, I forgot I was missing something,” she said.
Jeremy and Chelsey’s love story bloomed very slowly, but never once did they look at one another and see brokenness. They only saw hope.
In the summer of 2016, she was driving home from work. The camera on her phone went off at what she calls a God-awful angle.
“I saw the picture and I didn’t recognize myself,” she said. “I had been struggling with my weight for a long time. I pulled over to the side of the road and Googled weight loss surgery.”
The surgeon who would become hers popped up on Google. It was around 7 p.m. She called the office. She didn’t expect anything but a voicemail.
Someone answered.
That kickstarted into motion the wheels that began turning towards her eventual gastric bypass surgery in August 2017, just weeks after her thirtieth birthday.
“It was the first selfish decision I’d made for myself, to take care of my body,” Chelsey said. “I wasn’t doing it in hopes of getting pregnant or being skinny. I was doing this because I didn’t want to die. And I was going to die.”
Much like her desire to become a mother felt like imprisonment, her weight was an imprisonment. She spent the next year of her life dedicated to her health, losing 150 pounds when it was all said and done.
“I didn’t think I was ever going to get done losing this and get pregnant,” she said. “That was never my motivator. I was happy in my life and I wanted to be healthy to be around for my nephews and be a good example to them and my family.”
In the middle of all of this, Jeremy and Chelsey – together for three years by now – got married in March 2018. (One thing you certainly can never say about Chelsey Stephenson is that her life is boring.) After she lost the weight, her doctor suggested a re-check of her lab work to see if her 150-pound weight loss affected her fertility.
The lab work came back that she was still infertile and not ovulating on her own.
All of this. All of this and still, nothing.
Yet, as there always is if we look close enough, there was a silver lining. Her doctor suggested she get on medication to help her ovulate, but to not take it for more than three months. If it got to the three-month mark and there was still no progress and they desired to get pregnant, she would then go see a high risk specialist.
Jeremy and Chelsey talked and prayed and decided to try for three months just to see what happened. They weren’t even thinking it was possible to start a family. What’s the harm? they thought. The doctor was confident that, heretofore, in the nearly 20 years that Chelsey had menstrual cycles, she had never once ovulated. Never once. It was slim to none that this would work.
On that first ovulation of her life, in that very first month of trying the medication, it happened.
It happened.
Chelsey got pregnant. She was 31 years old.
“You’re never going to get better,” the doctor told 25-year-old Chelsey. “You need to have a hysterectomy and just get it over with. You’re never going to have a baby, so you need to do yourself a favor and just get the hysterectomy.”
Finally, finally – Chelsey had fully bloomed.
***
When she unwrapped the home pregnancy test that would change her life on November 2, 2018, she wasn’t excited.
“I knew it was going to be negative,” she said.
She didn’t tell anyone. She didn’t even tell Jeremy.
The home pregnancy test was immediately positive. No waiting.
“It was the most surreal moment of my entire life,” she said. “I asked myself ‘Am I really seeing this correctly?’”
She called her doctor as soon as they opened and went down to the hospital to do bloodwork. It came back positive. She said it was the coolest day of her life so far.
Jeremy was a football coach for a local high school, and it was the middle of playoff season. He was coaching a game an hour and a half away from home that night, and Chelsey wanted to tell him in person. She sat at the game with her in-laws with this staggering knowledge all night long. It was torture. Finally, when they got home after midnight, she gave him a box with the word “Touchdown” on the outside. He thought it was a present about football, since his team had won that night. He was not expecting Chelsey’s news at all. In fact, he didn’t even know she had taken a pregnancy test.
Inside were a couple of pregnancy tests, a football onesie, and a wooden ornament saying the news: He was going to be a dad.
Soon, they found out they were having a boy. Jeremy was thrilled that his name would carry on. Chelsey said her mother’s intuition told her she was having a son. He is due on July 13, 2019. A miracle. A tangible representation of 13 years of steadfast prayer from Chelsey and an army of prayer warriors.
“I didn’t realize how badly I wanted a son,” Chelsey said. “Just to know that one day I’ll have an adult son that will come back and love on me. I’m going to have one of those!”
She paused. I can hear the emotions in her voice. She says words that I’m sure at one point in her life she never thought she’d be able to say.
“I have a son.”
