When I was about 10 or 11, my mother called me into her bedroom, one afternoon, and shut the door. I remember thinking this must be something really big and important. Boy, I’ll say. I sat down on the bed, while she proceeded to have “the talk” with me. I don’t remember all that much about it except there was a book, some repulsive, implausible concepts explained, and subsequent awkwardness and urgency to return to playing outside. You remember that. You’re probably visualizing in your mind where you were when your mom had the talk with you. Looking back on it, Blair gives me somewhere between a C+ and C- for my discussion with her. Most everyone can picture their mom on that particular day. Her face flushed as she stuttered and stammered trying to explain things without really explaining them. It’s one generation getting the next ready for a big change that’s coming their way, so they’re not completely caught off guard some fateful day in 7th grade math. Oh, but they could’ve never completely prepared us- as blissfully carefree as we were- for what atomic bomb awaited us, but it certainly helped softened the boom. 

I’ve been thinking it would probably be prudent for a mother to have a second talk with her daughter. When a daughter celebrates her, let’s say, 47th birthday, her mom ought to ask her to come over and talk again. Maybe the discussions could be labeled “The Talk” and “The Talk: The Final Saga.” This time, she should explain the next big transformation that lurks on the horizon. Something like- Now, you may be noticing some changes in your body and that is perfectly normal. It’s called a muffin top and you will have it until the day they put you in the ground. You may find yourself more irritable and impatient than usual as I, too, have found you to be. You might hear your friends talk about having trouble remembering things, but don’t let that frighten you. You, too, will start to notice you can’t even think of names of everyday objects. You might say to your husband, “Please, hand me the…the….that….over there…you know…..the black thing that changes channels.” Again, no cause for concern. Like generations before you, you will walk into a room, stand there, and wonder what you’re supposed to be doing. Your chin will start to grow stray hair that will remind you of your Grandpa Jones. And, one day, out of nowhere, you’ll start to sweat and burn from your forehead to the small of your back. You might suspect you’re having a stroke, but it’s all very normal and natural and you should never feel weird or self-conscious. Don’t forget you’re still special- just in a changing way. 

Last week, I went for my yearly appointment and mentioned my increased hot flashes/night sweats to the doctor and he offered some prescription remedies for my unpredictable overheating. I wasn’t interested in adding to my medicine stash, so he said I could try the natural supplement, Gingko Biloba, for the flashes and accompanying brain fog. I came home and ordered a big bottle from Puritan’s Pride. I skipped right over their 1 and 2 month supply options and went straight to the cheese ball tub size. I took my first dose yesterday and I’m expecting big things. Cold, icy, and rainy may describe conditions on the outside, but heat and fog are the weather systems that have moved in and stalled over me at the moment. 

I filed into the choir loft on Sunday with the rest of the singers and, as soon as the air in the sanctuary hit my face, I knew it would be a long service. With the weather outside being unusually cold, the powers that be had obviously overcompensated with the heat setting. You know, those nameless captains of church climate who stay in the shadow of anonymity so to not attract criticism from the cold crowd or the hot herd. Not wishing that their parishioners succumb to the cold lest the hospital list get out of hand, it was apparently decided to err on the side of incineration that day. To splurge on the electric bill and envelop the congregation in a blanket of fire. And so, it was. 

Did I forget to mention the choir wears robes? On any given Sunday, this isn’t a big deal one way or another but, on this particular day, it became a considerable factor. The robe serves as, let’s say, the aluminum foil on a baked potato- trapping in the heat and moisture for faster cook times. Quickly, the heat enfolded me and, making its way under the robe, it set off one of my hot flashes. The kind of heat that burns and tingles the nerve endings and comes up from deep within- I suspect somewhere around the kidneys or small intestines and working its way up through the chest, neck, and face before finally rolling down the back in drops of sweat. It’s the kind of heat that will make a woman look down to be sure she hasn’t accidentally caught herself on fire. 

