The Biggest Update of Them All

As I mentioned in the previous post, life has not slowed down since we returned from our family vacation in Italy this summer. In addition to moving to a new house AND bidding on our next international post, we have a 3rd major life update to share with you, actually the biggest of them all!

One evening in Venice, we got the kids food, got them settled in our Airbnb with TV and a phone to contact us in case of emergency, and then Don and I snuck out for a date at a restaurant just a couple minutes down the street. Actually, not a street, I should say “down the canal”, which was infinitely more fun! We had a lovely dinner overlooking the water, and chatted about a fear that had been on my mind the last few days…I thought I might be pregnant. This was NOT something we had planned, and we spent quite a while talking about all this might mean for our future, should it turn out to be true. After dinner we walked back to the kids and got them tucked into bed. And then, in that little Airbnb bathroom overlooking a canal in Venice, Italy, I took the test I had picked up at an Italian pharmacy earlier that day. It was immediately and undeniably positive. I stumbled into the bedroom to tell Don, and we both laid on the bed, trying to absorb this news in the midst of our best ever family vacation. I cried.

As all of our readers know by now, Don and I are both devout practicing Catholics, which means we follow the Catholic Church’s teaching on NO contraception or sterilization procedures of any kind. We follow natural family planning methods, which have worked for us almost 100% of the time in our 14 year marriage. We’ve been able to conceive when we wanted to conceive, and avoid when we wanted to avoid. All 4 of our current children were planned. But we HAVE slipped up, just twice, both times in the last year. I don’t know if its the stress of this wild crazy life or what, but after having a perfect record for 13 years, somehow we’ve gone off the rails 😂.

I also found out I was pregnant just about 4 months after moving to Ghana, before we had even finished unpacking our stuff from the States. That one unfortunately ended in a miscarriage with an absolute myriad of unending complications. That story is an entire book in itself, and perhaps I will feel ready to write it someday. For now, I will just say that it involved massive hemorrhaging, not one but TWO emergency D & C surgical procedures, and an additional hospital admission to receive IV tranexamic acid, a medication to stop bleeding. The entire process lasted weeks and occurred in the midst of us still trying to adjust to living in West Africa.

I mention that period of life just to provide more context into our feelings about this new pregnancy. Everything in me screamed “no.” I can’t do that again. So many thoughts racing through my head. That I would have to tell the staff at the embassy med clinic, who had held my hand through the catastrophe of last year. How hard would they judge me for allowing myself to get pregnant AGAIN, less than a year later? I would have to march right back into the local Ghanaian OB clinic where I had had the ultrasound to discover the miscarriage and both D & C procedures. Though the staff there were always very kind and I actually like the clinic itself, I had had not one single positive experience there. And I didn’t want to go back.

We already have the MOST kids of anyone at the embassy (tied with another family who also has 4). I knew I would have to face the judgement (though never said out loud), of many who would think our life choices were absolutely insane. The timing of this pregnancy is also a huge challenge in and of itself…the baby will be due just 2-3 months before we are scheduled to move out of Ghana and to our next post. Add to all this the fact that our kids are ALL now school age, and we are years out of diapers, night wakings, toddler tantrums, and all the “hard” of those first few years. I have been enjoying this phase of having “older” kids so very much, and when I think of the long nights and of having a baby attached to me again 24/7, I’ll admit, it does make me panic a little. For all these reasons and more, this pregnancy news was a hard pill for me to swallow.

All of that being said, I do still, without a sliver of a shadow of a doubt, believe that the Catholic Church’s teachings concerning conception and family planning are 100% morally right and true. Never ONCE, including now, do I feel that these teachings infringe on my rights as a woman, or that they are draconian, too strict, or not “with the times.” Never once, including now, have I regretted our choices to follow these teachings. Something can be morally right AND hard at the same time. In fact, isn’t choosing what is right often also the hard choice? Don’t we teach our children that? Do the right thing, even when it’s hard? Despite the surface level me that struggles to accept all the “hard” that this pregnancy brings, deep down in my soul, I am very, very much at peace. Yes, our choices have brought us to a difficult path, but we never compromised the integrity of our souls, we never betrayed our faith and our beliefs in the name of making life easier. As my favorite priest, Fr. Michael, back in Panama City, Florida always used to say, we still know “Who we are and Whose we are”, and that matters more than all the comforts of the world.

In a way, I almost think I needed this situation to remind me of that. Away from our strong Catholic communities back home, it is easy to feel the pull of the world, to put all your focus on traveling as much as you can, seeing as much as you can, doing as much as you can. Traveling with a baby is going to be much, much harder. And again, one of those negative thoughts I had was about that very thing. I selfishly though “ah man, but I want to do more vacations like the one we just did! Now those vacations are going to cost even MORE and be a lot more work.” But then I heard God speaking to my soul…is THAT the point of life? Is the whole goal and purpose of life to travel as much as you can? Maybe for some. But we have a much deeper purpose…to know, love, and serve God in this life so we can spend eternity with him in the next. Eternity with God is infinitely better than traveling to every single country in the world, and if this baby needed to happen to remind me of that truth and keep me on track, then it’s the best thing that has ever happened to me.

This pregnancy is also a beautiful reminder that, in a culture that strives to remain as comfortable as possible and to avoid any discomforts, inconveniences, and sufferings like the plague, we as Christians are actually called to EMBRACE sacrifice. “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24). In a unique way, motherhood is actually an echo of Jesus’ sacrifice. Just as Jesus said “This is my body, which is given for you” (Luke 22:19), mothers are asked to give up their bodies for the sake of another. Shockingly, the due date for this baby is March 26th…this year, that is Good Friday itself! What clearer message could there be that this pregnancy, this baby, is a call to Don and I to deny ourselves, take up our crosses, and embrace God’s will for our family.

