Even Trades.

              They faced each other, outside standing near the park bench.  It was the first time they disagreed, the first real decision as a married couple, that needed to be made. 

And they disagreed.

    Funny thing was, by the time she was a teenager she had decided she wouldn't even have children.  Her relationship with her mother and father, contentious.  Her family, non traditional, dysfunctional even.  With cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents states away there wasn't much to bond with nearby.  She didn't particularly value or look up to her own parents.  They certainly didn't seem very happy or satisfied with their own lives.  Why would she inflict a similar dreary existence on a another person?  The idea of staying single and childless fit into her idea of the path of her life.  

But her teenager self seemed a lifetime away.  Now, she had been married all of one year.  Married just 3 days after her 21^st birthday, she fancied herself mature enough to be a wife.  She had a lot to learn, and she was a sponge.  Nothing in her background prepared her for marriage.  She wanted to learn all that she could, and she knew exactly who to emulate:  Her mother-in-law.  She had spent hours copying her husband’s favorite boyhood recipes.  Her in-law’s bookshelves contained two curious books, both dated from the early 1950s.  The books gave specific instructions on how to be a housewife.  Suggestions like, “Make sure dinner is ready when your husband gets home,” and, “Invest in a very long telephone cord so you can multitask.”  Although she smirked at these archaic suggestions, she took them to heart – it was this type of marital tradition that probably built happy, long, and eternal bonds.  Besides, her in-laws were really the only people knew who had actually been married before they had kids and were still married.

              Around this year mark, they decided together that there really wasn’t any reason not to have a baby.  Not that they would actively pursue getting pregnant…but he had a good job, and he was 7 years older than she was.  They reasoned that they had the basics to provide a baby a good home, and that they just wouldn’t prevent things from happening.  The Lord could decide when to bless them. They knew they wanted kids.  Four seemed like the right number.   She wouldn't even consider having three, due to the fact that one of her best school friends had been a "middle child".  Not as smart or beloved as the oldest, not as cute or cuddly as the youngest; she had observed that the middle child was the forgotten and forever the valley between the  best and the best.  She had grown up an only child, so lonely and out of place.  He was the oldest of four.  Two wasn't enough and she doubted more than four would be doable.  So, four was the goal.  Why not get started?

              But one, two, three months later… nothing was happening.  She began to really see all the other women that had babies at church.  By months 4 and 5, she started see how many teenagers at the mall were pregnant.  It hardly seemed fair – and then the concern crept in.  Maybe they needed to go to her doctor and check things out.  Maybe that case of mumps her husband had as a young adult had affected him adversely in the sperm count department. Maybe the wild days of her “pre-religion” years had somehow messed up her ability to get pregnant.  Off to the doctor they went, just to be sure.

              Over a month’s time the OB/GYN calculated the start and then stop and then days in between her periods.  The normal time to try to get pregnant was ½ way through a cycle…for most women that would have been around day 14.  She felt kinda dumb after, with the doctor’s help, she calculated that she had a longer cycle.  There had been lots of activity during days 13, 14, and 15.  If they were to actually try for a baby, according to her 31 day cycle they should be focusing on days 16, 17, and 18.  Sure enough, they did not know it…but she was already pregnant when she went into the appointment on day 18 so they could sample the environment to see if her inside parts were hostile and killing her husband’s little soldiers.  A couple week’s later she missed her period and the drug store pregnancy test confirmed with double lines that she was expecting.

              They had dinner in a Chinese restaurant that night and dreamed about the little boy or little girl that would be coming in January early in the new year.  This must be what joy feels like, she thought to herself.  The last 2 years had already had so much excitement, change and love that she just couldn’t imagine more.  BUT there was more to come.  She awoke the next day to go to work and made a comment to her husband wondering how she would manage college and a baby.   An offhanded comment from her husband struck her.  “You will be at home, of course.  You aren’t gonna keep going to school, are you?  You were planning to stay home…like MY mom, right?

              She had just completed her application for the REAL university in their town.  She had worked hard to earn a 4.0 and applicants for the degree she wanted had access to huge scholarships and financial support for the clinical degree she desired.  She had done well on the aptitude testing.  She had focused so much on getting pregnant…she had forgotten to plan for the “plan for when you get pregnant.”  As she left for her college-work-study position at her community college – the tension between she and her husband was thick.

              Later at work, she had some quiet time to think.  She thought about being alone.  About how much time she spent alone and feeling alone growing up.  Raised by her single mom, she had longed for a traditional home, brothers, and sisters, and it didn’t take much time for her to make the decision that would stick for over two decades later.  She wanted more than anything in this world, to be a mommy.  This was no accident, no surprise, but a dearly wanted, and wished for blessing.  She wanted to be with that baby, her baby.  She wanted to be all the things for her baby that she had not had access to, during her own upbringing.  When her husband stopped by to have lunch with her, and they faced each other by the park bench near her work…she felt the weight of the calling before her and she conceded that he was right.  She would stop her life and stay home to mom the new life.  That was that.

              She never regretted it.  It was hard but blissful.  Full and challenging.  Beautiful and messy.  Invigorating and exhausting.  But he and she had made what she never really had had – a family.  And they KEPT making that family.   Later, much later she realized she wasn’t prepared, she was too young, hadn’t grown up enough, and hadn’t matured enough.  But, with her husband by her side she felt they could do anything, tackle anything, and create anything.  Twenty-five years later, when they divorced and the family, they created dysfunctional and broken…was when she finally realized exactly how much she had sacrificed to make that family.  They had worked and worked at it…until it just didn’t work anymore.  It was all worth it, no doubt and no regrets.  But her almost 50-year-old self would look back and see the intersection point in which she traded her life, HER life for all the others. 

It was not an even trade.