How We Named Our Daughter

On the morning of December 24, 2023, we were holding hands while attending Mass at John’s parents’ parish in Madison, Wisconsin. The gospel reading that morning, the Fourth Sunday of Advent, was the Annunciation—when the angel Gabriel announced to Mary that she would conceive a child by the Holy Spirit:

the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God. And behold, Elizabeth, your relative, has also conceived a son in her old age, and this is the sixth month for her who was called barren; for nothing will be impossible for God.

For nothing will be impossible for God. At that moment, we squeezed each other’s hand, the way we’d squeezed each other’s hand many times before whenever the stories of Sarah and Abraham or Elizabeth and Zechariah—couples miraculously blessed with a child after many years of infertility—were read aloud in church.

The squeeze was meant to silently convey a sense of hope that God might still bless us with a miracle after a decade of infertility.

By that point, of course, we had little rational basis to think that wish would come true. Married in the spring of 2013, we’d always hoped for a large family, but God seemed to have other plans in mind. 

After years of unexplained infertility, Lauren was diagnosed with endometriosis in 2017. We were told of the widely cited statistic that couples with that condition still have a 50 to 70 percent chance of having a child. Our Catholic doctors, who attempt to address the underlying causes of infertility through restorative medicine called Natural Procreative Technology, said the chances would be higher with treatment. By the fall of 2022, Lauren had undergone three laparoscopic surgeries for endometriosis, and she also endured years of taking hormonal supplements to increase the odds of pregnancy. By Christmas 2023, we thought we had run out of time. We had never had a positive pregnancy test, and the longer infertility persists, the less likely a couple is to ever have biological children. It was hard to avoid the conclusion that we were simply among the 30 to 50 percent who would never have a biological child.

We felt, perhaps paradoxically, that even though infertility was the heaviest cross in our lives, our marriage had been a decade-long honeymoon—wonderful years spent with family, friends, 10 godchildren, and each other. But after much prayer and discernment, we had decided that it was time for the honeymoon phase to end by trying to start a family through adoption.

Adoption is a beautiful gift that brings goodness out of tragic circumstances—a gift that has already blessed our extended family. But we kept delaying serious plans for adoption because the process can be stressful, and we were concerned stress could contribute to infertility. The year 2024 seemed like a natural deadline for us. John would turn 39 in January, and when life expectancy was shorter, some adoption agencies would not let prospective parents older than 40 adopt. Even today, when birth mothers typically choose adoptive parents in cases of domestic infant adoption, they reportedly favor relatively younger parents. And with each of us approaching an age when fertility naturally declines more steeply (Lauren would turn 36 in the spring), the time seemed right to adopt.

Then a series of surprising events occurred. 

On December 26, we got a glimmer of hope from Lauren’s doctor. “[Y]ou may finally be ‘healing’ since you aren’t as stressed,” Dr. Christine Hemphill wrote in a message to Lauren, who felt less stressed since leaving her government-relations job in August to focus on the adoption process. Dr. Hemphill was trying to make sense of the results of a routine blood test checking to see if hormone levels were in normal range to sustain a pregnancy. The bloodwork indicated that her body was naturally producing enough hormones by itself, and the supplements could stop. 

It was just a small glimmer of hope, and we proceeded full speed ahead pursuing adoption. On January 20, a couple of days after John turned 39, we finished all the paperwork for our agency’s adoption profile webpage, where birth mothers who intend to place a child for adoption could read and watch a video about us and why we hoped to adopt.

The night we finished that paperwork, Lauren’s younger sister Hannah called her with some amazingly good news: She was pregnant for the first time after she and her husband had been hoping for a child for more than a year. Hannah had been waiting to share the news with Lauren since taking a positive pregnancy test on Christmas Eve.

One week later, the night of Saturday, January 27, we received the best news of our lives.