For anyone who either doesn’t know the Catholic teaching on contraception or thinks it sounds absolutely nuts in the 21st century, here’s the Cliff Notes version of WHY we hold that stance, and always will. It starts with what the definition and purpose of marriage actually is. One of my favorite paragraphs in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) states it this way:

God who created man out of love also calls him to love–the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being. For man is created in the image and likeness of God who is himself love. Since God created him man and woman, their mutual love becomes an image of the absolute and unfailing love with which God loves man. It is good, very good, in the Creator’s eyes. And this love which God blesses is intended to be fruitful and to be realized in the common work of watching over creation: ‘And God blessed them, and God said to them: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it'” (CCC, 1995, para. 1604)

It’s beautiful. God is the ultimate Creator, and wants us, made in his image and likeness, to create LIKE Him and WITH Him. God, being love itself, has also shown us what love, in its truest, purest form, looks like when He sacrificed His own son on the cross for us. In the same way, husband and wife are called to love one another totally, fully, and completely by giving their ENTIRE selves to each other. God held nothing back from us, we are to hold nothing back from each other. And that includes our fertility. When we use contraception or have a medical procedure that renders us infertile, we are saying to each other “I love you. And I will give you all of me forever…EXCEPT for this part of me. That part, I am unwilling to give to you.” Contraception and sterilization are so widely accepted as normal in our society today, no one even thinks about this teeny tiny lie we are telling our spouse with our body. At the same time, we are telling God that we reject that part of his image and likeness, the Creator part. We are both rejecting his command to be fruitful and multiply, as well as showing him that we are unwilling to sacrifice ourselves totally to His will, as He did for us on the cross.

The Catholic Church also teaches that the entire purpose of sex is two-fold: it is meant to be unitive (YES, it is absolutely meant to be pleasurable, fun, and to bring us closer to each other) and procreative. Sex is for pleasure AND for making babies; those are its two functions, and they cannot be split one from another. Interestingly, when we do try to “divorce” these two functions, keeping the pleasure one while blocking the procreative one, we end up more likely to…actually divorce. You would think it would be the opposite, if we’re keeping the fun and losing the responsibility, but it is as if somewhere deep inside us, subconsciously, we know we have taken something good…and broken it. According to the National Survey of Family Growth (NFSG), which analyzes large scale federal data, including data from the CDC, NFP users have a divorce or separation rate of 9.6 to 14%, while those who use various contraceptive methods have a divorce rate of 14.4 to 40% (Fehring & Manhart, 2020). According to research in the Journal of Divorce and Remarriage, those who practice NFP reduce their chances of divorce by 40-58% (Fehring & Manhart, 2023). Historical data is even more eye opening. The FDA approved the first contraceptive pill in 1960; the divorce rate then immediately DOUBLED from 1960 to 1980 (National Center for Health Statistics (U.S.) Division of Health Resources Statistics, 1983). It is truly shocking how much the “freedom” offered by contraceptives and the option to forego the sacrifice part of marriage has led to married couples being profoundly more UN-happy.

I know we are living out the stereotype of the big Catholic family with way too many kids. I know people often judge those families, and probably view the moms as poor women who are just used as breed horses by their husbands, then left to care for all those kids, giving up the chance of a successful career or “making something of themselves.” I’m here to tell you, nothing could be further from the truth. We BOTH chose to love each other truly, totally, and unconditionally, to hold nothing back from each other or from our Creator. Motherhood, though often extremely difficult, exhausting, and even filled with drudgery and boredom, is a higher calling than any career in the world. I say this as I’ve dealt with a stomach bug, lice, moving, bidding, throwing a 5 year old birthday party, a broken washing machine and 1st trimester pregnancy all in the last 2 weeks. Ya’ll…I KNOW it’s hard and not as glamorous as most careers!! I know this to the marrow of my bones. But knowing that I am shaping human lives, teaching them their purpose, teaching them to serve others and improve this world, teaching them to know, love, and serve God, and guiding them hopefully to eternity beyond this life someday…that has more beauty, meaning, purpose, and reward than any job I’ve ever had, even that of being a NICU nurse. And I have no regrets.

So, little one, welcome to this world. You’re going to get to see quite a lot of it. Made in Ghana, discovered in Italy, and (to be) born in the US, you’re already miles ahead of 99% of the population. We can’t wait to show you what an awfully big adventure LIFE is.

Sources:

Catholic Church. (1995). Catechism of the Catholic Church (1st Image Books ed.). Doubleday.

Fehring R. & Manhart, M. (2020). Natural Family Planning and Marital Chastity: The Effects of Periodic Abstinence on Marital Relationships. The Lincare Quarterly, 88(1), 42–55. doi: 10.1177/0024363920930875

Fehring, R. & Manhart, M. (2023). The Association of Family Planning Methods With the Odds of Divorce Among Women in the 2015–2019 National Survey of Family Growth. Journal of Divorce and Remarriage, 64(1), 55-66. doi:  https://doi.org/10.1080/10502556.2023.2179837

National Center for Health Statistics (U.S.) Division of Health Resources Statistics (1983). Advance Report of Final Divorce Statistics, 1980.  Monthly Vital Statistics Report, 32(3), 1-12. https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/108683/cdc_108683_DS1.pdf