The Gift of Courage
Every time I have seen that little “X” on the test bought at the drug store, it’s felt much more like a cross than a plus. After eight children, one would think I’d have gotten over being terrified of taking on another. Every time I discover my life will be once again rewritten, I chafe and I remember back in ’92 when for some reason, I began to pray hard for courage. That month was the first time I found out I would be a mother. It is always the first gift I nag the Holy Spirit for when pushed out of my comfort zone…you will be a mother again and again and again and still more. This was never my plan.
As I agonized this past two months at how our lives would be rocked yet again in September, I cried at God, “Hadn’t I given enough?” “This wasn’t fair.” “Why us again?” and in my darker moods, rewrote Rose Kennedy’s “God only gives us what we can handle” to be “God gives us as much as we are willing to accept.” It wasn't that I did not love this child, it was just I felt tired. I wanted to be able to go into my daughter’s kindergarten room without dragging a three seater stroller. I wanted to enjoy my son’s high school experience and go to his evening shows without Herculean efforts to find multiple babysitters. I wanted to experience a year of changing only one diapered child, something that hadn’t happened since 2002.
Then I went for the first trimester ultrasound. There was a bad reading that got the doctors jumped up. They took blood. They sent me to a specialist. They wanted samples from the placenta and more ultrasounds. Suddenly, the prospect of raising nine children successfully seemed like a breeze compared to raising nine with one having significant handicapping conditions. As of this moment, I still don’t know if the baby has any problems that will be systemic, physical and lifelong that modern medicine cannot fix; that test result is pending.
And so I am in a state of anxious limbo, waiting, hoping, fearing, praying, crying and trying to find a brave face in light of the statistical prospects which are at the very least, not promising. When I told a friend about the situation, she put her arm out and said, “If this baby has a serious problem, this baby will have an asset that most handicapped children don’t get, a large family.” Her words were like balm. They gave comfort and courage. I no longer asked “Why.” This baby would be blessed to be in our family, and we would be blessed to have him or her. At the test where they drew the culture to determine any problems, the baby gave me a gift, a smile with open eyes for the ultrasound. I have the picture. Even if he or she is not healthy, even now, he or she is happy. The child is spiritually whole, even if the body is still in development. That too, makes me braver.
If we look to Mary the Mother of God as our model, all pregnancies are reflective of Advent, a period of blessed waiting and Lent, sublimation of our will to God’s. For most of us though, the tedium of weight gain, morning sickness, doctors appointments, blood tests, restricted diets, screens and having endless speculation about gender based on that day’s wardrobe choice is more reflective of ordinary time. Being not sinless as our Blessed Mother, we shuffle through much of what should be a time of profound understanding that in this state, we are quite close to God, quite dear to His mother.
When pregnant, we mothers are in the process, day by day of surrendering ourselves, our bodies to another. That act, though sometimes done with great joy, and other days, with halting obedience, is also imitative of Christ in his hours of passion. We only get to Easter by enduring all the stations of the cross and the forty days. We only get to having the baby by surrendering to the passage of all forty weeks. I look at the picture of my baby smiling at me, and think I got a little bit of Pentecost early, the gift of courage no matter what the test results may show.
Spiritual Hot Cocoa
Sherry Antonetti is a mother of eight children and a freelance writer of humor and family life columns with prior publications in Absolutewrite, the Catholic Standard, Beaumont Enterprise and the Washington Post. She can be reached at 