Lauren came home from a ladies’ book club and nonchalantly told John to come upstairs to open a belated birthday present. John thought the gift was probably winter gloves, maybe a belt, and said he’d be right up from the basement after finishing watching an episode of Band of Brothers.

At 11:50 p.m., we sat down together on our loveseat, and John opened a white box tied in a white satin bow. The gift was exactly what he’d wished for when he blew out his birthday candles nine days earlier. 

“This can’t be true,” John said, as the positive pregnancy tests fell from his hands and he burst into tears. After several minutes of hugging and crying and silently praying, he said Lauren being pregnant at the same time as her sister was like the story of “Mary and the mother of John the Baptist—her cousin … ”

“Elizabeth,” Lauren said.

We are able to provide exact quotations because Lauren had placed her iPhone across the living room (right next to the print of Fra Angelico’s The Annunciation we’d purchased on our five-year anniversary trip to Rome) and recorded the whole thing. Right before realizing he was being recorded, John, pretending as though he hadn’t lost his composure, stood up and said: “I’m going to go finish Band of Brothers.” (This was a joke, John swears.) And then, with a laugh: “Did you take a video of this whole thing? You’re such a millennial.”

Months later, we found out our baby was a girl. Within hours, we settled on the only name that seemed fitting: Mary Elizabeth. 

For nothing will be impossible for God.

Every human life is a miracle from the moment of conception, but Mary Elizabeth’s arrival in the eleventh hour for us feels a little extra-miraculous—the answer to years of prayers from us, our family, and our friends on earth and in heaven. It would take many thousands of words to thank everyone we know has been praying for us and thousands more to thank those who have done so without our knowledge. But we would be remiss if we didn’t note we are particularly grateful for the intercessory prayers of St. John Paul II and Mary our Blessed Mother.

We think Our Lady has always been watching out for us ever since we met on a blind date that occurred by happenstance on the Feast of the Annunciation. On Easter in 2022, we visited Lourdes, France, a Marian holy site known for miraculous healings. And the very month before Mary Elizabeth was conceived after a decade of infertility, we participated in our diocese’s novena to Our Lady of Guadalupe for couples struggling with infertility, miscarriage, and early infant loss.

Throughout our marriage, we also drew close to Mary and Jesus through the rosary. In 2022, a friend of ours who had been praying for us for years told us we should see if Father Roger Landry (who was named a monsignor this week) would pray with us with a rosary given to him by St. John Paul II because two other couples experiencing infertility had children not long after praying with the relic. Before John’s office Christmas party in New York that year, we met with Father Landry at the Church of Notre Dame in Morningside Heights, thinking we were going to pray a decade of the rosary and then head off to a deli for lunch. After Father Landry prayed with the rosary for us, he placed it in our hands and said we should keep it.

We were overwhelmed by his generosity and insisted we could not accept it. 

Father Landry persisted, and offered a compromise. 

“You can give it back to me at the baptism,” he said.

Over the following two years, that rosary provided us much comfort and grace. John will never forget, after Lauren told him she was pregnant, clutching that rosary the entire night as he laid in bed wide awake—totally in love with our poppy-seed-sized baby and wondering if we’d get to experience life as a family of three on earth for decades, or only hours. We both clutched that rosary a month later during the worst 24 hours of our lives when we thought our baby might be dying in a miscarriage that turned out to be a condition that was ultimately benign. And John will never forget clutching it during Lauren’s long labor and somewhat dramatic delivery.

Within minutes of being born and placed on her mother’s chest, Mary Elizabeth found herself being peppered with questions from her journalist father. “How do you like air?” he asked. “How are you real?” Mary Elizabeth’s mother had, of course, already answered that question with her first words she repeated after the birth: “Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus.”

We intended to give the St. John Paul II rosary back to Father Landry when he baptized Mary Elizabeth last month at the Basilica of St. Mary in Alexandria, Virginia, but we were unable to do so. We had already shipped the rosary back to Father Landry immediately after Mary Elizabeth was born—at Father Landry’s request. He had found another couple who needed it.