***
Jeremy, Chelsey’s husband, didn’t marry until he was nearly 40. He didn’t think he’d ever be a father. Of course, Chelsey thought her dreams of motherhood would never come to pass, at least not by carrying her own child.
Something I’ve noticed in my life and in the lives of those I write about for this blog is that God’s timing rarely, if ever, matches up with our own. And it reminds me of the summer of 2011 in my life – I had just graduated from graduate school with my master’s degree. I had been job searching for eight months. I had been on countless on campus interviews. (This is back when I was still working in higher education.) I was broke and my lease ended on July 28. I moved all of my big belongings into a storage unit, resigning myself to the fact that I’d probably have to move back to Kansas if I couldn’t figure this out. My day-to-day belongings I loaded up in my Jeep and slept on different friends’ couches and in their guest rooms. And I prayed constantly, and nothing happened. I was down on my knees in prayer, begging. And it wasn’t like the prayers I prayed to find a husband. That would be nice, but a husband was a want; I needed a job. I had no home of my own anymore, I was essentially couch hopping and living out of my car, and I was surviving on gas mileage reimbursement checks from the many on campus interviews I was going on but getting told “We are looking for someone with full-time experience.” Well, the only way I can get full-time experience is if you hire me, I thought. It was the lowest point of my life, even lower than that time in Jackson post-breakup that I wrote about a couple of blog entries ago. I had a master’s degree. This wasn’t supposed to be happening.
Then, a friend sent me this:
“God actually delights in exalting our inability. He intentionally puts His people in situations where they come face to face with their need for Him…He divinely orchestrat[es] the events of His people so that in the end only He could get the glory for what would happen…He puts His people in positions where they are desperate for His power, and then He shows His provision in ways that display His greatness.”
Long story short, I got a job right down the hall from where I was working at Ole Miss, but it required a retirement, a promotion, and an office change to make that happen. But it did. So many puzzle pieces had to shift to make it possible for me. And it left me standing there saying the words “To God be the glory. Only God could have done that and worked it out like that.” And it certainly didn’t happen on my timetable. I would have loved to have had a job upon my graduation on May 14. My first day in that gig was August 15 – two weeks after I’d moved out of my apartment. Now I had to rush to find housing in a college town in August, where there was little housing to be found. But that worked out, too. It all works out. It all works out!
***
But back to Chelsey, and Jeremy, too.
“We both are this story of God’s timing,” she said. “It is mindblowing. Neither Jeremy nor I were in positions before where life would have made sense to have what we have now. We both had gone through so much, and God has led us to this moment. Neither one of us was looking for one another, but we found each other and we’ve been blessed through our entire relationship. We are on the precipice of having a child neither of us thought would ever happen. God wasn’t telling us no, but, rather, just hang on a little longer.”
She appreciates the gift of pregnancy more because of her wait, she said. She began showing early – a big bump very early on. Some moms would wince at that. She embraced it. After all, she’d been waiting 13 years for this. She sees it as God letting her enjoy looking at a bump for even longer.
“It’s so hard when you’re walking it to trust – to trust God’s timing when, in the moment, you’re knee deep in the waves,” Chelsey said. “I wanted what I wanted right then and there, but it wasn’t right in the moment. God grew me truly to be in this moment. Right now, he [Baby Stephenson] is kicking up a storm. I might have taken it for granted 13 years ago, but there’s no way I’m taking it for granted now. I appreciate it so much more because I truly never thought I would be here. Every bit of it is such a gift and I am so extremely blessed to be carrying this child.”
Her pregnancy has been an easy one – no sickness. She’s just been able to sit back and enjoy it. The baby is due on July 13, two days before her thirty-second birthday. It will be the best birthday present of all time, she said. Once again, God’s timing – it leaves her speechless.
“I’m thankful for the nos, certainly,” she said. “I thought I was ready for so much throughout my entire twenties. I can handle this. I can do this. But I just wasn’t – I just wasn’t the person I am today, by far. I feel as I’m approaching motherhood that I’ve grown more mature, I know myself completely, and I know what I’m capable of. For the first time, I can acknowledge my strength. I’ve spent an entire lifetime noticing my weaknesses. God grew me substantially.”
