Searching for Blessing in Non-Motherhood

“Without revelation and reframing, life can seem like an endless desert of danger with scratchy sand in your shoes, and yet if we remember or are reminded to pay attention, we find so many sources of hidden water, so many bits and chips and washes of color, in a weed or the gravel or a sunrise.” – Anne Lamott

In the summer of 2013, I found myself sitting in a vacant lot near Hebron. It was the second day of my study course at St. George’s College in Jerusalem, and we were visiting sites associated with Abraham’s family and descendants, the patriarchs and matriarchs of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.

We were starting at one of several locations believed over the centuries to be the site of the “Oaks of Mamre,” where Yahweh visited Abraham and Sarah and promised they would have a child in their old age (Genesis 18). I had quickly learned that the locations of these holy sites – especially the older ones associated with folks who lived some 4,000 years ago – were very, very subjective, based more on guesswork and tradition than archaeology or historical records. Of all the sites we would visit during my course, Mamre would turn out to be the most lackluster. If it wasn’t for a small historical plaque identifying the potential significance of this particular piece of real estate, you would never guess it was a sacred place. The Romans had once built a temple to Hermes there, later replaced by a Christian monastery – both were long gone, and archaeologists had excavated what they could from the ruins of those structures. Now it was your average downtown vacant lot, surrounded by nondescript modern office buildings and covered in broken glass of every color and variety.

Our course leader invited us to spend twenty minutes exploring the site, an extremely generous allotment given that the temperature that day was well above 40º Celsius and the site no longer contained any of its legendary oak trees or anything at all that would offer shade. I walked the perimeter of the ruins and then sat uncomfortably on a tumbled stone, where I stared intently at the patch of earth in front of me, willing it to release its memory of a divine encounter. 

The dry ground and scorched weeds reminded me how I had landed there. The opportunity to study at St. George’s was part of an award I had received from my seminary three years earlier for excellence in the study of biblical Hebrew. I had never expected to enjoy Hebrew or to be any good at it – in fact, when I was originally scoping out seminaries, I was most intrigued by the one that didn’t have a Biblical language requirement. After studying Latin in high school, Italian in college, and French for fun, I figured I had done my time as far as conjugations were concerned. But the Holy Spirit led me to Virginia Theological Seminary, where my very first class on my first day was a Hebrew intensive with The Rev. Dr. Judy Fentress-Williams, a brilliant and soulful professor who taught me to recognize the beauty and power in ancient texts. To my surprise, I fell in love with translating and interpreting the Hebrew Bible.

That newfound passion led to my unwittingly writing a master’s thesis on fertility. What started as exegesis of the only biblical passages that refer to “the house of the mother” (in Genesis, Ruth, and Song of Songs) led me to discover that these passages share imagery of livestock and water, symbols of fertility in the Ancient Near East. I also posited that the women featured in these narratives, Ruth and the woman with whom I share a name, Rebekah, were channels of divine fertility and carriers of God’s covenant. When I finally held the published document in my hand, my husband and I had just started trying to conceive, and my research felt like a fortuitous omen.

As I graduated from seminary and moved across the country to work at a church just a few miles from the Pacific Ocean, everything felt full of promise and potential. I repeatedly deferred using the study prize, hoping I would soon be caring for an infant instead. But when two years had passed without a pregnancy, I decided I may as well take advantage of the opportunity to visit the Holy Land before the scholarship expired. Now here I was, in the spot commemorating where Abraham and Sarah had received their divine visit after decades of their own inability to have a child. I wanted some of that promise to rub off on me, but everything I could see was desiccated and disappointing. When I was finally able to observe holy ground at close range, it only reminded me how barren and deserted I felt.

