My personal earthquake

This April, in the first days after my husband and I learned a baby was coming to us—certain and irreversible as a tracked train—I cried for several days. Instead of the jubilation endemic in pregnancy-test TV commercials, I took the news as a kind of death knell. Ah, now, I said to myself, I have an unchangeable rendezvous with the curse of God: the pangs of childbirth, the terrifying circumstance God reserves for the most frightening judgment metaphors in the Bible.

And beneath this supreme terror, fell the others. I like to call them the “nasty nevers”: Now I will never write a book. I will never have another job. I will never be skinny. I will become one of those unhappy women who never talks to other adults.

My own reaction astonished me. As a firm believer in all the robust tenants of healthy family life—and particularly in the humanity of the tiniest people: babies at the embryonic stage—I had expected to greet the news of pregnancy with joy. I have cherished the dream of raising children for years. I love families, especially big ones, and have long aspired to motherhood as life’s most creative vocation. Why, then, the sudden dread?

It was partly hormones, of course, and partly selfishness, and partly the natural shock that accompanies any huge change. I was living something TV never talks about: Even the happily married, secure woman who trusts God needs time to adjust to the idea of having a baby. Not three days. Nine months.

But in those three days of enormous apprehension—more days, if I’m realistic—I knew God was giving me a blessing I could receive no other way. It was a window into my generation’s views about childbirth and abortion.

Like other Christian teens growing up in an increasingly godless America, I had spent my afternoon rides on the school bus urging girls my age not to get abortions. But now I suddenly understood, on a personal level, the impulse that says, I should be able to control every aspect of my health. I should be able to go to the doctor and reset my life. This personal earthquake led to another realization: Just as it was for Jesus’ mother Mary, the gift of motherhood would not bring me unadulterated joy. It would pierce my soul with a host of possible pains. My personal feelings would not always incline me to this holy calling. I had to rely on something much firmer: the words of God.

Children are a blessing from the Lord. Our baby—who we nicknamed “Kumquat”—is a real person. Jonathan hung our first ultrasound image of Kumquat in the corner of the bedroom mirror. I still look at it, then at my belly, and think, Are you really in there?

He or she really is. At this stage, when Kumquat is so tiny we can hardly feel him or her kick, we trust God. He says He knit Kumquat together. He has purposes just for Kumquat. Day by day, He helps us believe.