“ A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.”

Jeremiah then imagines Rachel, long dead, weeping for her children from the grave.

Before all this, though, Rachel had hope. The hope of a just-married beautiful bride who had found her soulmate at a Christian university in the heart of Texas. An unlikely pair one might think: one a California-Vietnamese fashionista, the other a Middle America Tech Nerd. But decades in, he was the obsessively dedicated, doting husband who never let her make her own coffee, and she was the fawningly obsessed wife who swooned in his arms like it was the first time she saw him, every time.

Financially and emotionally successful, they built the visually, realistically, and on-paper life that would bring the healthiest and happiest children into this world. That doesn’t mean it happened for them, though. Infertility hits at random in the most crushingly painful and unfair ways, no matter how many boxes you check off on how many forms. So, they began harvesting eggs and creating embryos.

They adopted a child.

In Jeremiah 31: 16, G-d asks Rachel:

“Restrain your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears, for your work will be rewarded…”

They go through several rounds of IVF. It is debilitating. Rounds and rounds and rounds of shots and drugs and egg retrieval and embryos and implantation and failure and shots and drugs and egg retrieval and embryos and implantation and failure until finally their infertility doctor tells them, I think it is time you consider a surrogate.

So a plea is sent out to the world for a womb to welcome.

And that womb is me.

In Genesis 30: 3, unable to conceive, Rachel gives her servant Bilhah to Jacob so that Bilhah can bear children, saying:

“Here is my maid Bilhah. Go in to her, that she may bear upon my knees, and that through her I too may have children.”

Bilhah then gives birth to Dan and Naphtali.

In my incredible honor to carry two courageous embryos for this beautiful couple, I will never forget holding their mother’s hand as I got pregnant with her children. Her look of hope as we both watched them enter my womb. Our collective hope at what could be.

Her wail at what wouldn’t be.

Pregnancy had not been hard.

I wore platform Louboutins, too short Marc Jacobs’ a-lines, as many shades of Bobbi Brown blush as the questionable, but hilarious, comments I got from clients, their husbands, my coworkers…

“Do you know you have options?”

“Do you know the father?” (I don’t know, Rachel.. do YOU?!)

I worked right up until the day before my due date, which was my regular day off. My water broke really unceremoniously. Nothing like the movies. I called my doctor’s office and spoke to the receptionist, headed to the hospital. I drove myself there.

My husband met me after work. I had her a few hours later after watching Dancing with the Stars with a nurse. On my due date. Really dull up until the last 20 minutes when my doctor and my husband decided to stare into my vagina like two explorers in a cave while my doctor said, “see, that’s the head” but neither offered to grab my phone to at least get a photo. I gained no content this day.

We went home approximately whatever-my-insurance-covered days later.

That was May 5, 2009, a Tuesday. My husband returned to work that Friday.

My next fully awake memory would not be until August.

I knew pretty early that something was wrong. My first fear was inside of my own body. I knew that I was dying. I heard a doctor’s voice at all times of the day and night telling me that I was going to die and I needed to plan for it. No one else was going to be ready when I did, just me, so I must plan for it now.

I had a 1-week checkup for the baby and one for me, so I mentioned this and my doctor asked me if I was breastfeeding. I said that I hadn’t slept since I left the hospital, he said “oh good,” then prescribed me Zoloft. That was the last time I saw that doctor; with 6 months of Oh Good Zoloft.

OGZ helped me live but not sleep. My ever constant doctor telling me to plan for my death then received his driver’s license, and that’s when things went from annoying-scary to scary-scary.

I remember the first time I had a visual hallucination with Dr Death narrating like Jim Jones. The headlights of a car slowly came toward me, then faster. His voice matched the pace. Slow, slow, slow, slow, fast, faster, faster, loud, loud, louder, louder, LOUDER. YOU ARE GOING to die. YOU AREN’T TAKING THIS SERIOUSLY. YOU ARE GOING TO DIE. YOU NEEDED TO PLAN FOR IT. You didn’t listen. IT’S TOO LATE. IT WAS TOO LATE. I jumped and ran and grabbed my daughter and she was crying and telling me, “why didn’t you save me, he told you, it’s too late, you needed to plan for this, it’s too late.”