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Five years later, I was still childless and on the brink of turning 40. The additional years of struggle had taken even more toll on my body, my soul, and my marriage. A few months earlier, my husband and I had visited a new fertility specialist with the intention of starting another round of procedures, but when we got home from the initial appointment, we both fell asleep before lunch, exhausted by the mere prospect of going down that path again. We never found the energy to go back. My work in foster care meant I was closely acquainted with the numerous minefields of grief inherent to processes of fostering and adoption, and we knew we didn’t have the emotional reserves to pursue those options. It had been seven long years – the number that signifies completion and fulfillment in the Hebrew Bible. It was time to close this chapter of my life, to let go of my obsession with having a child, to make peace with my aging body and how life had turned out. Otherwise, I feared I would enter middle age consumed with bitterness.

Six months before my milestone birthday, I wrote to a few close friends asking for special prayers as I embarked on this soul journey. To kick things off, I scheduled a five-day silent retreat at a monastery in Big Sur. I took along a journal, art supplies, a book about breathing, and my Hebrew lexicon to translate the verses in Gen. 18 where Yahweh visits Abraham and Sarah. My own annunciation had never come, and I needed to return to that dry field to learn how to sit there for the rest of my life. And I felt the impulse to connect to Sarah, who – though she did ultimately end up with a child in her very old age – was the first woman in the Bible defined by her inability to be a mother. I wanted to know how she settled into that identity, when all hope was lost. Or, in my case, forfeited. 

It rained steadily throughout my retreat, so I sat at the window of my little cell and looked out at an expanse of gray that had replaced the ocean view. The conditions couldn’t have been any more different than that field in Hebron, but as I dove into the Hebrew text I was able to remember my visit and imagine it many centuries ago when Sarah lived there, having arrived via her own difficult journey.

The very first biblical mention of Sarai/Sarah is in Gen. 11, an outline of the generations of Abram/Abraham’s family tree all the way back to Noah. After a long succession of verses naming fathers and their children, the toledot hits a snag at Sarai, who gets an entire verse to herself after being named as Abram’s wife: “And Sarai was barren. She did not have a child.” (Gen. 11:30) From there the story turns back to Abram, who has left his homeland after his father’s death to wander throughout Canaan and beyond. Along the way, Yahweh repeatedly promises Abram that the land he’s passing through will someday be filled with his offspring (Gen. 12:1-4, Gen. 13:14-17, Gen. 15:1-5). As for Sarai, she suffers the humiliation of a detour in Egypt where Pharaoh takes a shine to her and invites her into his household after Abram cooks up a plan where Sarah pretends to be his sister. As a result, Pharaoh’s household suffers “big plagues” from Yahweh and they are sent packing again (Gen. 12:17-20). Eventually they arrive in Hebron, and when they are still childless ten years later, in desperation Sarai gives Abram her Egyptian maidservant Hagar so that perhaps she will be “childed” or “built up” (banah) through her (Gen. 16:1-2). Hagar conceives Abram’s son, and what was intended to build Sarai up is instead her ultimate degradation. Now she knows with certainty that the blame for their infertility lies squarely with her. In her shame, Sarai exiles the pregnant Hagar, who is sent back by an angel of Yahweh (Gen. 16:5-9). After Sarah’s son is born, the Elohist describes Sarah banishing Hagar and her young son Ishmael for good (Gen. 21: 9-13).

And then one day, three strangers arrive in Mamre – as the scene opens in Gen. 18 the narrator (the Yahwist throughout this passage) tells us they are a manifestation of God, approaching Abraham at “his terebinth/tall tree (elon).” While there is another more common Hebrew word for “tree” (ets), which the Yahwist uses elsewhere in this passage, this word for terebinth, a relative of the oak tree, is a distinctively Abrahamic word. It is used a few times in Genesis to refer to where Abraham dwells, where he builds an altar (Gen. 13:18), where he is placed on earth, where he and Sarah will eventually be buried (Gen. 23:19, Gen. 25: 7-10). This tree is more than a tree: it is a symbol of a person of great stature. Another version (from the Priestly source) names Abraham’s age at this time as 100 years old, Sarah’s as 90 years old (Gen. 17:17).

