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For This Child We Prayed
CHAPTER 3
excerpted from: For This Child We Prayed: Living with the Secret Shame of Infertility

Year of Jubilee is the Year of Grief To Me
"Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the spirit..."
Ephesians 5:18a

February 19, 1997

Dear Children:

The other day, after watching our niece and nephew, your father and I asked ourselves,“do we really want kids?” They wanted to play and we wanted to watch a movie. Shoot,we’d pretty much gotten used to doing things when we wan

Infertility Press: A division of Emperor Publishing is looking for stories of Black and Hispanic People who were, or currently are struggling with Infertility. Pays in copies of books as well as discounted books to contributors. There are no guidelines, simply email your story, poem, or encouraging words to lena@infertilitypress.com. Please be sure to include your name and contact information. Pseudonyms are okay as well, as long as we have current contact info. A letter will be mailed or emaile

In the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, many Hispanics are talking about voting for the lesser of two evils. The hard part is figuring out the lesser evil.

African-Americans aren’t facing the same dilemma, and yet many of those on the far left are also disappointed in President Obama. While most black voters approve of his job performance, there is also frustration that he hasn’t been more attentive to issues such as the lack of economic development in African-American communities, high

The National Association of Hispanic Nurses launched a Mentorship Academy in July 2011 to maintain a formal peer-driven process to help advance Hispanic nurses' educations and careers.

The academy pairs novice nurses with experienced mentors, said Vivian Torres-Suarez, RN, BSN, MBA, director and founder of the Mentorship Academy. "They work together for a year on goals and objectives set by the novice and on achieving tasks related to advancing their career and/or their education," she said.

Tor

Finding "almost laughable" Republican claims that newly drawn electoral districts were not influenced by partisan factors, a panel of three federal judges unanimously ruled that new maps for two districts on Milwaukee's south side violate the Voting Rights Act and dilute Latinos' voting power.

The judges enjoined the state's Government Accountability Board from implementing Act 43 as it stands, but Wisconsin's 130 other newly drawn districts are expected to stay the same.
Act 43 concerned redist

The closest those attending the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce’s (USHCC) Legislative Summit will get to the cherry blossoms now in season is a meeting room, make that many meeting rooms. Entrepreneurs have signed up for a crash course in Washington, D.C., to learn how to influence the players in government who can help Hispanic-owned businesses grow. This includes a new alliance between the USHCC and the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) announced at this conference with the a

The Friends of the American Latino Museum (Friends), a 501(c)(3) created to support the American Latino Museum initiative, surpassed 100,000 followers on Twitter and has accumulated 70,000 fans on Facebook and 67,000 supporters through its website, bringing its total reach to over 237,000 supporters. A renewed energy and hope for the museum is increasing rapidly since the introduction of the Smithsonian American Latino Museum Act earlier this year in the House and Senate. The Smithsonian America

The Republicans are committing political suicide by catering to the xenophobic vote. Assuming that Latinos will vote for the candidate promising the most free taxpayer money shows how out-of-touch the mainstream media and a lot of American politicians from both parties are with voters in the Hispanic community.

If the Republicans would talk about social issues and economic issues and drop the endless ranting about immigration I would almost guarantee they'd receive 60+ percent of votes from Latin

SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age.

This view of bilingual

Employment among Hispanics and Asians in the U.S. has climbed back to levels seen prior to the last recession, while hiring of whites and blacks has lagged behind, a study found.

The number of Hispanic workers reached 20.7 million in the last three months of 2011, up from 19.9 million in the final quarter of 2007 when the economic slump began, according to a report by the Washington-based Pew Hispanic Center, a non- partisan research group. Employment among Asians climbed by about 263,000 during

For years, America’s growing and mobile Latino population helped transform cities such as Atlanta and Las Vegas as well as many smaller communities. But the deep recession slowed this great dispersion, a new analysis shows, raising economic and political implications.