The church bulletin has long served dual purposes of informing congregants of the order of the service and its lesser-talked-about side gig of the creation of air movement in warm surroundings. Did I mention our service is televised? Bulletins waving back and forth in the air aren’t the most becoming backdrop for a  pastor, but I suppose a choir loft full of fainting goats wouldn’t be that great either. I looked around and noticed most of the 50-and-over altos were red-faced and shifting uncomfortably in their seats. I did create a few gusts of wind with my bulletin until I deemed it too distracting for the level of comfort it brought in return. I listened intently to the sermon as my innards reached the temperature of rare, then medium rare and, by the hymn of invitation - well done. 

Mothers of 40-something daughters, don’t wait and let your daughters get their information on the streets. Change is coming. Knowledge is power. 

Night, y’all-

JONI 

First of all, I have to say we were all overwhelmed with the emails and messages concerning Blair and John Samuel’s miraculous turn of events. Whether you shared your own story of infertility, promised your prayers, or offered encouragement- every single word was a gift to us all. Thank you so much for taking the time to encourage them- to encourage us. You all really touched my heart and I can’t say thank you enough. They’ve delayed the transfer until the first week of April. With just one embryo, they want to have time to get Blair in the most ideal condition for the big day. We really would all appreciate your continued prayers for them through the coming months. 

So, did y’all survive the endurance test that is Christmas? For three or four days in a row, it feels like you’re off to the races. Bake something, put it on a pretty platter, get dressed in some shade of red or green, load gifts in the car, drive to family’s house or wait for them to get to yours, eat cream cheese, bacon, butter, almond bark, and refined sugars in various forms and shapes. Repeat steps for each side of the family- which can be a lot of repeats if you get together with your extended families like we do. 

Now I’m having trouble getting back up and at ‘em. Something about those two weeks- the one leading up to Christmas which exhausts you with all the things you have to do and the one after which spoils you because absolutely nothing is expected of you. Put them back to back and you become this lazy layabout  who can’t walk past a chair without plopping down in it……and, before you know it, you’ve been staring off into space for 20 minutes. Yes, I’ve done that a few times. And I can’t stop eating…..or sleeping. That’s all I want to do. Eat. Sleep. Sit in a chair. So, if anyone has the antidote for the two weeks surrounding Christmas, please share. I’m suffering from lingering effects. 

I don’t know how you all celebrate Christmas, but Christmas night is when we have our big meal, open gifts, and celebrate with our little family. After we’ve been with friends and extended family, it’s the night we have our most special celebration with our closest people. It’s my favorite night of the entire year. It’s just us, our children, their significant others, and my sweet mama. We open our gifts one at a time- one person at a time. I figure if I’ve shopped since July, gone to the grocery store about 42 times, and worked like a dog since Thanksgiving, by golly, we’re going to stretch this thing out as long as possible. 

I’ve loved watching all the Facebook reels of what people gave and received for Christmas. Especially the parents of little kids. I really miss those days. Somehow, they’re not quite as fun to shop for when they’re shaving and paying mortgages. 

I start asking for gift suggestions in the summertime. I give them budget perimeters and wait for the responses. Gift giving is my love language, so I enjoy every minute of the hunting and gathering. Blair wanted a specific purse- gold, sparkly, and conspicuous. Also on her list were workout clothes and a Pura scent diffuser. Carson wanted Birkenstocks. He’s into vinyls- mostly classic rock. And he asked for Dickie’s work pants- which I don’t get these young people and their trend of going out on the town looking like UPS drivers but whatever, son. John Samuel asked for sunglasses, running shoes, and he loves reading and baseball memorabilia. Davis- he’s the worst one. He’s a practical man and doesn’t have any wants. “I don’t need a thing…just save your money.” As a result, he gets a lot of stuff that probably makes him wish he’d given us suggestions. And since the kids grew up, stockings are now for socks and underwear with a few sugary treats at the top. Christmas night around here is no time to be sheepish about your undergarment preferences. Everyone will leave knowing yours. I did spare Carson’s girlfriend from this new family tradition and stuffed her stocking with more fun things. 

