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Contents © 2005
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

CONFESSIONS
June 2005

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ME, MY WIFE, AND GOD

Baby number five is on the way. We talked about it a lot before calling the stork. Baby Four is a tough nut, the toughest yet, and Pregnancy Four was no picnic, either. My wife got frequent bladder infections, suffered back pain severe enough to drive her to the chiropractor a few times, and bled more after delivery than I care to think about. What a woman can take, physically and emotionally, does seem to me to be a pretty compelling reason to hold off on the babymaking. I was ready to take up the cross marked NFP for as long as she needed.

Of course, it's not simply a matter of what a person is comfortable with. (This is how these NFP discussions tend to go - qualifier, then qualifier to the qualifier....) People have told my sister-in-law, now mother to six, that she's "the kind of person who can do that sort of thing." And what kind of person would that be? She's not a woman who has always dreamed of being a wife and mother and nothing else (not that there's anything wrong with that - qualify, qualify...), not a superwoman who doesn't feel the strain of raising six children. She's got a couple of advanced degrees in theology; she'd like to write more than she does. She once suggested this response to that sort of comment: "Have one more than you think you can handle. You might find you're 'that kind of person' yourself."

I was at a party recently where a fellow father told me, "It wasn't until I had my sixth that I really started to get the hang of this whole thing." I didn't get to ask him what he meant, but when my friend Joseph, a father of six, visited, he concurred. "You start to appreciate them more after your sixth," he said. Amazing.

A lot of my own fears about lots of kids are financial. My friend Ernie - also the father of six! - dismissed my talk of college tuition. "Siblings are a much more valuable gift than a full ride to college," he pronounced with the certainty of a man who himself hails from a large family. Joseph agreed again, and went further still: "Don't tell my wife this," he said, "but I think it's good to always be under the gun financially. Good to stay poor." The statement shocked me, but I found myself agreeing. Hadn't I just told my son that if he always chased money, he'd keep chasing it even after he'd got it? Didn't I know in my bones that wealth was not the way to happiness?

And then there was this, a letter I got from a woman I met through a blog: "My husband wasn't religious at all while we raised our kids. We had nine of them, were desperately poor and extremely stressed. Religion was one source of conflict in a general atmosphere of conflict. As a result, my children are not Catholics. So much so that I am thrilled that one is going to church now, even if it is a Baptist church. However, the youngest is different. Who knows why?

"I have an idea why. I was pregnant with her, after I thought I was done with having kids, since it had been three whole years since number eight. I thought I had finally mastered natural family planning. I really, really didn't want to be pregnant. I felt guilty about this, but still really, really did not want to be pregnant. So one day, early in the pregnancy, I was at daily Mass, where all eight or ten of us stood up around the altar. And when the priest lifted up the Host, I suddenly thought, 'That's about the size of a blanket to wrap around the tiny little one inside of me.' And I asked Jesus to wrap Himself around her (didn't know it was a her yet, of course), and wrap her in His love, since her mother was not feeling loving towards her."

Baby Number Nine attends Mass with her mother. She gave up meat for Lent. She seems to accept the mysteries of the faith. The story, says her mother, "is the best explanation I have."

The story is not an argument for having nine kids - another qualification - but it is a beautiful story in which God seems to work something out. And it made me worry a little less; me, with my good job and my big house and my Catholic wife. Ultimately, the decision to have another child involved nobody but me, my wife and, most importantly, God. But these conversations, these examples, may be something of what is meant by a culture of life.

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