There are some intimately honest e-mails coming in; here’s one:

Your observation that there is something good about giving yourself totally to your spouse struck a chord. My husband and I confronted a case of “unexplained infertility” for seven years. One particularly caring doctor recommended IVF, saying that while she could never guarantee anything, she felt certain that with IVF we would be holding our baby within a year. Those were enormously powerful words. Our parenthood quest had gone on for so long and had become so sad and consuming. IVF didn’t sound right, though, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church had recently been published in the US. I went home and compared its advice against the doctor’s … several times. I am a lawyer, “I’m a professional loophole finder,” I said to myself. My husband was agnostic, so I thought, “I can’t demand that he choose between his hopes for fatherhood and his desire to marry only once.” On my last reading of those passages of the catechism, the words struck me as beautiful, almost poetic, and it occurred to me that there is beauty in obedience for the sake of obedience. Long story short, I vaguely mentioned some hesitance by the Church and my husband cut me off, announcing that we would have nothing of IVF because he didn’t want me to do anything that would violate my beliefs. That’s giving yourself totally! We left the dismal fertility road. Some time later, I heard a story on NPR that led us to adopt a child from China. While we were at the orphanage, that child (… who just this week turned 13, won a tennis semi-final and placed third in a regatta!) took my husband by the hand and pulled him through forbidden corridors to another child, who is now our eldest daughter… (whose credits are too numerous to mention and who is heading to high school in the fall). The next day, my husband told me that he finally understood why we’d been unable to have a child … “because God had our baby waiting for us here.” Our daughters are the most wonderful girls in the world. No exaggeration! What interests me most about that line of yours is this … I, too, was adopted. I remember my mother in an unguarded moment, saying that she thought that her own marriage might have been better had she and my father had biological children. She didn’t elaborate, but I think I understand why she said that. I had begun to wonder the same in fits and then your line made me stop. It must be almost magic to see your spouse in your child, mixed with you. That must be a pretty powerful daily reminder of the love you owe. But it’s also awfully cool to have the daily reminder of a face that doesn’t look like yours. It just reminds you of different things; one is total giving in the physical sense and the other is total giving in, for lack of a better word, the deeper sense. I’m probably not explaining this all that well and I don’t want to take the time to edit because I’ll never send this if I do, but you probably get the point. So, thanks for those words. Thanks for yelling, “Stop!” or at least “Pause!” For what it’s worth, there is no power on earth that could convince our family that we were not always meant to be.