Jennifer Groft

Around the time that Molly, our eighth child, turned one the usual questions that we get asked changed in character a bit.  They went from “Are you going to have any more?” to “Surely, you are not having any more! Right?”

Having a large family means getting a lot of questions from people.  There are many nosy questions that people would never think to ask someone in a smaller family.  Mostly I am okay with that. I smile and answer questions as best I can without getting too personal.  People don’t run into large families very often any more and they are fascinated, usually in a friendly way, and just want to understand how it works to live like this.  I think it is a good thing that they are seeking to understand better.  There are those who are not so kind, but I don’t run into them very often.

But the questions we were getting as Molly graduated to toddlerhood came from unexpected sources and carried more pressure than usual.  They came from dear friends and family who have seen how hard the last year has been for us and who truly want things to be easier fur us.  They would point out how we have certainly done our part in being open to life and now it was time to move on, to expand our horizons, to live a bit for ourselves.

For a while we felt like they might be right.  Maybe it was time to close up the old womb and focus on the future, when things wouldn’t be so hard and labor intensive (in more ways than one).  I could get more involved in my ministries and writing, and not spend as much time feeling like I was going to die from either morning sickness or exhaustion from dealing with a baby who can’t sleep.  I looked around me at people who don’t have little babies in arms all the time or toddlers to chase and thought, “I could get so much done if all my kids were just a little older!”  And isn’t that a noble thing to hope for: to work for the church and school and my family in an efficient way?

So we dusted off the old charts, bought a new thermometer, and buckled down for the bumpy ride through my return to fertility while breastfeeding.

What we found though was that we weren’t really all that convinced we didn’t want another baby.  The older kids talk frequently about “when the next one comes”, and as we looked over the dinner table in the evening there was that gnawing feeling that we aren’t all here yet.  I found myself hoping that NFP would fail or I would make a mistake in my charting and the decision would just be taken out of our hands.

My husband and I discussed all these things at length.  We prayed about them and contemplated them in our minds, and our hearts.  And here are the things we discovered:

1. God allows us to participate in creation.  Let that sink in a moment.  He lets us be a part of the creation of a whole new person, a soul that never existed before but will now exist for all time.  How can we pass that up?  Most especially when He put it in the framework of an act that brings us closer to each other and is, in a word, amazing.
2. We are already here, doing the daily work of parenting, and we have gotten pretty good at it if I may say so.  We have adjusted to the fact that having young children around is a way of life and not just a hardship to toil our way through as quickly as possible.
3. There is no really good time for a baby.  There is never enough money or time or sleep to prepare.  One of the other children is always needing us in a way we hadn’t anticipated.  And yet time after time we find that…
4. Children are a gift.  They are joy, they are work, they are renewal.  As each one of our children has been unique and special and world changing, so will the next one be.  We can’t take that for granted because…
5. Children are not a guarantee from being open to life.  I have been surrounded lately by friends who have lost babies to miscarriage, babies whose lives were cut short by disease, and those who yearn for children and suffer the heavy cross of infertility.  I have mourned with those friends and seen what it is like when that gift is taken away.  On a lighter note, I am thirty-a-lot and my body is not what it once was.  We just don’t know what will happen at this stage of the game.

I would like to point out that using Natural Family Planning to avoid pregnancy doesn’t automatically make one closed to life.  A couple can prayerfully discern that the timing isn’t right for another child.  By using the woman’s natural fertile or infertile times, we make use of the system that God designed.  When we come to a time that preventing pregnancy becomes more important, we will again use this method to work in harmony with our bodies. I am thankful that we have this to fall back on.  But for us, at this time, we feel called to release control.

We have been down the road of being actually closed to life through sterilization, and it wasn’t a good place to be.  The story of that will be coming shortly.  So for now, we have decided to throw wide the doors to life and embrace what comes.