***
Sometimes, she thinks back to rock bottom. To Alabama. To being told she’d never have a child. And, then, the betrayal of her second husband’s affair. After her first divorce, she tried harder than ever to create that life she envisioned for herself. I’m going to find the man I’m going to be with forever, darn it, she said. She forced it, because her life then didn’t look like what she thought her image of her adulthood should look like. When she moved to Alabama, she’d only known the man that would become her second husband for three months.
But yet. But yet! It led her to today.
“When I got divorced I was so angry at God,” she said. “Looking back, if everything had happened the way I wanted it to happen, I would have missed out on so many things. I wouldn’t have my family around and the relationships I have with them. I wouldn’t have bought a car and a home, paid off my debt, and gone back to school to become a teacher. All of that would never have happened if I had remained in that toxic situation. I look back and see so many things never happened because I was standing in the way, living life and making the decisions I wanted to make – not even close to living the life God wanted me to live.”
She left Alabama on February 13, 2015 (happy freaking Valentine’s Day) with $75 to her name. Her grandparents paid for a hotel room for her in Jonesboro, Arkansas so she wouldn’t have to drive the entire 13-hour drive in one stretch. No one knew she was coming home to Kansas except her immediate family.
“I sat on the floor of the hotel room bawling and full of emptiness,” Chelsey said. “I had absolutely nothing left. I was stripped of my identity. It was my lowest moment. I was heartbroken, shamed, embarrassed, hurt. I had nobody and I had nothing. I got mad at God that night – really, really mad. I wish now that I would have cooled my jets a little bit; that I could have felt God hugging me, and I really believe that he was. Just trust me, He was saying. In my human nature, just physically I could not at that moment. And it took me at least two years before I got to a point where I had to humbly fall on my face and beg God for forgiveness. I felt so betrayed, more by Him than anyone else. It turned out He was the only one I could count on the whole time. I just had to trust in God’s plan. It’s so hard in those moments, when something is being withheld from you, you feel like you’ve failed, you feel nothing but shame and that’s a really powerful thing to feel and have to overcome. It’s not possible to do without handing it over. I wish I would have known then that I just needed to hang on and trust.”
“There is a lot of shame in divorce,” she said. “I never, ever envisioned myself having been divorced twice. Even to this day, I feel a strange sense of guilt because I am truly so happy and so blessed in this life – I question, ‘do I really even deserve it?’ The answer is no – I don’t deserve God’s mercy and grace, but Romans 5:8 reminds me that God ‘demonstrates His own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.’ I am so thankful for His redemption in my life and for the story He is using me to tell.”
When she came home to Kansas, she was surprised that things weren’t as much of a struggle for her. She got a job quickly. She was able to see her nephews all the time. She felt financial security. When her stepfather had a heart attack, she could be there and not be 1,000 miles away. (He survived and is thriving.) She’d always felt trouble and obstacles when she was trying to call the shots on her own. Now, she leaned into God’s plan for her life, and it was just – easy.
Within a month of returning home, she met Jeremy.
***
We all have that dream. The dream that was planted in our hearts for a reason. For Chelsey, it was to become a mother. For others, maybe it’s going to medical school. Writing a book. Becoming a husband. And, not coincidentally, these dreams that are so deeply planted are usually not easy to make come to pass. These are what I call your “God-given dream.” And, because that dream is so deeply planted in your soul by God, therefore only through God will it come to pass. You cannot force it. Only God can bring it about. And He will, but it most assuredly won’t be on your timetable. And you will fight it. And you will rage at God for denying you. But all He is doing is strengthening your faith and bringing it about in a way where only He could get the glory for making your dream come true. He planted the dream, after all – so He wants to sow it, and, eventually, bring it into full bloom.
Sometimes, when you’re in a dark place, you think you’ve been buried, but, actually, you’ve been planted. Bloom. And we can only bloom through tending to by God. Chelsey has bloomed. She is living her deepest dream. She gives God all the glory. Her story has been, at times, messy. Plot twists abounded. But it led her to today. To this moment. It was worth the wait. And she wouldn’t change a thing.
“I never imagined I’d be 31, divorced twice, having lived all over the country – I never imagined this as my life,” she said. “But now that I’m here on this side of it, God has been so good to me. Every bit of my journey was for a purpose and it’s important to remember that nothing happens just because – it all builds up to the purpose of your life. Life doesn’t look the way I thought it would. But it’s so much better than I ever thought it would be.”