If God Never Spoke

Andrew offers some thoughts on Mother's Day, Cormac McCarthy, and unmet longing

I wasn’t intending to write anything for or about Mother’s Day.

After all, I’m not a mother, I don’t love the Hallmark holidays, and honestly, I didn’t think it would be interesting for me to boast about my mother, about how she has been a reliable presence, always there for me, always ready to humor my antics or to support me, even if I might sometimes make her mad. Or about my mother-in-law, who accepted and fed me from day one and expresses joy at my quirks. Or my wife, who really teaches me what it means to love our kids, to work like the dickens on their behalf, and to give selflessly and find wonder and delight in these unpredictable, wonderful creatures who share our name.

* * *

Then I saw

Megan Anna Neff

’s post “A Mother’s Day Holding Place ~ For the Overlooked and In Between,” and despite that weird tilde, the tone of it strikes me as spot on.

I think it is good and right to celebrate and acknowledge moms—thank you all for pouring your time and love into this work!—but I also appreciate how Neff guides readers toward a more specific instinct. Like the Jesus of the beatitudes, she urges us to bless those who we might otherwise overlook, beginning with those women who have the “ache of almosts and unmet longing.”

Zade’s 2025 Mother’s Day card

That ache was the first big trial of my marriage.

During those years, Erica and I listened to doctors lecture us on long-passed fertility time tables. We agonized and fought over treatments and procedures. I created an orbit of sunsets along her pale skin, a solar system of miniature bruises that marked the path of her nightly hormone injections.

This is what I recall of that time:

The inability to have a child turns babies and holidays into hardships, reminders of what may never be. It is an echo chamber of desire and grief. It is the certainty of identity—Erica knew she was meant to be a mother, could feel it in some deep place I can’t describe—colliding with the reality of absence. It is a maelstrom and a vortex, a quiet, lonely place that is peopled with so many good people.

And then time and luck and God do their work, and some of us are blessed. And some of us are not.

* * *

I do not know how to shout gratitude to the women in my life who do this unique, amazing thing in the rearing of children while also giving space and acknowledgment to those who live with that unmet longing.

But I think this is part of what it means to be human. Joy and longing. Life and death. Kids here and then gone. Presence and absence, all happening at once.

And so, in that spirit of coming and going, here’s what I wrote on Facebook seven years ago when I announced that we were pregnant with Zade:

One of my favorite Christmas novels is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

It’s the harrowing story of an incarnation, of a boy born into an apocalyptic darkness, a boy who carries the fire. Early in the novel, McCarthy writes this: “All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, [the father] whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.”

For Erica and me there’s been a lot of pain these last few years. It’s not the kind of pain that leaves welts on the skin or that trickles down through systems of power and abuse, harming the disenfranchised and less powerful. But in some sense, it has been about a lack of power, about a helplessness that’s felt most acutely every twenty-eight or so days.

I remember that when we were first married, I told Erica that I wanted to wait a year before we had kids. I wanted to savor our time together as a couple before adding a little monster to the mix. I thought we’d still have plenty of time to grow our gang after catching our collective breath and just digging on one another for awhile. But time casts a longer shadow in one’s thirties pregnancywise than in one’s twenties, and I couldn’t have anticipated the way our hopes would fall through our fingers, like McCarthy’s flakes of ash, as the months and years went by and there was no sign of a little one.

That was hard. That was grief and anger and absence. That was a pain that’s private, that many couples keep hidden because it might strike us as selfish or too closely connected to the perceived failures of our bodies. Perhaps we don’t talk about it because we haven’t figured out how to publicly handle the bittersweet feelings of learning of the pregnancies of friends or coworkers or family.

That’s all a long preamble to say two things.

First, if that’s also your journey, then this post might have that bittersweet sting, and I can’t think of anything we can do to help with that, except to validate all your feels—anger, grief, joy, ambivalence, they’re all OK. We’ll also endeavor—both Erica and I—to be sensitive to how we post about this.

And second, we’re having a baby boy. In about sixteen weeks, we’ll have a kid! After all that grief and ash and pain, I can see beauty and grace. As McCarthy says elsewhere in The Road, “If he is not the word of God, God never spoke.” And so, sometime in March or early April, like the father in The Road, I can, God willing, whisper to my son, my sleeping, squalling boy, “I have you.”

“Grace and beauty and pain,” says McCarthy.

“Happy Mother’s Day,” we say to the women who know it’s not enough. “Happy Mother’s Day,” we say, even as the words form a kind of weight to those who live in absence.

“I have you,” I say to Zade.