Unplanned Parenthood

I’ve got all these thoughts on babies and “openness to life” floating around in my head. Having two kids so closely together has sort of lumped us into the “large families” category, even though two isn’t really that large. But of course if we managed to crazily produce two within 12 months of each other, who knows what madness we’re capable of!

Although I’m passionate about natural family planning (NFP), going into long explanations about trying to live a life, to have a marriage, that is open to life is never something that I’ve wanted to get into in the fleeting situations that bring up most of the comments about our intended family size. I usually just smile and say something affirmative when people assume we’re trying for a lot of kids, but lately I’ve started to be honest. And my honesty seems to be putting people into a position of not knowing what to say next. How many kids do we want?

We don’t know.

Crazy, isn’t it? In a culture that is so heavy about planning your [perfect] family, we’re operating without a plan.

Sure, numbers get bandied about. I always liked the idea of having four kids. Two girls and two boys. David, meanwhile, teases me about double digits. But we’ve never come up with a number at which we’ll look at our family and say “now it’s complete”. I don’t think we ever will. It sounds like the opposite of everything my organized, plan-loving heart wants, but it’s actually very freeing to not have this all planned out. I am too easily trapped by my own plans. I don’t shift gears that well and often have to remind myself that a change is ok. So planning NOT to have a plan actually works great for me, because it makes it easier for me to handle reality.

My pregnancy with Emily did rock my confidence with how much I thought I knew about my body. I’d had a choice to make – follow the advice my instructor had given me, prior to Walter’s birth, if I wanted to keep using the method to prevent pregnancy during that tricky period after birth/breastfeeding, or take a gamble in assuming things were back to normal before they were. But you know what? A surprise pregnancy at a time in life when most people would’ve said having kids was the dumbest thing ever was NOT the end of the world. There are moments when being a mom is so utterly exhausting and thankless that it feels like the end of the world, but now that this first year and chapter of “two under two” is drawing to a close it’s getting better & better. I’m glad that God had other ideas to my more rigid plans on child spacing. Emily took all the broken pieces of last year and made them work together, providing our family with a way of staying together while giving David the chance to finish his PhD. When I look at how everything has worked out so far it is so clearly God’s planning, not ours, just in the perfection of each little event that had to happen at just the right moment in time.

Crazy, messy life but totally worth it -- and hard to believe that was almost a year ago!!