Between 2000 and 2010, the nation’s Latino population jumped 43 percent to 50.5 million, growing especially fast throughout the South and in smaller metropolitan areas in the Midwest and Northeast. The Latino populations more than

Mitt Romney won a landslide victory over Rick Santorum in Puerto Rico last weekend and Santorum is not taking his 75-point defeat lightly.

Santorum, who spent two full days campaigning in the Caribbean island, congratulated Romney on his victory in a press release late Sunday night, but in the same breath accused the former governor of pandering to Puerto Rico's Latino voters by switching his position on making English the official language of every U.S. state.

"Their decision to put political e

While more than half of California's public school children are Latino, they are underrepresented on college campuses, particularly in four-year schools, according to a new statewide study.

The Campaign for College Opportunity's "Latinos and Higher Education" report finds that Latinos are not going directly to college after high school graduation in as many numbers as youth from other groups. It also found these students are not accessing high school college preparation courses as much as studen

NALEO researchers are redirecting their aim to improve Hispanic voter turnout, pointing efforts at the most influential target inside Latino households: the women.

The National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials is using new findings from recently gathered focus groups to retool its campaign for the Hispanic vote, after participants in Houston revealed that a nudge from wives and mothers could be the key.

“We will develop a strategy where we speak to Latinas,” said Arturo Varg

Cosmopolitan, the iconic women’s lifestyle magazine, is launching a Hispanic-focused, English-language version, Cosmo Latina, in May, per Adweek, which reported the news earlier this week. Cosmo Latina aims to attract beauty and fashion advertisers looking for a platform to reach young, bilingual and bicultural Latinas.

Self-identifying bicultural Latinos (of both genders) make up 39% of the total U.S. Hispanic population, according to the 2011 edition of Horowitz Associates’ annual Focus: Latin

The glass ceiling still keeps many women from reaching the top echelons of business or government. But it's something that Labor Secretary Hilda Solis hasn't experienced herself. The 54-year-old former lawmaker, the first Latina to become a Cabinet secretary, knows firsthand that women can overcome barriers. She was born into a large family of limited means in Southern California, the daughter of a Mexican father and a Nicaraguan mother with less than sixth-grade educations. She was expected to

The era of the Hispanic homebuyer is upon us, according to the 2011 State of Hispanic Homeownership Report released by the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals (NAHREP). The 36-page document offers an analysis of data on the Hispanic homebuyer market and points to youth, birth rates, household formation, rising purchasing power, labor trends, educational achievements and desire as key indicators that will make Latinos a major purchase force in the first-time homebuyer marke

It's not obvious what language Will Ferrell's new film, Casa de Mi Padre, is speaking. Everyone's favourite cross-eyed man-child had last-minute cramming sessions in order to be able to drawl the Spanish-language dialogue for the comedy – a sendup of cheesy rural-Mexico telenovelas. But just as Ferrell admits he still can't really hold a conversation in Spanish, Casa looks like it could have communication issues, too. Is it a deft in-joke for the US's movie-mad Hispanic audience? Or does Ferrell

You can't escape Sofia Vergara these days.

She plays the loud Colombian wife with the tight tops and high heels on ABC'stop-rated sitcom "Modern Family."She's in ads for Diet Pepsi and Cover Girl cosmetics. The self-branding Latina, who's been known to split her time between South Florida and Hollywood, even has a clothing line at Kmart.

But is the actress and businesswoman a role model for Hispanic women, or is she helping to perpetuate a stereotype? Feelings are mixed.

Some celebrate her succe

There's a man in Phoenix with a political playbook that has become valuable. So valuable, the Obama campaign believes it could help clinch the president's re-election.

Phoenix City Council Member Daniel Valenzuela is a fourth-generation Mexican-American. Last year, he won a seat on the Phoenix City Council in a traditionally Republican district, and he did it by increasing Latino voter turnout by 488 percent.

"I decided early on that this campaign would be a campaign for social behavioral change