Abraham invites the men to sit under one of the many regular trees while Sarah and the servants prepare a meal. The men ask after Sarah and then say that they will return “in the time of life and lo! a son will be to Sarah your wife.” There is no mention of conception or birth that will define later narratives, just the almost-magical appearance of a child. Eavesdropping from the opening of the tent, Sarah hears this ridiculous oversimplification of how offspring are acquired – the ultimate mansplaining. She famously laughs, a hearty laugh in her “inward parts” (qereb). In the stories of Rachel, Leah, and Hannah, various biblical authors – the Yahwist, the Elohist, and the author of 1 Samuel – use a different word for “womb” (batan), which only ever refers to reproduction and birth (Gen. 25:21, Gen. 29:31, 1 Sam. 2:5). The word qereb is used more widely to describe a person’s seat of thought and emotion, the center of a city or a battle, or a sacrificed animal’s entrails. Sarah laughs not in the place where her successors will carry children, but in the part of her where she has fought against society’s expectations and where her deepest unfulfilled dreams have been publicly and brutally laid bare.

Whether in her head or out loud, Sarah speaks. “After I am worn out (balah - a Hebrew term usually used for clothes and shoes that are past their prime), shall I have to me delight (eden)?” This rarely used word for delight or luxury shares its root with that of Eden, the creative epicenter of the entire world where God commissions Adam and Eve, whose very name means ‘life,’ to reproduce (Gen. 1:28). As the first woman in the biblical record who has been unable to fulfill that purpose, Sarah is declaring what her life over several decades has illustrated: that she is no Eve. At her advanced age, for total strangers to promise so casually what has long been beyond the capability of her body is, indeed, laughable. Where were these guys half a lifetime ago?

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In Sarah’s laugh, I recognized a kindred spirit. I identified with her resistance to receiving good news, the result of years of hearing other people’s happy announcements and never her own. I sympathized with her isolation and the ways the constant tug-of-war between hope and disappointment had worn her thin. Sarah was a not-mother for longer than she was a mother. For her, infertility was not a temporary obstacle to be overcome, but a way of life that shaped her identity moreso than for any other biblical character. By any calculation of her biblical age, Sarah had endured this heartbreak for her entire adult life, decades longer than my seven years. On my own journey, I had found comfort and solidarity with a handful of friends going through similar experiences, only to have them fall away one by one as they went on to become parents, no longer wanting to engage with my story as a reminder of their own difficulties. Sarah would not have shoved her painful past under the rug; it was too much a part of her identity. She was the closest thing I would find to a patron saint in scripture. But as I translated her story, I came to realize that the Bible doesn’t tell the stories of women like me, those who never got a happy ending in the form of a child. 

This is because not being a mother is anathema to the biblical mindset. My thesis work had only served to confirm a mantra my professor Dr. Fentress-Williams recited frequently to her students: “In the Hebrew Bible, it’s all about the baby.” God’s very first directive to the newly-created humans is to “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:28), the same commandment given to birds and sea creatures earlier (Gen. 1:22, both from the Priestly source). In both cases, this instruction directly follows and flows out of God’s blessing. In the second creation account from the Yahwist in Gen. 2, the emphasis is more on companionship than reproduction: Yahweh fashions for the man “a strength corresponding to him” (Gen. 2:18, Richard Elliott Friedman’s translation) and it is not until chapter 4, after their expulsion from Eden, that Adam and Eve have a child. While in this account reproduction is not the ultimate end, when it happens there is a clear divine component. After giving birth, Eve says: “I have created a man with God.” (Gen. 4:1)

