OK, so here is Our Birth Story. Just so you know, it is still deeply personal - even though I'm sharing it with the entire world. Another paradox of life, I guess. Just please respect it and don't say anything horrible. Or maybe just don't say anything at all. Unless it's something lovely. That I can handle. Here goes nothing...
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Two and a half months preggie on the Sunshine Coast with my Aunty and Uncle.
I think it's about time we share our birth story with y'all. It's not that I haven't wanted to share it. I just think it's taken me the full six months to recover my powers of speech! Kidding, kidding. Giving birth was the most precious thing we've ever experienced, second only to salvation (which is a birth anyway). I don't tend to speak about things that effect me so deeply but birth is so miracolous, so profound, so joyful that it refuses to be secreted away.
Now I promised that this would be a birth story but I'm going to start with something that happened when I first got married that really set the stage. I was all set to wait two years to have a baby. What's the rush after all? We're going to travel, see the world, make a few millions, print our names in neon lights and have the time of our lives. Right? Right! Of course right. What else is a young newly married couple to do? Except that the Lord had other plans. Shortly after we got married I had a health problem and needed to see doctors and specialists, nothing new there. As I was leaving my specialists office one day she told me off-handedly that we needed to do tests "because," she said, "you may never be able to fall pregnant".
There are some moments in life when the whole world stops. This was one of them. I still remember standing in her office, hand on the doorknob and turning back to look at her nonchalant face. What had she just said? I may never be able to fall pregnant? I had wondered how hearing such news would make me feel and I thought I knew. I thought I would be upset, disappointed. I was so wrong. It's not a feeling that can be imagined. Like love, it has to be felt to be realised. I felt broken. Not only broken in my heart but broken as a woman. How could I tell my new husband? He had married me not knowing that I was defective, possibly never able to give him a child. I was less than whole. There began an ache in my womb for the child that I might never carry. It was a very real ache, one that haunted me when I woke late at night or when I sat and thought for too long. Everything changed. As I looked back at that Doctor I noticed that in that split second that the world had stopped it had rearranged itself. Two years of fun freedom with my husband was no longer my pinnacle of greatness. I wanted more than anything to have a baby. Funnily enough the sorrow was not stronger for me, but for Chris. If my body was as broken as this Doctor thought it could be it would be normal for me not to have a child. But to take that away from the man that I loved? No! I couldn't! And yet he had already vowed himself to me. I felt such shame as I walked down the flight of stairs and out to my waiting husband. That was how it felt. Shameful and half-human.
When I told Chris he was as calm as could be. He told me that it didn't matter, he hadn't married me for children – he had married me for me. It sounds good on paper but it just made things worse. I wanted him to cry and hold me and let me cry and we could all be very sad together. Instead his calm made me feel like I couldn't share my disappointment. Instead it became something that gnawed tirelessly at my mind.
But our God is a God of miracles, a God of wonders, a God who delights in proving Himself stronger than all the Doctors! I fell pregnant in May, a short six months after the Specialist had broken my heart.
I suspected I was pregnant when I was only about two weeks along. I felt different, like I wasn't alone and like I was suddenly more beautiful than anything around me. One morning, about three and a half weeks along, I put on a white flowery blouse and pearl earrings. I was washing my hands in the bathroom basin when I looked up into the mirror and I thought, “That lady is pregnant.” Three seconds later I thought, “Wait a second... that lady is me!” I could already see the difference in my face. I remember smiling at myself and putting my hand on my belly. I had a very precious secret.
At the time I was working at a petrol station in the middle of nowhere. Before going to work one day I drove into town and brought a pregnancy test. A double one. I wanted to see the lines twice just to be sure! The next morning, early in the day when the hormones are stronger, I took the test. How I managed to wait that long I have no idea, I was so excited! I remember watching that stick barely able to breathe, and then it appeared – a faint blue line! I gasped! I was flooded with emotion, I was so happy, so scared, so exhuberant! I went back into bed, snuggled up to my husband and thought, “What have we done?”
Chris had always said that when I fell pregnant I was to throw him a beautiful candlelit dinner. And I had to wait a few months so he didn't have to count down the full nine. So I kept my secret to myself. Until that night.
That night I was working late at the garage. All evening I had felt pain in my lower abdomen. I wondered if it was normal, but by the time I closed up at ten thirty I was doubled over with searing pains and I knew something wasn't quite right. I drove straight to the hospital and was escorted immediately to a bed. That night was one of the scariest nights I've ever lived through. An iranian man and a young nurse asked questions, gave me paperwork to complete and then examined me so painfully I can still feel it. They did urine pregnancy tests and fussed over at the table, then the Doctor returned to the bed and said, “Sweetheart, you are not pregnant.” Shocked? An understatement. I knew in my heart of hearts that I was carrying. “Yes I am.” I told him firmly. “No, you're not” and the look in his eyes said 'poor delusional girl'. I insisted enough that he resigned himself to having to confirm his diagnosis with a blood test which I would hear about in the next 24 hours. “If you are pregnant,” he told me. (And I'm thinking, 'see now, I was right') “then I fear it is an ectopic pregnancy. The baby will not survive and you may not either, so you need to urgently get an ultrasound done.” WHAT?! Here I am in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, half an hour down a dusty Queensland road from my farm home and he tells me IF I am pregnant then my baby is going to die. “But,” he said reassuringly, “You are not pregnant. If you were I would keep you here for the safety of your child. So you may go home and take some panadol.”
I drove home at a speed that I will not mention on the internet for fear of being tracked down by the Highway Patrol. It was only the Lord protecting me that night. There are no streetlights on that old country road, only mining trucks and kangaroos that like to total vehicles. I just wanted to be home, to be reassured by my husband that everything was OK. By this time I was distraught at the thought that I had been wrong about being pregnant, that there was no baby. But at the back of my mind was this instinct that could not be silenced.
To be continued...
