The Pregnancy That is the Teen Years

The Pregnancy That is the Teen Years

I am an adoptive mom.  Many of us shun using the "a" word as an adjective, as if by clarifying our route to motherhood we degrade our status or negate part of the meaning of that word:  Mom.  I am an adoptive mom, and I am also fully a mom. 

I have known and loved many moms whose route to motherhood was pregnancy.  I have known and loved many moms whose pregnancies began and ended joyfully and easily.  I have also known and loved several moms whose pregnancies began delicately and deliberately, progressed bathed in that strange brew of grief-fear-hope, and often ended in unexplainable loss and emptiness.  My understanding of the physical and emotional state of pregnancy is secondhand.  In this regard, I am an adoptive mom.   

I have run, walked, and crawled along the path to motherhood through adoption processes that were effortless, predictable, and agonizing.  I have followed clearly marked roads that veered without warning to loss and emptiness.  I have trudged off-road until I've caught sight of the path to my child again through the overgrowth.  My understanding of the desire, pursuit, and realization of the birth of a family is firsthand.  In this regard, I am simply a mom. 

In Genesis 3:16, God declared to the wayward Eve and to us, her daughters, "I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children."  Childbirth is painful.  Sometimes bearing children--the ones who are here, to whom we daily devote ourselves--is painful, too. 

As a daughter of Eve who became a mom through adoption, I have admittedly glossed over God's fateful pronouncement to my ancient ancestor.  I've considered it a bullet dodged.  During years of waiting and uncertainty, in those times when the adoption process became particularly grueling, the absence of physical pain in childbearing was even a sort of consolation prize.   

And then the Lord saw fit that I bear a certain teenage son. 

In the beginning, the Lord blessed me with this blond, blue-eyed, nine-year-old ray of sunshine.  I felt sure of it, then.  He needed me, needed the home and family my husband and I held out to him.  We were a unit working together, mother and child.  He needed the sustenance, comfort, and guidance that only a mom can give, and I needed him to fill me up, heart and soul.  But suddenly, now, I am intensely uncomfortable.  He seems to be abruptly breech, upside down and sideways, in our relationship.  Now, what seemed right, true, and rewarding has morphed into something twisted, heavy, and life-sapping.  

Lately, I've been seized with terror that four years of high school, if my husband and I are even able to carry him that far, will end in loss.  He will spontaneously abort, despite our desire, vigilance, and care.  The pangs of separation have come too early, and the trickle will become a hemorrhage.  And the hemorrhage will result not only in the loss of this child but also in irreparable damage to me, his mother. 

If the teen years really are a second pregnancy, and if the gestation of this, my oldest son, fails, what is to become of me?  What is to become of the three children next in line?  If the womb that is my mothering is not conducive to carrying them to term, how will they ever make their way out of childhood into adulthood?  What if they stagnate, all four of them? 

I'm an adult with an adult relationship with my parents.  They did their best raising me and, from what they tell me now, they are proud of the results of their efforts:  a healthy, successful, full-term birth.  They apparently knew the steps through which to walk me on my way through the teen years, through college, and through establishing my identity and independence.  How did they know what they were supposed to do?  Or was the process, like a pregnancy, bound to move along in one way or another because of or despite their efforts?   Is there a teenage equivalent of the how-to book, What to Expect When You're Expecting, that everyone has read but me? 

I never had questions like this when I was waiting for each of my four sons to come home.  I just knew we'd figure it out.  Parents parent, and children grow.  There was that brief moment when I held my first baby boy--gravely ill, with his heartbeat and rattling breath fluttering his tiny chest like butterfly wings--that I panicked, certain he would expire in my arms.  But really, up till now, I never feared the death of anyone or anything like I fear the death of myself as a mom.  After all these years, all the hope and anticipation, all the hard work, all the making sure I was doing everything right...  Is this how it ends?  I can't see my hand in front of my face.  I can't see into the darkened mirror.  I can't see the future.  Or if I can see it, it is a dot on the horizon, and the roadmap between here and there has been smudged into an indecipherable blur. 

What I know now is that a nearly grown man-boy is lodged awkwardly in a place where it hurts me to move and breath.  And I, as the mom, have to keep carrying him, because there is no undoing it.  I do not know whether I can carry him or his siblings to term.  I do not know if the passage of time will bring relief or more heartache.  Some days I would welcome a radical surgical procedure to remove him.  Other days I grieve what used to be and what might have been, and I hope for what might yet be. 

"With pain you will give birth to children."   

God, I don't know what I'm doing!  Help me!  I'm stuck out here on a limb, and I don't know how to get back.  There are lives to shape, roles I still need to play, purposes I am sure I am supposed to serve!  What am I supposed to do now?   

"With pain you will give birth...."   

This cannot be the end of the road.  I will not go out with a whimper.  Time will pass.  Children will grow.  I am still here, and God is still faithful.  This one may be breech, an anomaly that doesn't necessarily reflect upon me, the mom.  It may mean that he tears a hole through me on his way out.  God didn't promise me bearing him would be easy.  In fact, he promised the opposite.   

Here are some more things he promised:   

In Matthew 28:20:  "Surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age."

In Ephesians 2:10:  "For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do." 

In Proverbs 20:24:  "A man’s steps are directed by the Lord.  How then can anyone understand his own way?" 

In Proverbs 3:5-6:  "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight." 

Of course, in Jeremiah 29:11:  "'For I know the plans I have for you,' declares the Lord, 'plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.'" 

And then there is Jeremiah 33:3:  "'Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.'" 

And perhaps it is all wrapped up and tied together with Philippians 4:6-7:  "Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.   And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." 

Yes, there will be great pain in childbearing, but, as I am called to this point in my life by the God who is with me always, surely there is also great purpose.   

ErinRMS

2/7/2013