“…everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall.”

-Cormac McCarthy

When I was in college, I had an experience I will never forget. It was my birthday, May 3, 2006. As I walked across campus to meet my boyfriend (who is now my husband of 17 years), I had a sudden welling up in my heart. It’s hard to explain what it felt like or where it originated, but I was filled with a sense of profound gratitude that I had been born, on this day, twenty years ago, and that life had brought me here. 

People talk about spiritual experiences, and I suppose I would classify this moment as one of them. It was quiet and took me off guard, which is also why it was so powerful. It was as if it came from outside of me but was also inseparable from me and that moment in time. I suddenly knew – not by way of philosophical arguments or theological justifications or logical proofs – but just knew within myself that I was supposed to be here, and everything was just as it should be. 

The years went by, and that moment proved to be fleeting but potent. In moments of hardship, doubt, struggle, I came back to it and remembered the absolute gratitude that had suddenly come over me on my 20th birthday. 

And then, 17 years later, something happened that clouded my memory for a little while. In March 2023, after six healthy and pretty easy pregnancies and births, we lost our first baby.

We told the kids I was pregnant on Valentine’s Day, which also happens to be our second-born daughter’s birthday. We figured the announcement was the best birthday present ever. We gave the baby a name that day – Baby Ollie. I remember the kids putting their hands on my belly and saying his name. I told my sister he was coming the day before I started losing him.

And then our baby was suddenly gone. 

All the expectation and excitement were snuffed out, and I experienced a kind of pain I had never felt before. Try as I might, I couldn’t take myself back to that moment of gratitude 17 years ago, which had pulled me through so many dark times up to this point. I don’t think I really wanted to. Life felt different now.

And then a new life came along, and that felt different, too. I think I was in denial my whole pregnancy that this baby would actually be born. When I held him in my arms, it was absolutely surreal, in a way none of my other first encounters with our babies had been. 

But it wasn’t until he was about four months old that I experienced something akin to healing. On that day, I was sitting in church with all the kids. I was reflecting on how much I wished I could have held Baby Ollie in my arms or known what he looked like. A deep feeling of sadness started to come over me, and I kissed Lavran, our baby boy, who I was holding as he slept. I kissed him mostly to keep from crying. 

And then suddenly it dawned on me – or rather, it struck me in an almost-physical way – that this little boy would not be here if I had had the chance to hold Baby Ollie. This little life I can’t imagine living without would simply not exist.

Funny enough, it felt a lot like my 20th birthday in May 2006. It was that sudden realization that all is as it should be, though perhaps now even more strangely and mysteriously and painfully so.

Parenting is dangerous because the potential for loss is multiplied as each new life is brought into the world. But it is also a beautiful gift insofar as it allows us to see the way it all holds together. To realize that everything is given to us and is not to be despised, even the things we don’t understand and wouldn’t choose for ourselves.

“…everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson.”

I know Baby Ollie was given to me, although briefly, to remind me of this. His little life is a part of the unseen joinery, the hidden seams. And it always will be.