Being a Momma

I am going down memory lane for the next few posts here. Hope you enjoy the trip with me.

After a few years of marriage, Hubby and I decided to stop taking family planning measures and to try for a baby.

However, unlike the many women I nursed and took care of, I did not fall pregnant so easily. This was a shock to me because even before I had married, the Lord seemed to have promised me sons when a particular passage spoke to me.

It brought me much heartache to nurse women who were falling pregnant so easily, some of whom were giving up their offspring for adoption, for various reasons. I still remember one little chappie called Jack. His parents couldn't keep him because they were both of a different race and culture and so they named him, loved him for a day, gave him toys, and signed the papers to go. I would nurse him each night I was on duty while the paperwork was being finalised, I dreaded the day, which inevitably came, when his cot would no longer be in its usual spot in the nursery.

When my friends fell pregnant, cooing over their babies, my heart hurt and I envied them. Yes, I envied them. It added to my low self-esteem when I discovered I could harbour such feelings towards my own friends. I felt incomplete and not sufficient a woman.

I would cry out to the Lord much like Hannah did in the Bible. I alternated between asking God to hear me and telling Him to have his way. It was a time of huddling close to Him and to Hubby. It helped a little that Hubby was patient. But how could he understand?

There was no cause for my primary infertility, as they called it. Hubby checked out great and I had a mild case of endometriosis which wasn't enough to do anything to me. This, together with monthly reminders added to my sense of poor self worth which the Lord had to deal with.

Being offered IVF (those days it wasn't called IVF) was tempting. I was staff on the British National Health Service and it would have been free. But we decided to hold off for a while so we could think more about it. We ended up not thinking more about it for another four years!

During that time, my best friend fell pregnant and asked me to be present at her delivery. I was a good midwife and a good friend in other aspects. But I could barely even look at her bulging belly. Could I consider being there to help with her birth?

Thank God, in the end I did go. And whilst I did not actively take part in the delivery, just being there began the healing.

I began to enjoy not having children - we could get in the car and go anywhere anytime for short breaks and do whatever we wanted with ease. I could enjoy other people's children, baby sitting for them, and giving them back at the end of it all.

We began to honestl y be able to say, "Lord, if you want us to have children, we could be on the highest dose of the pill and we would still have children. If You didn't want us to have children, we could try and try and nothing would happen. You are Lord."

And then it happened. God has a sense of humour. I'll tell you more in the next post how things worked out.