Regardless of the source, God is always a main character when it comes to biblical fertility – or infertility – and biological reproduction is directly associated with God’s blessing. In addition to Sarah, there are five women mentioned in the Hebrew Bible who struggle to conceive at some point: Rebekah, Rachel, Leah, Hannah, and Samson’s unnamed mother, as well as a Shunamitess in 2 Kings 4 whose encounters with the prophet Elisha around this situation warrant their own essay. Some of these women (Sarah, Rebekah, and Samson’s mother) are described as being “barren” (aqar) without any mention of whether God caused this condition, but in Hannah’s case the narrator actually states that Yahweh closed her womb (1 Sam. 2:5). And in the story of Leah and Rachel, the Yahwist tells us that God opens Leah’s womb after seeing that she is unloved (senuah) by Jacob (Gen. 29:31). By contrast, Rachel is barren, implying that Yahweh has orchestrated both the opening and the closing. Being barren is never described as a punishment, but it is also a condition that is never resolved without divine intervention. Each of these women ultimately conceives because God hears her (via her husband in Rebekah’s case), remembers her, or chooses to bless her. When it comes to wombs, God is the gatekeeper. The Hebrew Bible is very clear that not being a mother is a theological issue, not a biological one.

In the Bible, motherhood is also a competitive sport, in which God regularly takes sides. While this dynamic still very much exists today – I am not the only woman who often had to boycott social media when I was deep in the wilderness of infertility – for these Biblical women it was especially acute because their husbands had multiple wives. Rather than being compared with an abstract ideal of motherhood, they were vying with the other women in their household to produce the most offspring. There was no way to escape their inferiority, which was woven into daily life. In Hannah’s case, the dynamic was exacerbated and even ritualized every year when the household made its pilgrimage to Shiloh to offer their annual sacrifice. Hannah’s husband Elkanah divided the sacrifice into portions for each member of the household, something that made it painfully clear that even the extra portions Elkanah gave Hannah, a token of his love for her, didn’t stack up to the piles allotted for his other wife, Peninnah (1 Sam. 1:4-5).

As if the circumstances themselves weren’t difficult enough, these women were often vindictive in stoking the fires of jealousy for their infertile counterparts. The author of 1 Sam. actually invents a term for Peninnah of a “vexer/adversary/rival-wife” (tsarah, a homophone of the name Sarah). (1 Sam. 1:6) The text uses the Hebrew piel form to emphasize that Peninnah “utterly” angers Hannah and “causes thunder” for her. (1 Sam. 2:6) During this turbulent annual torture ritual, Hannah rages and weeps and refuses to eat. 

In the story of Rachel and Leah, two sisters spend years competing to produce offspring for Jacob. In this case, it is actually Yahweh who fuels this competition by favoring Leah when Jacob doesn’t by opening her womb (Gen. 29:31). The ensuing verses (Gen. 29:32-35) employ a repetitive form, each one beginning “And she conceived again and she bore a son,” that emphasizes the seeming ease with which Leah births children and the regularity with which Rachel watches her sister triumph. After Leah has borne four sons, Rachel becomes envious (qanah, a term that means to become jealous or zealous – in her case, probably both) and presents her maidservant Bilhah to Jacob to bear a child on her behalf (Gen. 30:3-4). Following the same linguistic formula, Bilhah conceives and bears two sons, followed by Leah’s maidservant Zilpah, who also produces two male heirs when Leah’s fertility is temporarily dormant (Gen. 30:9-12).

An interlude in Gen. 30:14-17 portrays an incident in which Leah’s oldest son Rueben harvests some mandrakes or “love-apples” (dudaim), believed to be an aphrodisiac. Rachel begs Leah for the mandrakes and is met with a bitter retort: “Is it a small thing that you have taken my husband and would also take the mandrakes of my son?” The fact that Leah’s first son is now old enough to hunt and forage on his own illustrates how long Rachel has endured humiliation, but that is still not the end. Leah keeps the mandrakes for herself and goes on to conceive and bear two more sons. Elohim finally remembers Rachel and opens her womb, but not until she has suffered for many years (Gen. 30:22). 

