The Growing Loneliness
Pregnancy and the inability to find a church multiplied my growing loneliness and kept me searching for purpose
Walking through my faith deconstruction/reconstruction journey has required a lot of vulnerability. That is why there is a paywall below. If you want to support my writing but do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation. I will give you one month of access to all paid content.
The previous chapter
And now
I stared at the positive pregnancy test. I had only been off of the pill for a month and it had taken us two and a half years to get pregnant with our daughter. There was no way I could possibly be pregnant.
But the test in my hand confirmed what I had started to suspect a few days before when my breasts grew more tender than usual.
I walked into our bedroom to wake up my husband. I had done the math. We were going to have a June baby. “We’re not going anywhere for spring break this year.”
Jeff sleepily rolled over. “Why not?
“I’m going to be too pregnant.”
“You’re not pregnant,” he said in disbelief. “There’s no way you can be pregnant.”
“Tell that to the pregnancy test,” I responded.
It would take him weeks to truly believe I was pregnant. We had decided to start trying again for a baby because we believed we would have the same amount of difficulty the second time around. This time, it had taken one month. One month, and we were on the way to becoming a family of four.
But the timing could not have been worse.
We still hadn’t sold our house. I had just started graduate school. When we brought our daughter home in Indianapolis, she was welcomed by an aunt and uncle and our friends. We had a complete support system.
Now we had none. Jeff’s coworkers were my acquaintances, but nothing more. My grad school classmates were great, but we were all so different from each other and I hadn’t made any deep friendships in the first two months of classes. They all had their own lives and support groups and weren’t inviting me into their social circles. And honestly, I didn’t expect that of them because, again, we were all so different. I still spoke to my cousin, but I had already asked too much of her and of a relationship mostly held together by a shared history. I had found a seminary wife to watch our daughter three days a week so I could teach and work on homework, but she would be gone to a new life after her husband got a Call in May. And we still couldn’t find a church we were ready to call home.
I was in a new city surrounded by people but lonelier than ever. I really had no one outside of Jeff. And now I would be bringing a new baby into a world in which I was miserable.
So I began my search for a new church in earnest. We had a Lutheran church close to our house that had a daycare we couldn’t afford, but when we moved I had high hopes that it could become our new church home.
I went the first Sunday we lived in Fort Wayne on my own. It was the 4th of July weekend and the pastor was leaning into patriotism, hard. I walked out feeling like we had worshiped the greatness of America as opposed to the grace of an all-powerful God for all nations. I hoped it was just a holiday service and a one-time thing. The next Sunday, we went as a family. The pastor again leaned in hard on a marriage of patriotism and faith, this time preaching about the dangers of Islam and the Muslim influence that was a danger to America and the Christian church in America.
We didn’t go back.
