The Road to Motherhood (Isn't Always Easy)

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We take so much for granted in this life.

"I am in control of my fertility."

"I will be having     children."

"I plan on having a natural birth... or an epidural... or whatever other birth plan I've devised."

"Of course I'll have a healthy pregnancy- my mother was healthy as a horse and had 5 babies, no problem!"

We forget about the Curse. The pain involved in childbirth. The reality that life is a vapor, often quenched too soon. That God alone is the Giver of Life, who opens and closes wombs without consulting any of us.

Sometimes the trouble is in the beginning. You start to try for a baby, but it never comes. Months turn into years, years into a decade... no pregnancy. You watch your friends who are fruitful and multiplying, attend their showers, babysit for their precious broods.... all the while wondering if your turn will ever come.

Hundreds of parents wait for a year, even two, for the completion of their adoption process and the arrival of their long anticipated child. Vast amounts of money spent, hours of anxiety and hope and excitement as they are forced to simply wait.

Then there are the fertile Myrtles, who can't seem to stop getting pregnant. But even overcoming this first obstacle on the road to motherhood is no guarantee (I speak as a woman who's gotten pregnant "on accident" twice).

Early (and late) miscarriages rob the womb of life. One in every three pregnancies ends this way. The anticipated due date arrives, and you find yourself crying in the bathroom when everyone else has forgotten your loss. You wonder what they would have looked like, what today would have been like if things had gone differently...

Sometimes the second trimester is achieved, and you think you are safe- you've heard the heart beat, know the gender, you're decorating a nursery as your belly starts to swell. Then pre-term labor (the rising Western epidemic) drops like a bomb shell, interrupting all your well laid plans.

You might come home empty armed after all. Or home with a baby, but after months in a hospital- with a little one who will bear the scars of prematurity for the rest of their life.

Even more tragic is the baby lost full-term, due to a cord cutting off air or labor complications. Oh, how the heart of the healing mother must ache as she lays in the mom-and-baby ward with no baby, hearing the cries of infants down the hall...

Or the child lost at six months. Or one year. Or five, or ten, or twenty... Death is the sinister reality of a world gone wrong.

Our hope is in Christ and in the goodness of God. The future world to come, in which He wipes every tear away from our eyes.

And yet the road right now is hard.

If your road to motherhood was easy, don't feel guilty. Thank God! Rejoice in His kindness, and delight in your precious babies.

Just please don't forget that it doesn't work that way for all of us. We don't resent you (though at times, we struggle with envy), but it is painful to listen to complaints of the woes of morning sickness, or the trials of your third trimester, or the agonies of your uncomplicated delivery. The annoyance you feel towards your house-full of children, the piles of diapers, your lack of "me" time.

May God give us grace to complain a little less, and to rejoice in Him a whole lot more. To never forget that life is always a miracle, and always precious. To be sensitive to the women around us who long for what we just take for granted.

May we seek to ease and encourage and love the women whose road is harder then ours. To offer compassion, to show sensitivity, to weep with those who weep.

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 Linked with: Raising Homemakers, A Wise Woman Builds Her Home, and Women Living Well.