Answer

If I Can't Have Children, Will I Still Be a Parent in Eternity?

Month after month, or diagnosis after diagnosis, infertility stops feeling like something you are going through and starts feeling like something you are. In a Church that talks about families constantly, that can be an isolating place to sit, and the well-meant advice from people who have children rarely helps.

Yes. Infertility does not remove you from Heavenly Father’s plan for families, and prophets have been unusually direct that no blessing will be withheld from those who are faithful. That is not a softening of the doctrine that children are central to the plan. It is the doctrine’s other half, and it has been repeated by apostle after apostle precisely because the first half causes this pain.

Eternal Truths

God judges by desire where the opportunity did not come. Joseph Smith was shown that the Lord judges people “according to the desire of their hearts” and according to the works they would have done (Doctrine and Covenants 137:9). A lifetime is not the window in which everything must happen.

The plan is longer than a mortal life on both ends. The Family: A Proclamation to the World teaches that you lived as a spirit child of heavenly parents before you were born and that family relationships can continue beyond the grave. Every promise about parenthood has been made with that horizon in view, not with your thirties in view.

Mothering and fathering are not restricted to people with children in the house. Sheri Dew asked the question directly in “Are We Not All Mothers?” and taught that motherhood is a defining part of a woman’s identity whether or not she bears children in this life. Some of the people doing that work best are doing it for children who are not theirs.

What Can Make This Confusing?

After enough years, infertility starts to change how you see yourself. Deficient. Behind. Outside. That is a distortion rather than a diagnosis, and it usually does more damage than the infertility itself does. If your experience has included miscarriage, that is bereavement rather than a medical event, and many people carry it quietly for years because nobody around them treated it as a death.

Questions to Think About

• What have I started believing about myself that no revelation supports?
• Is there a grief here that I have never let anyone treat as a grief?
• Where could I mother or father someone this year, whatever happens next?

What You Can Do

Tell one person the true version this week, including the part you usually leave out. Then find one child who is not yours who needs an adult paying attention, and be that adult. Neither of those replaces what you want. Both are the actual work, available now. The essay behind this Answer goes further into eternity, adoption and the promises made to the childless.

Jesus Christ knows what it is to want something righteous and be told to wait, and He can carry the part of this you cannot explain to anyone.