Prayer buddy reveal

Hi!

I had the inmense pleasure to pray for Brenda from Life as we Know It. http://lameys.blogspot.com/ .

I had been a long time lurker of hers specially to find out what Maggie was up to so it was great to be able to follow their path more closely in building a family.

I laughed every time she called her husband CHE since I could not but imagine an Argentinian Gaucho! Che is slang for guy in Argentina so I was always imagining an Argentinan in the USA!

I loved reading the updates on their pregnancy and Maggie during a very dark period for me since it gave me hope that even in the hardest of circumstances God is always there.

I put intentions at the Basilica of Guadalupe for a healthy pregnancy and delivery, prayed at Adoration, offered my hospital stay and most recent miscarriage and the pain surrounding it for her and had her and her family adopted by a convent.

I will continue to pray for you and your family Brenda and will be right there praying when the time comes for the birth of your new baby.

An early Christmas present

Yesterday I went to the appointment with what I thought was a grief counselor (she turned out to be a normal psychologist, not specializing in grief) and the appoinment became an early Christmas gift.

One of several that I have received since Monday.

I am sure it has to do with all of your prayers and my very powerful prayer buddy and the intercession of Miguel and Rafael.

How can you explain that various forms of help could come so fast and in the very best forms ever during the most hectic time of the year?

First my meeting with the counselor. As I write it I cannot belive to this moment what happened. God was there.

She was recommended to me by my local Catholic gyn to get help after my 2 miscarriages and she agreed to meet with me during her vacations. wow.

Help I badly needed. I was in such bad shape that the slightest things made me cry.

So I arrived at this very sunny and warm office (it was been quite cold for Mexico City standards the last weeks) and I was greeted by this 50 plus very kind looking woman.

She hugged me from the get go to welcome me something not that common even by our very physical culture standards. I felt completly safe and welcome.

She asked me how I was doing and why I was there and I began my story, not of the 2 miscarriages, but that it all started 3 years ago.

She listened to me with her heart. I could feel it.

And after a while she asked me to stop and breath deeply and to sense my body.

So she began to teach me some breathing excercises and to start telling her what my body was saying.

It became painfully clear after a few minutes that my body was screaming both from physical and emotional pain. Screaming.

I had not been listening to it in all of this mess.

My shoulders felt so heavy and my chest oppresed. And I began to cry , from deep deep down. She asked me to focus on the moment, on what I was feeling and to describe it in the most primal sense I could, something very, very difficult coming from a person that likes to analyse everything.

It took many efforts, but finally I was able to connect with myself and everything in me screamed that I needed care, rest and peace.

Then she asked me something that utterly surprised me. To relate to myself as a mother would. What? To take care of myself as a mother would. As if I were the child.

It broke all my barries and all my preconceived notions.

I needed to be taken care of? Me? In the myer briggs I appeared to be protector, not the other way around.

That all my mothering instincts could be directed to me first and then to others?

Immediately came to mind the image of my maternal grandmother. An amazing woman, the very best woman one could ever hope to have as a grandmother and her nickname for me: Schatzie, little treasure in German.

She called me this even if she did not speak German and I was named after her, since its the way my father has always called me and she loved it.

I was always her little treasure and felt so very loved and secure with her.

Slowly I began to feel very, very loved. I cannot explain it other than God.

I could feel my grandmother right there. I could see her very light blue eyes, her very slight frame and all her love. She loved God and could transmit it to everybody she met. She was a prayer warrior. Always with the Rosary.

So the counselor told me that my task in the next few days was to do unto me as a mother would do and that if the image of a mother was my grandmother treat myself as she would have done.

How had she treated me as a child? What had she told me time and time again? And to do this to myself the next days.

The counselor said that the way to become a mother is first to treat yourself as a mother would.

My grandmother had loved me with such a pure love that I cried, but now with tears of love.

It resonated to me on such a deep level I cannot describe it. I can truly say she was there and so was God.

I felt such peace.

I left her office so light I cannot describe it. Emotionally drained, but with peace.

