Thread by @jdflynn

On the feast of St. Joseph, I'll mention the period in which he was most manifestly evident in my life:

We were 23 and just-turned-24 when we got married, we were both in grad school, we had no money and no plan. We lived in a rat infested apartment in DC.

But we really wanted to be parents. So we did the things people do when they want to be parents, but no babies came.

We tried for a couple of years without getting pregnant before we went to see doctors, but eventually we saw doctors, had surgeries, etc. No babies came.

Those of you who have experienced infertility know it can be a very difficult cross.

We found it to be a source of frequent disunity in our marriage. We struggled with it in different ways: Kate experienced the rawness of it, I the impotence, so to speak, of being unable to fix it.

After a couple of years and a couple of surgeries, that all became acute.

We went through a particularly dark period of maybe 18 months in which we trying very much to get pregnant, non-Catholic people were urging us to use immoral means to have a baby, and Catholic people were telling us to just have faith and pray more and it would happen.

Interiorly, though, while we were trying to have a baby, we were miles apart from each other. Lots of things we couldn't say, and plenty of fights in which we said the wrong things.

Basically, we were two fairly immature kids who were presented with a cross and handled it badly.

So here's where St. Joseph comes in. While I felt unsure about how to lead, failed at it a lot, unsure what we should do, and hearing lots of bad advice from all sides, it was St. Joseph who gave the grace of perspective, and some ability to help us see this was unsustainable.

St. Joseph helped me to step into just the role of being a husband better, to be patient, to help us decide that the pursuit of having a baby had become something of an idol, and to call it quits, so to speak.

And that led to a renewal of our marriage, a lot of healing, and then clarity that we might -- like St. Joseph -- become parents by a more circumlocutious route than our friends who had like 6 kids and a minivan while we just doted on our dogs like a couple of oddballs.

And that -- St. Joseph, really -- led us to the adoption of Maxie and Pia, and then the arrival of Davey.

Without him, honestly, I think we would have just not known how to keep our marriage intact.

And from that, he guided us to a family.

So, St. Joseph is great.

Also, we have two ribeye roasts in the oven. Kate is apparently also making salmon, but I won't be eating it.