Last night I had dinner with two church friends. We are part of the same discipleship group, and we really are a good match: We all are boy moms with a son under 2, we are all working moms, and though we are very different in personality, we share similar values and sensibilities.
One is currently about 34 weeks pregnant, the other is already trying for a second child, and me? David and I aren’t trying, because we can’t–at almost 16 months postpartum, I still haven’t gotten my period back, and there are zero signs of ovulation. When I told my church friends that I was starting to feel anxious, wondering if I am infertile, one friend asked me, “You want more kids?”
“I want two more,” I said definitively, surprising myself. Before I had mentioned having three kids, but that was more like a half-joke. This was the first time I had seriously declared out loud that I want to expand my family. How I’ve changed. What is happening to me?
This is a weird period. It’s that season when everyone in a similar life stage as you are already pregnant with their second, or trying, or determinedly not because they have decided they are good with just one. I see more people in the first group. Just like when I found out I was pregnant and I started seeing pregnant ladies everywhere, I am now seeing women pregnant with their second everywhere– on social media, at church, in friend groups, at grocery stores– and what I feel isn’t jealousy or envy, but rather, waves of longing that roil inside me, a discomforting sensation that strangely feels a lot like nausea.
I tried to explain to David why I feel this way, and I found I didn’t really have the words. The desire is almost primal, as instinctive as wanting water. It comes especially when I’m with Tov, watching him burst out of his baby stage into the toddler stage, like a little chick flapping out of its shell, ready to hop and chirp and skip the moment it’s out into the world. Tov graduated from crawling to walking so suddenly, lifting himself overnight from his knees and hands to stomping around the house, his little feet going boom boom boom and his little hands already almost reaching the kitchen countertop and his energy as loud and rambunctious as his cackles of laughter. Almost overnight, too, two more teeth popped beside his two lower teeth. And just as suddenly, he was saying his first real word: “This! (pointing at the remote control he spies on top of his book shelf) This! This!” When he scrambles away from my arms to grab some other random obsession he spies, I see the back of his head, full of tufty brown hair that sprouted in the last several months.
As I watch Tov grow into a full-fledged boy, no longer a baby, I feel that wave of nausea-like sensation. I miss him. I miss his two-teeth goofy baby grin. I miss his army crawl. I miss his softer, gentler newborn cry. I miss his bald head with the hilarious patch of hair on the front. I miss the person he was two minutes ago. I am constantly missing him, nostalgic for the present even before it slips into the past. No, don’t go yet, I want to say. I haven’t fully enjoyed all of you yet.
It’s strange. I miss the previous Tov, but I love the current Tov more. My love for him keeps growing, yet so does the nostalgia.
Motherhood has radically changed my perspective on children. Psalm 127 describes children as arrows in one’s quiver, a heritage from the Lord, a reward. I never really got what that meant, and it’s still a surprising metaphor to me, likening children to arrows of a warrior, but like the assurance a warrior feels in battle with a fully-loaded quiver, Tov brings me assurance. Motherhood has secured my feet as I walk my life. It has sunken them into the earth with the weight of parental responsibilities, but also toughened them, strengthened them against the thistles and creatures in my path. I am less flighty, less idealistic, less dreamy as I was in my youth, but also more content, more secure, more assured, not because I now have the identity of a mother, but because that’s what happens, I think, when you love and invest in a God-given life that requires sacrifice of sleep, time, self-interest, comfort, and convenience.
I tried to describe that to David during our walk, but very inadequately. “Would you be sad if we couldn’t have any more kids?” I asked.
David made his characteristic “let me rustle my brain for a few seconds to think” noises and then said glibly, “No.” He gestured at Tov, who was looking up at us with wide eyes from his wagon. “I mean, look at him. He’s perfect. I’m content if it’s just Tov.”
Yes, he’s perfect. So wouldn’t one or two more of this perfection be even more wonderful?
“I would like to have a second kid, but I can’t imagine having another kid, just like I couldn’t imagine having Tov before we had him,” David said. He was also getting anxious thinking about the added burdens and stresses of expanding our family. As of now, he was just grateful to have Tov, he said, mentioning friends we know who are struggling with infertility.
I am too. Grateful. Because before we had Tov, I found children annoying and inconvenient. Because after we had Tov, I found he can indeed be annoying and inconvenient, but even when he’s waking me up from a deep sleep, or disrupting my plans, the feeling of wellness and fullness when he reaches for me far supersedes those irritations. Because less than two years ago, I envisioned a future free of all this, planned for it, and then God surprised me with something I never asked for.
But am I content? Why this slow-burbling anxiety that I won’t be able to have another?
I don’t think it’s bad that I desire more children, when the Bible itself declares that “happy is a man whose quiver is full of [children].” As always, the human heart is complex, stitching complications into good and healthy fabric. The desire for more is natural, God-made, healthy, but I’m punching holes into that desire with fear and distrust that essentially questions the character of God: I’m grateful to God for giving me this unexpected gift, but I can’t help wondering…maybe God will intentionally withhold more such gifts to me because I hadn’t wanted them in the first place.
Because sometimes I see God as an exacting judge. “Well,” I imagine Him pronouncing, in his judicial robes, “I’ve given you this measure of happiness, so that you’ve learned your lesson for poo-pooing motherhood, but now I’m sentencing you to the same measure of sadness, so you once again learn your lesson for poo-pooing motherhood. That’s what you get for being selfish, but see, I’m being rather generous, since I could have never given you a child at all.”
Or I imagine him as an ambitious coach. “OK, Sophia,” I imagine him huffing, blowing his whistle, “You’ve run 200 laps. But here are 200 burpees you need to do, because it’s good for you, it’ll make you stronger to experience the pain of infertility, because then you can truly bless them all, the mothers and the childless! For the good of the Kingdom, go go go!”
What a twisted vision of God. All my life, God has shown me boundless grace and compassion and empathy, and has even given me a glimpse of how far and wide and deep his father’s heart is through my own mother’s heart, and yet, at only 16 months postpartum, before even the first real roadblock to fertility, I let the serpent plant a seed of doubt in my heart: Did God really…? Is God really….?
If God really is the all-compassionate, all-loving, all-knowing Father he’s revealed to me, can I not just rest in that? Rest not just in the hope that he will answer the desires of my heart, but rest also in the hope that even if my heart’s desires aren’t fulfilled, he will surprise me yet again with something just as unexpected, just as wonderful, something just as intricately and uniquely designed to pull me down to my knees in worship, exalting him for who he is?
In a way, David is right: We should be content. We should be grateful. But I noticed that I was already trying to precondition my heart to be “content” with Tov by listing all the benefits to having only one child: We can devote all our resources and time to Tov; we don’t have to look for a bigger house; I don’t have to worry about how having more kids will impact my career; my body won’t sag and stretch more from more childbearing (though I’m sure it will from aging). I was reciting this list to myself to in a way brainwash myself into “gratefulness” and “contentedness.” But that’s not genuine contentedness. That’s distracting myself from my discontentedness.
What does it look like to be truly content, even as I allow myself to desire and ask for more?
Writing for Sophia 