The author of a new book wants women struggling with infertility to know: You are a gift.
“That’s the key, no matter how your journey or your story unfolds, is to remember: Okay, I am a gift. I am special. I have these gifts, these talents. I am meaningful and have purpose for the world, just as I am,” Mary Bruno, the author of “Holding Space for Joy: A Prayer Companion for Women Struggling with Infertility,” told Our Sunday Visitor.
Bruno, the co-founder and executive director of FAbM Base, a nonprofit dedicated to fertility awareness, and a certified Creighton practitioner, spoke ahead of the publication of her latest book. The book, available beginning Sept. 3 from OSV, promises to accompany women struggling with infertility. Drawing from her own personal struggle with infertility, Bruno presents nine different concepts — concepts that helped her find and maintain peace.
The 38-year-old, who also suffers from endometriosis, lives right outside of New Orleans, Louisiana, with her husband and their daughter, whom they adopted. Bruno previously spoke about her story with Our Sunday Visitor.
She shares some of that story in her nearly 100-page book, which promises an immersive experience. Each chapter offers a reflection, an original prayer, song and podcast suggestions (including rap songs by Bruno herself), and journal prompts. Bible verses and saintly quotes — from Pope St. John Paul II to St. Edith Stein — are sprinkled throughout.
“I really think of it as an experience to help you enter in and make it your own,” Bruno described.
Her warm, conversational tone comes across like that of an older sister or best friend.
“When I write, I want you to feel like you’re sitting in front of me and you can be exactly who you are,” Bruno said. “I’m just here to love you, hopefully like Christ loves you.”
A personal struggle
Bruno hoped that other women might benefit from her own struggle with infertility.
“It’s definitely the hardest thing I’ve experienced in my entire life, which is why it was so surprising for me to experience so much joy and acceptance through that — and all the things that it’s actually ended up doing for me,” she revealed. “That’s why it’s so important for me to look back to see, okay, how did I get here? And then share that with other women.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), infertility is common: Around one in five U.S. married women ages 15 to 49 with no prior births struggle with infertility or are unable to get pregnant after one year of trying.
Looking back on her own experience, Bruno identified a need.
“When I was going through it so long ago, there was no one talking about it, at least that I knew of,” she said. “You had nowhere to turn, no one understood.”
As a practicing Catholic in Catholic circles, she found herself surrounded by people having children and noticed that the activities at church focused on them.
“They should have those things, those things are good,” she commented. “But it often is unintentionally at the expense of other people who aren’t in the norm.”
She called that a “really big struggle.”
Finding joy and acceptance
While still painful, her experience would have been different, she said, “had I had a better understanding of what God teaches us through the Catholic Church, better witnesses from other Catholic families who are fertile and having children — and what I mean by that is, them living out and speaking about fruitfulness and procreation beyond the scope of having biological children.”
The experience magnified her struggle, she said.
“Not only my faith but myself and who I am as a woman, as a wife, as a Catholic friend, as a Catholic person sitting in the pews, was solely focused on the absence of a child,” she said. “It’s really hard to live out who God made me to be if that’s all I can focus on.”
She remembered the struggle, pain and anger she experienced while in a “very dark place.” In that place, she encountered God, she said.
“He just taught me to pay attention to that and to stop trying to escape from that,” she said. “I wanted to get curious about that and sit with that discomfort and that pain to see, well, God’s allowing this, so why? Is it because he hates me? Because he’s forgotten me?”
“We know that’s not possible,” she added. “So there’s got to be something else here … I think it’s that we’ve got to have that motivation to pursue that.”
She spent years trying and failing, she said. Then, before undergoing a medical hysterectomy, a surgical procedure which removes a woman’s uterus or womb, she remembered experiencing an “unexplainable acceptance and joy.”
“Which is how I knew, okay, this is possible,” she said.
That’s when she wrote her memoir, “Twelve Stripes Deep: How Infertility & Other Suffering Delivered My Greatest Joys.”
“Then a friend of mine suggested a journal to really help women make it their own,” she said.
A message of hope
She described the goal of her new book.
“The goal is to propose to these women suffering, to propose some questions and ideas … to really just sit with their own pain to see how is God trying to move in their life — and make it their own journey,” she said. “I’m living this every day, and I want women to know that this is available for you no matter how your story unfolds.”
“Many of us hear from women who get pregnant eventually, and that’s great,” she added. “But it’s so important to me for women to know that even if that doesn’t happen, there’s still hope.”
One of the messages Bruno emphasizes in her book is that Good Friday — the day commemorating Christ’s crucifixion and death — is the beginning of something, not the end.
“Anyone who suffers, it’s so easy — and it’s totally understandable, we’re human — to get stuck in this Good Friday,” she said. “To stay there and dwell on the things that we don’t have or the things that are so hard for us.”
She began to realize not only that people don’t get to Easter Sunday without Good Friday, but also that they sometimes suffer as if that’s the end of the story.
“That was not the end of God’s story, that wasn’t the end of Jesus’ story,” she stressed.
She also examined the “waiting of Holy Saturday,” between Christ’s death on Good Friday and his resurrection on Easter Sunday.
“We have the suffering of Good Friday and then the waiting — and what a thing for women who are infertile, it’s just this big waiting period that Christ went through first,” she said.
“We don’t always believe we’re going to get to Easter Sunday, but we know that God did,” she added. “So we know it’s coming. We just don’t know how.”
A ‘yes’ to God
In her book, Bruno refers to the Blessed Mother’s fiat — her “yes” to God to conceive baby Jesus and all that that entailed — and adds that it’s the nature of someone’s “yes” to God that makes them fruitful. In other words, couples struggling with infertility can still be fruitful and life-giving.
“This is not just a call for infertile women,” she commented. “It’s a call to everyone, no matter whether you’re fertile or infertile, is the gift in how we love, it’s in the nature of our ‘yes’ and not what we’re saying ‘yes’ to.”
A central message
Bruno hoped that her book helped women feel more seen, she said.
“We’re not just longing for a baby, we’re longing to be seen,” she said. “We all want to be seen no matter what we’re going through.”
She also hoped her book would lead readers to begin to see themselves as gifts.
“Our desire for a pregnancy is so good. God gave it to us, right? And it’s beautiful,” she said. “It’s really easy for us to see a child as a gift — and a child is a gift — but when we … fall down that rabbit hole, we lose sight of ourselves as a gift.”
“I’m not surprising God because I’m infertile, and so … what is he trying to bring about to the world and my family through how I love?” she added. “Because I am the gift … I am still a gift, no matter what happens.”