This has never happened in my whole life and for the first time in many years I felt again my grandmothers presence.

I decided not to go back to the office for the rest of the day and instead took care of several things that I had been puting off that were just for myself.

I had lunch in a very simple restaurant, but took the time to eat, to enjoy each bite and sat by the sun just looking at people and life.

I bought a children´s book for learning the rosary just for myself with the most amazing pictured for the Virgin of Guadalupe that showed her as a 14 year old girl. It was a gift for me and one that I cannot stop smiling about.


Later that day I began receiving several other unexpected gifts.

But this by far was the most precious one.

Breakdown and hopefully a turning point

This weekend I had what you could call a breakdown.

A breakdown that I am not surprised has arrived.

It happened in what should have been a joyous occasion. My parents and siblings were all together for the very first time in months (my sister and her family live in another city) and we were there to start the Christmas celebrations and to celebrate Advent.

I am too embarassed to give details, but somebody in my family mentioned that I was stressed in a very sharp tone in the middle of lunch and I basically broke down in tears in the restaurant and when we came home went to my room refusing to come down for dinner. I could not stop crying.

I ended up in my room for many, many hours crying and very mad at this person whom I love very, very much. How dare him tell me that I am stressed!

Does he not know that I am barely surviving? That somedays I can barely wake up?

I then poured out my heart to my DH and told him how much all of what has happened in the last years has hurt me on a very deep level and shaken me to the core. We had a heart to heart like never before.

I begged God for help. Told Him I could not go on.

I have been feeling like I have been swimming against huge waves and the more I try to reach shore, the farther away it seems. My 2 miscarriages have almost drowned me and on Saturday when this happened I felt with barely the strenght to continue to swim.

Add to this my DH´s lack of direction in his job at 43 and me hiding from most people that I am supporting us in a job I do not like, deaths in both families, many health complications on both sides together with IF (just this year between DH and I we were 7 times in hospitals), financial stresses brought by these crisis, etc.

Basically my life is where I would have never imagined it would be.

And it hurts.

Badly.

I know that God must have a plan for all of this. I know it in all this darkness.

Yet, it hurts and continues to hurt when I thought it could not hurt more.

And I need help. This has become clear.

And God, I think, has been providing it since Saturday.


I began today by feeling an urgent need to go to Mass early and there I had an amazing confession. I haven´t had the energy for weeks, but today I was able and felt so much peace on my way there.


During confession I was told by the priest a story from his brother which I think was the reason that God wanted me at this Mass:

His brother had lost a newborn baby due to SIDS and he told the priest that he always thought that he would take care of a child, but with the death of the baby he found out that he now would be taken care of by his own child in Heaven.

It left me speechless and in the middle of many tears shed in the confessionary I felt some hope.

That Rafael and Miguel might be taking care of us in all of this, I had been praying to them,, but had not envisioned them watching over us like I would have watched over them .

Not the order of things I would have wanted to live, but that one that makes me feel near them.

And God continued to help today.

I had received on Friday a call by my amazing Catholic local gyn who was checking up on me after the D&C.

He also wanted to check up on me emotionaly and he told me that what we had been living was amazingly hard. Miscarriages back to back after a long time of IF and with medical complications can break the hardiest.

I began to cry and asked him for help. Out of the blue. I never expected it.

I told him that I needed to speak to somebody and asked him if he knew of person that he trusted, that would not start recommending me IVF. He said he would think about it.

And today he called. I did not expect it.

He gave me the name of a person specializing in grief. He had even called her to recommend me to her.

This amazing holy man. A super-numerary from the Opus Dei who is a saint in my eyes.

This woman was expecting my call and due to the inmense respect that she has for him has accepted to see me this week when she is on vacation.

God in the middle of the darkness.

"Look vertically, not horizontally"

About a week and a half ago I wrote about the advice that a monk, my spiritual director, had given me when I told him I was having a hard time with faith and all that we had been living in the last years.

He did not mention a retreat or more prayer, but instead that I should go on a romantic trip with my DH to really rest and focus on us. An advice that surprised me, but at the same time was very wise.