That was just the first time. That was just a week without sleep. I drove immediately to the ER. They gave me a high dose of Ativan, a sobriety test on a line down the hallway as I sobbed, cried, begged to be able to stay at least overnight.

Nothing would work. I gave up.

Defeated, as I walked away I overheard two nurses to each other.

“That poor girl, she’s so stressed.”

No. Said the other.

“Baby, she’s psychotic.”

Throughout the years, I have looked pregnant women deep in the eyes and told them to reach out if this gets dark. To reach out if this becomes the worst thing that ever happened to you. I have come across women that vaguely imply that they’re questioning having kids and I vaguely imply that it’s awful. That it gets dark.

This is the first time I’ve ever specifically shared any part of the darkest part of it. PPP is incredibly rare, incredibly severe, and impossible to get taken seriously.

I lived that personally.

On this same trip, “the incident” occurred.

We actually joked about something like it occurring. We had been harassed so many times by mediocre white men that it became more about what we would do when it occurred than if it occurred. We joked about which person we’d prefer, it being our retirement plan, and who we might bait among the men who had already come close, ranking them by their proximity to power, wealth, and decision-making systems.

So when it finally DID happen on this trip, was I shocked? No, not that it happened at all. I was shocked at the PERSON who broke the seal, for sure. He wasn't even on the suspect list before that night. We both thought he was happily married, vanilla, standoffish.

Not the kind of guy who brings my assistant back to his room after hitting on her all night, convincing her that he isn’t her superior, giving her the worst oral sex of her life, followed by the worst sex of her life, convincing her to wait until his “pills” kick in, so that he can give her the second worst sex of her life, then falling asleep promptly so she can sneak out of his room. After taking incriminating photos, of course.

Oh, btw, they were both sober.

But I digress.

I, of course, heard this story from her rather immediately. It was salacious and perfect. I laughed so hard I cried. I remembered that he met me, her boss, in the gift shop, mere hours after it happened, and was testing me to see if I knew. I didn’t yet know and was confused. That was hilarious later in the retelling.

But I warned her, this man will burn you. He is the CFO, and you have flown too close to the sun. Even though I knew I “should have” reported this, protecting her meant not doing so. I even lied when directly asked. So for 2 years, it was just a secret and a funny story we laughed about.

Until someone else found out and turned her in. And instead of doing what I did for her, she turned on me, thinking that would protect her. I think he promised her that. I choose to believe that, because otherwise I’m enraged that she lied about me to protect herself.

Because, in the end, there’s more that I could say, but I got paid for an NDA. She got laid off a few months later.

And he kept his job.

Because of my age and perhaps the way I dressed, this often included entertaining a variety of local celebrities, politicians, CEOs and other rich, famous, semi-famous, and people who thought they should or would somehow belong into these categories and spent enough to get themselves into them, at least at our store. You couldn’t pretend, you had to spend.

Now, I grew up in rural Massachusetts where my town was small, my school was small, my childhood was wild and so needless to say, many of these people I found to be generically ridiculous but also, after spending so much time essentially being paid to get them drunk while their wives shopped, rather funny to be around. Especially considering this was the height of the Bush Administration and many of them were scrambling to be heard and feel powerful but also had a sort of kink for not being taken seriously. My forté.

One of my favorites at the time was George Shultz, Secretary of State under Reagan. You might remember him for the near CIA level attack and cancellation of his grandson Tyler Shulz, whistleblower in the Theranos case. George, however, used to throw a Christmas Eve party each year at Neiman Marcus in Palo Alto with his close family, and several of us, all in our early to mid 20s, would be charged with entertaining him and his family as they giggled and shopped the morning away.

He would openly guffaw at celebrity gossip dropped by Perez Hilton. We watched runway shows together and he’d tell me what he would wear if he’d been born a woman then pretend to order items in his size, finding this the most hilarious Dad joke ever, but then laugh harder when I also couldn’t breathe.