I didn’t realize until I was making my photo book for 2023 that I hardly took any Christmas pictures. It’s so unlike me. This about sums up all I have of Christmas ‘23, but what a joyful one it was! 

Last week, I wrote my last post for 2023 and signed off for the year…. or so I thought. Something miraculous occurred about 14 hours after I wished you all a Merry Christmas. Something too wonderful to keep to myself. Psalm 105:1-2 says,“Give thanks to the Lord and proclaim His greatness. Let the whole world know what He has done. Sing to Him. Sing praises to Him. Tell everyone about His great works.” That’s exactly what we wanted to do so, with the permission and collaboration of Blair and John Samuel, I want to share with you what we’re calling a Christmas miracle. 

Something most of you don’t know is my sweet Blair and son-in-love, John Samuel, have been trying to have a baby for years. They were married in 2017 and the natural progression of life is usually to start a family within a few years. This was their plan, too. They’d traveled, had their careers in a good place, and had settled in a new home. They decided they were ready for children.

One year passed. Two. Three. They watched their friends, one by one, get baby bumps and cut cakes or pop balloons to reveal the gender. They hosted baby showers in their home and visited friends on the OB floor of the hospital with gifts for the new additions. They’ve taken casseroles to their friends with newborns and wished them well and they meant every word. They’ve held friends’ babies and family members’ babies while trying to keep a happy face and fight back the tears it always seemed to induce. No matter how delighted they were for their friends or family, it was always a reminder of their own longing and the possibility that they’d never experience that joy themselves. 

As a mother, there’s nothing worse than seeing your child in pain. We’d rather bear any illness, want, crisis, affliction- we’d take any kind of suffering on ourselves to keep one of our children from feeling those things. For those of you who don’t know Blair personally, she is delightful. I know all mothers say that about their kids, but that’s truly her personality. Since the moment she arrived, she’s been bubbling over with joy and personality and her eyes twinkle with life and light. She even bounces when she walks and it just fits her sunny disposition. She laughs with her whole body. She is a joyful soul. A dear friend of mine, who’s been praying for their situation, recently told me Blair is still Blair on the surface, but she’s felt a hint of sadness in her the last few times she’s been with her. Like there’s something heavy she’s carrying. Of course, my friend knew exactly what that something was. There are few things more emotionally taxing than infertility. 

Going on four years, they’ve struggled with this. They’ve seen doctors, embryologists, had countless blood tests, dozens and dozens of ultrasounds, three surgeries, three invasive diagnostic procedures, two diagnoses, 74 hormone injections to date, and a previous failed cycle of IVF. Between the two of them, they were taking 50 supplements a day, made drastic diet changes to eat cleanly, and a lot of other things that are too numerous to list. John Samuel even worked a side job for a while to help finance all of it because fertility treatments are very expensive. I tell you all of that just so you’ll know the background and appreciate the next part of their story. 

During the Thanksgiving weekend, Blair started a second round of IVF. They’d prepaid for two cycles of IVF and the first round had failed about a year ago. Because of the cost, this would be their last try with this type of treatment, so they were excited and more than a little nervous. In some ways, this felt like their Hail Mary pass. John Samuel gave Blair the first shots of the series while they were here visiting for the Thanksgiving holiday. After more than a week of those, they went to the hospital on December 7 and the doctor retrieved her eggs. After putting their ingredients together in an incubator, they had 12 little embryos and were ecstatic. 

The usual course is to leave them in the incubator for a week, see how many survive, and chart their progress before freezing for implantation. For those of you who aren’t embryologists, for the first three days, they look for cell division. They should see compacting on the 4th day and expanding by the 5th or 6th day with the baby and placenta both visible. Isn’t that amazing? In a routine that was familiar to them from the last time, the embryologist would call every day and give them an update on how many embryos they had and their scores based on those expected milestones. 