Without knowing all that would happen this week he also told me that it was OK to be mad at God about all that had been going on in our lives. I think he would agree I have now even more reasons to be mad on a very human level.

Another health crisis, another miscarriage, more money spent when it was already tight, no possibility of becoming a mother in sight, the possibility of me graduating as a practioner farther away, etc.

I had told him that I was feeling that all what had happened in the last 3 years was unfair. We were good people, we were trying our hardest to do what God wanted and we both were commited to bringing Napro to Mexico and the more we tried to promote this the worse and worse it went for us and the father away the possibility of a family for us was.

It seemed to me that the Devil was working overtime to make us give up and that God was doing nothing to help us. Several people had even told me this and even some had warned us about all of this when we started. They said that things would start to happen that we would not understand, but to keep ahead.

We discussed what Sta Teresa de Avila had said to God when things got rough, something like this: "No wonder you have so few friends, since this is how you treat them".

Then he told me all of this was normal and that of course the bad guy did not want for Napro to come here and that all that was happening to us and to the other practitioners was a clear sign that we were on the right path. Wow... it is kind of scary.

Then he told me: Its OK to be mad, even be mad with God and Christ. Its human and They know it. Then he said:

>"But when you are mad do not look horizontally. Do not look at your neighbors that did IVF and have lovely children, at those that do not do work for Life and have tons of money, to those that have children as they want with no issues, to those that have what you do not have."

"Please. Look vertically, look at the Cross and tell Him what you feel and how all of it is unfair. Tell Him, He will understand. And then tell me if you can be mad for long"

And its true. In all of this I am mad and sad and I cannot deny it, but then I look up at the Cross, look vertically at Him being cruxified I cannot stay mad long. Such wise words.

Being held by the Virgin (and my prayer buddy)

If you would have told me that I would be writing this I would have said you were crazy. Yet here I am. I cannot even believe this all has happened in the last days.

My prayer buddy must be working overtime since I am still alive.

Yesterday we found out we had conceived.

Us, the couple that it took 3.5 years to conceive the first time conceived 3 months later again when we were not actively trying, where there were not clear signs of ovulation, progesterone was almost non existant and I was not doing all the things that I thought had helped the first time (acupuncture, herbs, excercise, meditation, etc).

We also found out that I was in the process of miscarriage.

I had been pregnant a couple of weeks without knowing it and what I had been thinking was my period was the signs of an ongoing miscarriage. The second one in 3.5 months.

We took the news hard.

Yet felt much more peace than the 1st time. This time The Virgin Mary has been all over this.

All had begun really on the Feast of the Inmaculate Conception and went on through the Feast of our Lady of Guadalupe and ended in a convent.

My period or what I thought was my period had arrived that day, yet it was different. I knew deep within myself someting was off.

The very next day, the Feast of San Juan Diego, the bleeding had increased substantially and on Friday I was very, very scared. I had asked for prayers here and many people wrote that they had been praying. My local doctor advised that we go for an U/S as soon as the bleeding lessened.

I was very afraid to go again to the U/S doctor where I had found out we had lost Miguel. I could not bear it. So I did not do it on Monday.

During the weekend I tested to see if I was pregnant and it came out negative so I was thinking something else was going on. I was still uneasy, but decided to concentrate on something else.

This weekend was the Feast of our Lady of Guadalupe and I meditated a lot on Her words to Juan Diego. That we should not be afraid of sickness, that She is there and is Our Mother. I even wrote about it here.

I had no clue on what I was actually living and I would need to live those words.

Monday came and I decided not to do the U/S. I was stil afraid.

Then came yesterday. I asked the Virgin to give me strenght to go to this place. During the U/S the doctor, an amazing woman that had lost 3 pregnancies, told us that she was almost 100% sure I had been pregnant.

Me? Was she sure? My God.

Then she mentioned that most probably my doctor would let nature run its course.

