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We still think so. Like many young adults, we no doubt underestimated the work and expense of raising children and overestimated our abilities to be good parents, but our priorities were right. In God's view, people are more important than things, and we chose to invest our lives in people.
I was unemployed when we got married, and we thought we needed to take a few months to get to know each other first, so for the first six months we used birth control. Looking back, our fear of a too-soon pregnancy seems a cruel joke. The possibility of us becoming parents by accident was remote.
Nevertheless, the method of birth control required careful consideration. Although our doctor was reluctant to share this information clearly with us, we concluded that the IUD, for instance, probably works as much by aborting tiny fetuses as by preventing conception. While we thought it right to take some responsibility to control when we had children, we did not want to inadvertently kill a baby that had been conceived.
After six months, I was led to return to graduate school, and it became even more financially difficult for us to have children. Nevertheless, we had been older when we married and we decided that if God were to give us children, we would, with His help, find a way to provide for them.
We stopped using birth control, waited, got busy with other things--and nothing happened.
In time, we consulted a doctor, and thus began a long and difficult journey. Jackie began taking fertility drugs. She also was required to take her temperature every morning before she got out of bed. A rise in temperature at mid-month signalled that ovulation had occurred, and sex became an obligation. Then came two more weeks of waiting--until a drop in temperature at the end of the month signalled that she was not pregnant and the process must begin again.
We were disappointed--the first month. We were very disappointed the second month. And the third, and the fourth. . . .
Someone has defined hell as hope constantly denied. The daily temperature readings and the repeated monthly disappointments meant that we lived in a state of chronic anxiety--a state that lasted over two years.
We were fortunate. I don't know why. Unlike many couples who go through the same agony, there finally came a day when Jackie's temperature did not drop. Tests confirmed that she was indeed pregnant.
Even that was not the end of our anxiety. After so much hope had been invested in the process, the pregnancy proceeded fearfully but perfectly normally. Not so the delivery.
Jackie went into labour two weeks late, but the labour progressed slowly. After a long night, the monitors showed that the baby had gone into acute distress. We later learned that the umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck. Only an emergency Caesarean operation could save her life.
The next few hours were extremely traumatic. Instead of being present at my daughter's birth as we had planned, I was sent out to wait in the hall. I was told I would be able to hold my baby within a half-hour. The operation was delayed, and the newborn baby was placed immediately in the care of a pediatrician. I was told nothing. For two or three hours, I paced up and down the hall, prayed and feared that both Jackie and the baby were dead. I can only imagine what Jackie was feeling. Finally, our daughter was wheeled out, and I could hold her hand and then go and hold Jackie.
After a brief trip home to catch a couple of hours sleep, I returned to the hospital, only to find that the baby had aspiration pneumonia and had been placed in an incubator, with a 70% chance to live. It grieves me yet that at the times when my family needed me the most, I was not there. It makes me realize how weak and inadequate we humans really are.
Again God was gracious to us. Both Jackie and the baby recovered. We named her Christine Elizabeth, "Christian consecrated to God", which represents our hopes for her.
No doubt the pain we experienced in those months and years has left some scars. We are more protective and insecure parents than we might have been otherwise. Some parents have told us that the place where their children were born evokes feelings of joy and warmth. For a long time after Christine's birth, we could not pass the hospital without a shudder of anxiety for the disaster we had so narrowly avoided. Parenting has been harder than we had expected, but as fulfilling as we had hoped. In spite of the pain, we still think our priorities were right. We are glad we decided to invest our energies in people.
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