I felt entirely at peace. My tefillah had been heard on Yom Hazichronos — — heard, and answered. The answer was no. And that was okay
O n Rosh Hashanah Hashem heard my prayers for another child. On Erev Yom Kippur I contentedly gave away a room’s worth of baby equipment. As we celebrated our daughter’s seventh birthday on Succos I felt entirely at peace. My tefillah had been heard on Yom Hazichronos — — heard and answered. The answer was no. And that was okay.
I hadn’t always been brimming with equanimity and acceptance. Just six months earlier on Shabbos Hagadol I’d been rushed to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy. Coming soon after (yet another) fertility procedure I took it as a sign: It was time to cease and desist. We would never again enlist the wonders of medical science in our efforts to give our six-and-a-half-year-old daughter a little brother or sister.
I said it — and I meant it. But I certainly wasn’t at peace. I brimmed over with bitterness, grieved for what would never be.
I believed, as we all do, that my loss was one that could never be overcome. But mourning does eventually give way to peace of mind. So it was that the days leading up to Yom Kippur found baby cousins becoming happy recipients of our Pack ’n Play, Snap-N-Go, Bounce ’n Spring (what is the baby-stuff-inventors’ obsession with that little ‘n’?), which I now knew — and accepted — I wouldn’t need again.
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