We go to the chapel of the hospital and pray. I see a little paper where somebody had printed the Magnificat. We pray it. We also decided to name the baby Rafael, Raphael in English for the archangel.

I joke and tell my DH we have 2 angels in heaven, but hopefully God does not want another so he can have now a Gabriel, pur only missing archangel. He laughs and tells me in a very serious voice:
"E. we are parents of 2 angels, we are priviledged, do not forget this".

He smiles and I know he means it.

The next hours were a blurr. We tried to locate my doctor and could not and decided to make and appointment and luckily he had one open early. I was driving around not even knowing where I was heading.

We arrived at his office and he confirmed the findings. I had been pregnant. No doubt in his mind and he agreed with the U/S doctor.

And he added that I needed another D&C at the same exact hospital where we had lost Miguel and also where I had been treated for 4 horrible days of complications. The very next day since from what he saw there was a risk of infection or continued anemia.

My worst possible fear had become reality.

We left his office in complete shock. We called our priest and could not find him. We left a message so they could pray for us.

We called our friends, the contemplative nuns of St John, to ask for their prayers and they do not answer the phone. I think that they might be away.

My DH decides to go and knock on their door to ask if we can go in and pray in their chapel. (the doctors office is only 2 blocks from them). I feel its crazy, but we do it.

We knock, one of them opens and in the back I see another. She hugs me.

I start to cry like there is not tomorrow.

They just received a call from the person that had answered in the parish.

We sit out of their small chapel while they pray.

There is beautiful stone image of Our Lady of Guadalupe filled with flowers right in front of us. She is looking at us.

They start to sing in Latin the Magnificat in the chapel.

The exact same prayer I have in my pocket from the chapel in the hospital.

I feel tremendous peace. Feel those words deep within myself

The priest arrives, the exact priest we were looking for. His name: Juan Diego. the name of the Indian to whom the virgin appeared.

We tell him what has happened, he did not know. He feels inmense sadness. He is there for the 7 p.m Mass and had just arrived 5 minutes after us.

We are invited to join a convent of 6 contemplative nuns, all very young, that cover us in prayer, for their private Mass.

The Mass is dedicated to us and our intentions.

The subject: The cross since is the Feast day of St John of the Cross. Since my DH is a 3rd order Carmelite its a very important day. He feels consolation.

After the Mass the priest calls us into the refectory. He tells us not to give up in the quest to be parents, but also that I should not give us my work for Napro.

I tell him that I cannot believe that this is happening. It seems almost a punishment for working for Life.

I tell him paraphrasing st. Teresa de Avila: "If this is how You treat your friends, no wonder you have so few". Why are we given the cross of IF and then miscarriage and not only once, but twice.

I also tell him that I cannot be sick. This is the very week I need to deliver most of my work that I had not done due to my 1st miscarriage. I will not be able to graduate. It will be almost impossible.

He tells us that we have a mission and that we must offer this and whatever else for this. He is sure that God is with us, more than ever. He says it in such a way that peace again fills my heart.

We leave and the sisters tell us they will continue to pray for us and Rafael.

If you would have asked me a few days ago if I would have survived another miscarriage and another D&C I would have said no. I would have died.

Yet here I am. At home recuperating from my second miscarriage and D&C in less than 4 months. Sad and in disbelieve, but with strenght and peace.

thank you prayer buddy and Our Lady

She is with Us.

A 14 year old girl

Today a 14 year old girl appeared to a widowed indian that believed he did not deserve it. Who was he to deserve this? Who are also we to deserve it? Yet She calls us to Her. To be under Her mantle and protection.

He called Her: "My Lady, My Queen, my Little Girl"

She called him: "My youngest and dearest son". "Juanito" meaning little Juan

She asked him to be : "Faithful, not to fear, to trust Her, to do as She told Him".

Words of pure love and that She tell us also

This little girl stood over the moon and gave a sign so powerful, an image of Herself, that 6 million indians converted in the next 7 years, making Latin America Catholic

And today 6 more million people gather at Her feet since Friday.