When Rachel and Leah christen the children that they and their maidservants bear, the names they choose reflect what these children represent in their relationships with God, with their shared husband Jacob, and with each other. Leah, who hopes her sons will earn her their father’s love, selects the name Reuben because Yahweh looked (raah) on her suffering (beanyi), Simeon because Yahweh heard (sama) that she was unloved, Levi because she hopes Jacob will become attached (lavah) to her, Zebulun for her wish that her husband will dwell with her (zebelini). Rachel chooses names for Bilhah’s children: Dan because Elohim has vindicated (dannani) her and Naphtali after her wrestlings (naptule) with her sister. She names her own first son Joseph, one interpretation of which is that God has taken away (asap) her reproach. These sons, with their identities that reflect their mothers’ struggle and striving, become the tribes of Israel and cement the sacred symbolism of the number twelve in Judaism and Christianity, where Jesus chooses twelve disciples who build the church after his death. Hagar’s son Ishmael, the one exiled in Sarah’s jealousy, is traditionally considered to be an ancestor of the prophet Muhammad and thus the patriarch of Islam. This means that three of the world’s major religions rest on a foundation of competitive and indentured motherhood.

As for those mothers, once they produce offspring, Jacob’s wives and concubines – much like Sarah and Hannah and Hagar – all but disappear from the biblical narrative. The Hebrew Bible has little to say about what it actually means to be a mother: the important part is becoming one. 

The women in these stories eventually gain the coveted distinction of motherhood, but it comes at a cost. All of them spend years isolated from their communities, in the way we humans always push to the margins those who represent our worst fears. Leah and Rachel become estranged as sisters. Sarah loses the well-deserved respite of her golden years. Hannah conceives only after she drags herself sobbing to the temple in Shiloh, where she “makes herself to pray,” (a somewhat rare use of the Hebrew hithpael form), and promises Yahweh that if she bears a child she will dedicate him to God’s service for the rest of his life (1 Sam. 1:11). Samson’s mother is required to make a similar vow when an angel of Yahweh announces that she will no longer be barren (Judges 13:2-5). Rachel dies giving birth to her second son (Gen. 30:16-20).

Like my biblical forebears, I made many of my own sacrifices on the altar of motherhood. The trip to the Holy Land wasn’t the only adventure that was postponed or barely considered out of deference to my all-important ovulation schedule. I relinquished any semblance of mystery my body could hold, turning to fertility specialists, acupuncturists, and Ayurvedic practitioners for constant poking and prodding – some of it quite painful. I cleansed my liver. I gave up gluten, dairy, sugar, and nearly every food I liked and returned to eating meat after a decade as a vegetarian. I underwent two surgeries, one of which very nearly killed me. I sat through baby showers feigning joy for my friends. I watched old circles of friends evolve into parenting support groups that I often don’t have a place in. In addition to feeling estranged from my own body and many relationships, I started to grow away from God, just as I was beginning my ministry as a priest. I didn’t want to believe that God was smiting me, but I also couldn’t see evidence of being blessed.

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My hope in those days was very narrowly defined. Like the authors of the Hebrew Bible, I was “all about the baby.” I know this was in part because of my natural biological instincts and the deep existential dilemma of infertility, wondering what legacy I would leave in this world without anyone to receive my artifacts, my DNA, my wisdom. Now I wonder how much of my ceaseless striving arose from having been formed in a faith structured around dearly wanted sons, from being immersed in scripture that speaks of not-motherhood only as a condition to be overcome, that shows God hearing and heeding women almost exclusively when it is related to their pleas for fertility. These foundations of my faith could only set me up for disappointment, for the belief that blessing came with very specific parameters.

At the same time, I recognize that while my desperation separated me from much of what I loved, including God, the biblical stories describe women whose desperation drove them closer to the divine: Hannah barreling right into the holy of holies to bargain directly with the Almighty; Sarah having the gumption to laugh at God from behind a dangerously thin curtain. Without the option of freezing their eggs or injecting themselves with hormones, with nothing more than “love apples” at their disposal, these women couldn’t take control over how their lives turned out. As for me, I know that there were many days when I trusted in Chinese herbs more than in the God who called me into being. While I absolutely believe in free will and a God who gives us agency, I wonder what would have happened if I had loosened my grip on the steering wheel earlier. Would I have taken more vacations and cut my body more slack? Would I have made peace with my lot in life sooner?