But the funniest part? When he learned that I had no idea he was a member of the Reagan Administration, he told me I had to stop because he was about to pass out from laughter.

I guess offering to introduce him to Nancy Reagan, who was coming in later that day, wasn’t going to be necessary.

But then there was the question of what I wore, my gender, and my delegation to the Synod. It’s unfortunate as well that the top nomination from the parishioners was, in fact, for a female clergy, and this, being a Vatican 3, was a resurrgance after the revolt of the laicization of the nuns in Vatican 2. But back to the dress.

In the politics of this government, those looking for promotion will look to the cloud of perceived power and if there is a confusion within go toward the more traditional and comfortable and squash out the entrepreneurial. Those looking for peace or true pastoral care follow the voices of people, but also have no courage. It’s why “credibly accused” always got away with it. And while they may have supported my leadership, they also would never stand up to anything or anyone.

So, to this funeral that no one else would host, plan, participate in or otherwise lead, I dressed in a very conservative black dress with a white peter pan collar by Anna Sui from 2005 or so.

It was then that the first of the letters started coming in.

No one would host this event for this man, and perhaps for the better.

Except when we received the word from above that I would be promoted to. No bishop, no cardinal, no member of the clergy… Heather.

Now there had already been rumors milling through my election as a delegate to the Vatican Synod (the modern version of Vatican 3) that I was “trying to be” a priest or “going to be” a priest, but this process began the more cemented jokes and conspiracy theories. Even during the funeral, the clergy, who wouldn’t host but certainly all attended, were heavily split on how I should dress: laity or clergy.

(How I should dress features heavily in future episodes.)

The funeral went with reverence but condescension. Pray for us, pray for him, Our Father, Holy Mary, Amen. Going through the motions, more skeptical than a service. More like saying you went to the funeral of a pedophile hosted by a forced female priest than a reverent Catholic Mass.

And then: the committal. I had had to ask the very direct question to the Archbishop and above. Are we placing this person into the clergy section, or with the laity? I can hide a funeral, keep it out of the press, but I cannot hide him if he is buried directly under the monuments to the former Bishops people pay their respects to.

It had been quite a few days before I got the answer, which was really quite passive-aggressive... well, he hasn’t been laicized.

So I guess there he is, still receiving the honors of the vow, placed right below the Bishops by a woman who couldn’t get an answer out of any of the men. Is that how it’s always been?

But truly, what would I know…. I, too, have never been laicized.

But anyway.

There is a period of time in which I would have been convinced that we were rich and everything was fine. I was about to be 7.

My mom had a never-ending series of boyfriends, some less alcohol and drug addicted than others. None lasted more than a year except two and one of those two probably was only an alcoholic and I don’t even think hit her. Craig.

Craig was first-generation poor and so had wealthy parents that had likely caused his addictions but didn’t have their own.

I should say that I had very low standards for rich. It could mean food in the fridge or having the heat on.

So probably they were only middle class or average but their house wasn’t a total embarrassment so essentially they were rich.

Anyway I was about to be 7 and I was hardly having a party but we were all together at Craig’s parents’ house which was next to a cemetery with a big hill that we always rode our bikes down.

This particular day the fence between the house and the cemetery was covered in balloons and I could say I remembered why but that would be a lie.

What I do remember is my brother and cousins and such taking the balloons from the fence and letting them all go.

Well all except one because it was about to be my birthday so I decided that this particular red balloon would be my birthday balloon and I think perhaps someone even wrote on it.

I tied it to my wrist and carried it around for the rest of the day and perhaps the next day. It could have been months, it felt like forever.

Until we were called suddenly back home and I turned quickly, startled, and felt the string unravel itself and peaceful lift away.

I panicked a bit. Left my hand outstretched in vain. But as I watched it get smaller and further away I realized that if I had wanted it I would never have let it go.

Rationalized my loss. Turned seven. My mom left Craig. Onto the next.