When I was in my early twenties, I really didn't think that I ever wanted to have children. I wanted to be a business woman, to play on the playground with the "big boys." I wanted public recognition and monetary reward that often comes with big corporate management. I wanted to dress up for work and interact with adults. I thought that earnings and promotions were the definition of success.
Then I met Jeff and got married. In our discussions about building a family, we both agreed that it was something we would want...later. We both had jobs that we thought fulfilled our needs, and in the physical sense of the word, they did. We worked, bought a home, went on vacations. We were free to come and go as we pleased and that suited us just fine. We carried on like this for years, all the while feeling as though we had plenty of time in the future for doing the "kid thing." As I hit the age of 35, we determined that if we were going to have a child, we needed to get going on it in order to beat the biological clock. I became pregnant within the first month of ending birth control. Easy, right? Sure, easy and nothing bad would happen to us because we thought we had been doing everything right. Well, maybe not...
I went to my 12 week doctor appointment feeling sick, tired, pregnant. Jeff accompanied me to what we figured would just be a routine check up. The doctor could not find our babies heartbeat on her doppler so she sent us to have an ultrasound. I wasn't the least bit worried as I had been over to the labor and delivery ward in the hospital just prior to my appointment and had seen the baby moving and kicking. (Oh, the benefits of having a sister who delivers babies for a living!)
The girl doing the ultrasound was a young, beautiful, compassionate, blond. She pointed out our babies strong heartbeat. We saw his legs and arms moving about. She took measurements that verified the dates. Yep, I was 11 weeks 5 days pregnant. Everything looked great as far as the baby's development was concerned. The sweet technician suddenly became very quiet. The kind of deafening silence that lets you know that something is terribly wrong. "This pregnancy is ectopic" she said in a tone that let me know that she didn't believe it herself. "It CAN'T be" I protested, "I'm 12 weeks pregnant!" I had never heard of anyone carrying a live baby in their fallopian tube through an entire first trimester...And why hadn't I had any pain? I thought she had to be wrong and evidently she questioned herself as well because she summoned another tech and my doctor to come verify what she thought she saw.
Of course, they were right. Jeff looked at me, puzzled, and inquired as to what it meant. I told him it meant that we weren't going to be able to keep the baby. That the pregnancy would need to be terminated. He asked what would happen if we didn't terminate. "Then both me and the baby will die." I replied. For him, it was black and white. For me, shades of grey hung over me. Logically, I knew what had to happen, but emotionally, I didn't want to accept it. It just seemed so incredibly unfair. I could see a beautiful little baby on a screen and with all of modern medicine, no one could save him. It just didn't make sense.
Within a half hour, I was being walked into a surgical suite where I knew that the life I was carrying inside of me was going to end. It felt like an execution chamber. I just wanted to be sedated so that I didn't have to think about it any more. "Just put me out," I begged, and thankfully the anesthesiologist understood and didn't make me wait. "It will be over soon." he said. I fell asleep crying and woke up empty. When I was pregnant, I finally felt like I had been doing something truly important (something I had not ever felt in the workplace) and now that had been taken away.
That was March 31, 2000. A few weeks later, Mother's Day came around. I don't remember much about that particular Mother's Day except for a picture that my sister gave me of a mother laying next to a window with a baby on her chest. The caption reads "As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you." (Isaiah 66:13) Tears flowed freely as Jeanna hugged me and tried to console me. Now, 10 years later, I still get tears when looking at that beautiful framed print, but they are tears of joy. HE did comfort me and HE did get me through one of the worst times in my life and there WAS a reason behind the loss of our first child. For without that loss, we never would have gone down the road of infertility treatments that eventually brought us our quadruplets. God knew what he was doing.
Motherhood doesn't begin when you hold your infant in your arms, it begins when you hold that infant in your heart. I became a mom the day I lost my first baby. When I realized how much I already loved him and wanted him, I knew what it felt like to want more for another than I wanted for myself. That baby was in my heart then, and is still there today. May God bless all the mom's out there. Those that are struggling to have a family, those who are struggling to raise a family and those who have yet to embark on the journey to motherhood.