Starting with 12 embryos, the number went down each day with each phone call. From 12 to 6 to 4. With every decrease in number, the parents’ spirits fell right along with it. By day 5, the embryologists were not seeing any activity in any of the embryos. They waited 24 hours just to be sure as they weren’t eager to make the dreaded phone call. Finally, after seeing no activity indicative of life for a whole day- no division, no compacting, no expanding- they felt confident that there was no hope of life coming from this final cycle. The last count was 0. There would be no embryo to implant. There would be no baby. The clinic called and broke the news and, given their situation and history, advised Blair and John Samuel to look into adoption or other options. There was nothing more they could do for them. 

We got word of the news and we were all devastated. Blair and John Samuel were grieving. They were trying to come to grips with the fact that they may never experience one of the most basic and taken-for-granted physical functions of having their own child- something that seemed to come so easily to others around them. Everyone dreams of seeing traces of their own face in another human being. Being told you might not experience something you’ve always assumed would happen is a loss that has to be faced and processed and mourned. Blair called and was sobbing. It was the kind of weeping that comes up from the deepest parts of the heart and it broke mine. This is where we were when I wrote what I thought to be my final post of the year. I was grieving for my daughter and my son-in-law and was writing therapeutically as much as anything. Something we’d all prayed for for so long was seeming less and less likely. Godly grandparents, parents, uncles and aunts, great-uncles and great-aunts, cousins, second cousins, first cousins- twice removed, our close friends and circles, their close friends and circles. So many people had prayed for this. We know God is good, but -if I’m being honest- it wasn’t feeling much like that in the moment.

The next day, after 24 hours of crying and walking around in a daze, Blair got another phone call. They told her to sit down. The embryologist who looks at little embryos develop, all day every day, told her he didn’t know who they had praying for them, but he’d like to put some things on their list. The morning after their call to break the bad news, they’d done the required morning check on their embryos and still nothing. As a matter of routine, they checked again in the afternoon. He couldn’t believe what he saw. After sitting lifeless and unchanged for all that time, one embryo had divided, compacted, expanded and was hatching. All the things. Two days of growth and development had taken place in just a few hours. Just hours before their time was up, God did this miraculous thing. 

The doctor was sure to communicate that this is not how this usually works. This is not how it normally goes. Things do not typically happen this way. This is not the standard pattern of development. That’s why they were so certain it was time to break the bad news that it was over, the previous day. Looking at it through a scientific lens, it was over. But God. I believe if it had happened in the usual, normal, typical, standard way, we might have been tempted to give credit to modern medicine or gloss over God’s role in it all. We believe God stopped all life processes in the embryo and then started them again to remind us He is the Giver of life and He is able to do far more than we could ever imagine. He, alone, has the final say in all things. They were able to freeze the very healthy embryo for implantation in February and we give God all the praise. 

I know what you’re thinking- there’s a lot of distance and time and hurdles to clear between a frozen embryo and the birth of a viable child, and you’re right. But, to get to this point is huge for them and we choose to have faith that if God put life into that baby where there was none, He will keep His hand on it all the way. That is our prayer for the new year- that Blair and John Samuel will be holding their miracle in the glow of the Christmas lights next year. If you would give us the honor of adding it to your prayers, too, we’d be humbly grateful. 

Thanks be to the One who didn’t come to us at Christmas in a typical, normal, standard, ordinary way. He has given us hope and invigorated our faith, this season. 

Merry Christmas, 

JONI 

We’re back from our trip and had a wonderful time! Actually, we’ve been back from our trip- it’s just taken me a minute to get back in the groove. We flew into Portland, Maine and meandered up the coast to Acadia National Park- stopping at towns, harbors, and lighthouses all along the way. After a few days in beautiful Bar Harbor, we drove over to Woodstock, Vermont and took in the beauty around there. We stayed in a most charming inn but, sadly, Bob Newhart wasn’t working the front desk. Apparently, because of a hurricane and an extra-rainy summer and fall, it wasn’t the greatest year for fall foliage, but it was still prettier than a Mississippi fall and we really enjoyed (or I really enjoyed) the cooler weather. 