6 Million.

This is the video from this morning where we sing happy Birthday to Her. Poor, rich, famous, humble, old, young, sick and healthy at Her feet:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8OcqbyZyfM&feature=player_embedded

She was a sign of unity, not division.

Everything in Her speaks to the heart, when you know what to look for. She is both an Immaculate Conception, a pregnant Virgin, a pregnant "mestizo" woman, an image that speaks both to the Europeans and to the Indians. A beautiful sign of unity.

In this link you can find one of the most beautiful love letter ever written.

The Nican Mopohua. The written account of the apparitions. The second largest collection of words by Our Lady approved by the Church after Fatima.

http://www.virgendeguadalupe.org.mx/apariciones/Nican%20Mopohua/Nican%20Mopohua%20ingles.htm

And today, as everyday, you can put all your petitions at Her feet. She will listen to them as she promised hundreds of years ago. Here you can write all you needs and they will be prayed over at 9 a.m Mass tomorrow and everyday:

http://www.virgendeguadalupe.org.mx/eng/petitions.htm


Where She will listen to our weeping, sadness, where She will cure our miseries, griefs and pains.

"Let not your heart be disturbed. Do not fear that sickness, nor any other sickness or anguish. Am I not here, who am your Mother? Are you not under my protection? Am I not your health? Are you not happily within my fold? What else do you wish? Do not grieve nor be disturbed by anything."
(Words of Our Lady to Juan Diego

"Let nothing else worry you, disturb you"

"Let nothing else worry you, disturb you"

These were the words said to Our Lady of Guadalupe to Juan Diego hundreds of years ago and She tells me this everyday in my IF journey. To every one of us.

Am I truly listening? Living this way?

She is the Virgin protector of Life. She has been named this by different Popes and bishop. She is pregnant and about to give birth to LIFE and She is telling us not to worry, that She is with us.

Yet, am I listening to what She said? Am I truly living this way? Making Her words my own?

This is Her weekend. A weekend where we conmemorate Her apparitions. Its Her birthday and here in Mexico we sing to Her happy Birthday, Feliz Cumpleaños, Las Mañanitas.

Tomorrow most churches will be tolling their bells in Her honor, millions (last time they say there were 5 million pilgrims during 3 days) will visit Her, masses will be said, altars will be filled with flowers. We will celebrate Her with thousands of fiestas.

Yet for me this is a very difficult weekend on so many levels. I continue to bleed heavily, not so heavy as yesterday and Friday, but my body is giving clear signals that something is not well. I feel very tired, weak and deep down that something is off. Also another Christmas childless.

Two amazing doctors have different theories, neither of which is consoling: My local holy doctor thinks it might be that I still have remains of my miscarriage in me and my body is again trying to get rid of them. He mentioned that we need to check this out ASAP.

PPVI.... well they mentioned I should have a pregnancy test on Monday if this continues and if not go again into full hormonal testing mode. More and more testing again.

If its a pregnancy.... An ectopic pregnancy? such heavy bleeding during the 1st trimester is not a good sign. At all.

Being me I already tested and its negative, yet my heart of course is worried and hopeful at the same time.

DO I TRULY HEAR THIS THAT SHE TELLS ALL OF US? Do I live this way?

"Hear me and understand well, my son the least, that nothing should frighten or grieve you. Let not your heart be disturbed. Do not fear that sickness, nor any other sickness or anguish. Am I not here, who is your Mother? Are you not under my protection? Am I not your health?"

And I need to graduate to become a practioner and with so many health crisis in the last months I am way behind in reporting things. I basically need to do 2 months of work next week. So I am seeing clients during the weekend and all next week and will need to work nights to graduate.

DO I HEAR THESE ALSO HER WORDS?

"know, my little dear, that I will reward your solicitude and effort and fatigue spent of my behalf"

Work done for God always, always bears fruit. Do I truly live this way?

And last:

" Are you not happily within my fold? What else do you wish? Do not grieve nor be disturbed by anything"

So today when I am frigthened, weak and sad I repeat Her words over and over again and know that She is with me. With us