I have learned that accepting the reality of my life doesn’t necessarily mean I prefer things the way they are, but I am no longer agonized by the inner turmoil of wishing for something different and the exhaustion of trying to change my circumstances. I wonder if the matriarchs enjoyed more peace because they knew they couldn’t direct the outcome, because they didn’t have to second-guess whether they should have tried harder or paid for another round of treatments. I wish I could tell you that my life is categorically better for not having brought children into the world. I have nurtured young people for my entire adult life: as a Big Sister, as a youth minister, as the founder of a nonprofit mentoring program for foster youth. I am a pretty kickass aunt for eight nieces and one nephew, a top-notch godmother, and one of the best cat moms around. These are sources of joy in my life, but I’ve never gotten to be Santa Claus or pass down family names or my favorite dresses and books to my own offspring, and I will always wonder how life could have been different. 

It’s still difficult to imagine trees growing on that patch of desert in Hebron, but Genesis refers repeatedly to the oaks that once distinguished Mamre. In his essay “A Windstorm in the Forest,” John Muir recounted a time when he climbed a tree during a wind event in the High Sierra, not far from where I live now, to get a birds-eye view of how different types of trees fared. He noted that older, taller trees with fewer branches were both the strongest and the most supple and therefore more likely to survive fierce storms. When I read his description of the stately, resilient sugar pine, it reminded me of the terebinth at Mamre, which I originally interpreted as a symbol of Abraham and his stature. Now I associate it more with Sarah and all the decades she lived in that place growing alongside that tree, hoping for more branches, each year of waiting instead adding another ring of strength. By the time the three strangers appeared, that tree was the tallest for miles around and the woman in its shadow had weathered many a storm. I am only halfway to Sarah’s age at the time of her revelation, but I believe she had already been blessed long before the divine visitors showed up. By the time Sarah heard the words she had always wanted to hear, she had already received what she needed.

The morning of my visit to Mamre, when an angel had failed to present itself and I got bored of staring at the dry ground right under my feet, I let my eyes wander. Just a couple feet away I spied some small yellow flowers reaching toward the sun, tiny punctures of color defying their brown backdrop. My gaze traced the shadows of their delicate stems draping across the scorched earth to something glinting under a clump of dry grass nearby. Nudging with the toe of my sandal, I uncovered a very dusty marble. Its surface was scratched and dull, but a quick polish with my skirt revealed a yellow-green orb with a blue and white swirl in the center, like a drop of water frozen in sunshine. It was the first marble I’d seen in decades, since I was a little girl. I slid it into my pocket, and that afternoon I rubbed it like a talisman when we visited the tombs of Sarah and Rebekah and their husbands. Of course, at the time I thought that childlike symbol was an omen of annunciation – in those days, I read everything as a sign of what I wanted most dearly. I carried the marble home across the world and waited for its promise to come true.

I know now that my marble did hold a promise, though it was not the one I had hoped for. At that time in my life, everything felt broken: my body, my soul, my faith. I honestly didn’t think enough of me remained intact to survive not getting what I wanted, and I couldn’t see past that desire. The marble I found was the one piece of glass I saw that day that wasn’t shattered.  Sometimes I like to imagine how that marble ended up on holy ground and how long it was there before I found it. Who knows how long it had been since someone stopped and stayed awhile in that spot. Maybe it was waiting for someone who wasn’t just passing through. I still keep it in my jewelry box as a talisman – not of false hope, but of that piece of my soul that remained whole, a bit of color breaking through in the wilderness. It reminds me that against my will, I entered the most desolate of landscapes and came out the other side. The desert didn’t get the last word.