A couple of weeks before our trip, my family got together at our house. My little brother, Lee, was set to leave for Africa about the same time we were going to Maine. Lee, just being Lee, was going to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. I was asking about his trip and he started asking about ours. He wanted to know what we were going to do and I listed our simple goals of enjoying the leaves and cool weather while taking in the rocky coast and lighthouses. He nodded slowly with a hint of sympathy in his eyes and pursed his lips as if he was waiting for more- like…. and after that we’re going to bike the Appalachian Trail through Maine, do a polar bear plunge in the Atlantic, and run in the Boston Marathon before heading home. It was then I was reminded that there two kinds of people in this world. Those who climb mountains and those who look at them. There are those who think vacations are a time to challenge themselves and live on the edge and those of us who are content to tank up on the hotel breakfast and enjoy the scenery (from elevations that don’t cause hallucinations without supplemental oxygen. True story.) We are not the same. 

Well, the first hint of fall is set to blow in here on Saturday. Of course, as a Mississippian, by fall I mean highs in the 70’s and lows in the 50’s which will steadily climb back into the 80’s until the next wave of cool air arrives and we repeat the same process. When temps get too low to make cheese toast on our dash, it is considered autumn here and y’all know how I get. This is my time. The air is about to get crisp. The sky is already a ridiculous shade of blue. My steps are peppier. My voice is laced with more excitement. My outlook is brighter. I’m ready to sit around the firepit and drink hot chocolate while wearing a sweater. I kept my mouth shut and took summer on the chin. All 5 months of it. I’ve waited so long and endured so much for a chance at some chili, football, and chill bumps. And, yes, I’m even going to say it- I can’t wait for a gray, overcast, blustery day that’s not fit for anything but staying home in pajamas with a book and a bowl of soup. Yes, yes, yes!

Davis and I are taking a trip to Maine and Vermont in a couple of weeks to enjoy a real fall. You know- those places where the leaves actually turn beautiful, vivid colors before falling off the trees and not just brown from being fried to a crisp by the sun. I’ve bought sweaters and am already working on my northern fall ensemble which is quite a different thing from the southern fall line. 

While we’re down here waiting for the temps to drop on Saturday, Davis has killed a copperhead in our yard. I suppose they’re looking for a place to bed down for the winter. We’ve given up on the grass. It’s just a brown, crunchy mess at this point. Even my mums and pumpkins on the porch are droopy and  looking at me like…”um, are you sure it’s time for us? …it doesn’t feel like it’s time for us.” And still, we wait. Just because Brach’s has delivered their third shipment of mellowcreme pumpkins and autumn mix to Walmart does not the cool weather bring. But, only 60 more hours until it’s here. I can do this. I can do this.

I know not everyone has the same seasonal preferences. I know some of you enjoy torment and affliction and prefer summer and that’s ok, too. Bless your heart. God made us all different. I do love how He keeps things constantly changing. Just about the time you think you can’t take another cold and rainy day, the daffodils pop their heads out of the frozen ground. When you feel like you can’t take one more day of sweating through your clothes, you feel a cool breeze blow across your red face. We can always, always, always count on the seasons to change.

It’s usually like that in life, too. We go through seasons when we think we can’t handle another day just like the several dozens before it. Maybe it’s another day of separation or sickness or waiting and waiting. Day in and day out, nothing changes with our situation and we just want to see some movement in a more favorable direction. Sometimes, we’re in a season we just absolutely love. The climate is just right for our liking and we can’t imagine conditions being any more perfect for us. But, because life is the way it is, we know it can’t go on like that forever. Kids grow up. We age. Parents die. People leave. Jobs change. So, we make the most of our time. 

If you’re in a good season, savor each day and the people in it. Thank God for His blessings and ask how you can use them for His purposes. If you’re feeling stuck in a season that isn’t one of your choosing, trust God to walk you through it until that welcomed change finally comes. No one can be trusted more than the One “with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning.” He is faithful even when we don’t understand His plan. 

“The seasons change and you change, but the Lord abides evermore the same, and the streams of His love are as deep, as broad and as full as ever.” -Charles Spurgeon 

Bundle up. It’s gonna get chilly. I feel a change a-comin’. 

Night, 

JONI