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Single Mom -Day to Day
The child I
never held
Kate Oyer from
www.spirituality.com
I was surfing yesterday and found this fantastic
freebie online. It's for a completely free
subscription to Parents magazine. That's pretty
cool! I sign up for mine.
Get a free subscription to Parents Magazine!
I was 20 years old
the summer I became pregnant. She was my first child. But it was hard to be
happy about it. I was unmarried. Although the father and I had recently become
engaged, we weren’t married yet and this pregnancy was the result of our first
sexual encounter.
From the moment I guessed that I was pregnant I wanted to embrace feeling
beautiful and blessed, but I knew that my fiancé’s response to this news would
be abject terror. When his older sister had become pregnant out of wedlock four
years earlier, her parents had shipped her off to a home for unwed mothers and
forced her to surrender the baby for adoption. I figured his parents’ reaction
to my situation would be similar.
My fiancé was coming home from college for a weekend visit, and I knew I had
to tell him. He had a ride home partway and I was to meet him and pick him up at
a small truck stop on the highway. I arrived before they did and went into the
café for a snack.
I saw
how I was already growing and I knew that I was a mother.
As I walked past the
plate-glass window of the restaurant, I caught sight of my reflection. There I
was in frayed bellbottoms, an embroidered white gauze peasant blouse and
flipflops. In that moment I saw how I was already growing, and I knew that I was
a mother.
I will never forget the mix of joy and confusion and terror that washed over
me. I loved my fiancé, and I wanted him to be thrilled with our journey toward
parenthood. Yet I knew about his fear of his parents. When he arrived, I just
couldn’t tell him.
For the three days until he went back, I was in a haze. It was a beautiful
autumn homecoming weekend. We were surrounded by high-school friends, but I felt
lost. During the day I tried to smile and be a part of the festivities, but at
night I lay in bed singing lullabies. I was only twelve weeks pregnant, but my
love for this child was complete.
His answer
was as I had expected.
By
Sunday afternoon I was ready to explode into tears…and did. On the way to meet
his ride, I spilled out that I was pregnant and wanted to keep the baby. His
answer was as I had expected. His parents’ reaction was all he could think
about.
He insisted that we couldn’t keep the child. Hadn’t Roe v Wade given
us the right and the permission to abort this ill-timed pregnancy? He argued for
this position intensely, saying he wanted us to start our family on the right
note, and if I wouldn’t do this for him he wasn’t sure that I loved him. I caved
in to the fear. As much as I loved the baby, I let fear rule—I was afraid of
being alone and without the father.
The next morning with tears streaming down my cheeks I called the local
clinic and made an appointment for an abortion. Three hours later I left the
clinic no longer pregnant. Within four years the baby’s father and I were both
married and divorced—without children.
I lived with an
ache for her every day.
But
the baby never left my thought. I lived with an ache for this little one, who I
always thought of as a girl, every day.
Many years later it still haunted me. One night, I was lying in bed trying to
silence the grieving sobs for a child I had never held. My husband of 13 years
rolled over and suggested that whatever was making me this sad had to be
healable. Though we had three adopted children of our own, he knew that I needed
lasting comfort about my loss and believed I could have it.
I was astonished. I didn’t think there could be any reparation, redemption or
healing for what I had done to this innocent child. How could I ever expect to
feel anything but despair over my poor choices? But I knew that this dear loving
man, a great partner and support, was urging me to find a spiritual solution for
this anguish.
I sat in the rocker
in the corner and began to sing softly a hymn.
I padded into another room to
pray. Without turning on the light, I sat in the rocker in the corner and began
to sing softly a hymn I had learned in childhood and that I had sung to that
precious baby those many years before. My own mother had sung this hymn to me
not only as a small child, but through my teenage years when self-doubt and fear
of growing up plagued me.
The words are from a poem written by a woman whose life inspires me—Mary
Baker Eddy, the author of Science and Health. A woman of the 19th
century, she herself had to give up a child when she was a young widowed mother.
Her own family would not help her care for her son, who was given to a family
that then moved far away.
Later, Eddy wrote the poem “Mother’s Evening Prayer,” which meant so much to
me as a hymn. As I sang to myself and rocked back and forth, the beginning of a
deep peace came to my heart. The words were addressed straight to God. “Thou
Love that guards the nestling’s faltering flight! / Keep Thou my child on upward
wing to-night.” and “Beneath the shadow of His mighty wing; / In that sweet
secret of the narrow way, / Seeking and finding, with the angels sing: / ‘Lo, I
am with you alway,’—watch and pray.”
Here was an ongoing message of mother-love.
Here was an ongoing message of mother-love. I could trust that God was keeping
and had kept this child “on upward wing” and that God, divine Love, was always
with her and with me, encouraging us both to “watch and pray.”
With tears of love now flowing down my cheeks I went to my desk and randomly
opened Science and Health as I do often when looking for comfort,
guidance and answers. My eyes fell on this passage: “A mother’s affection cannot
be weaned from her child, because mother-love includes purity and constancy,
both of which are immortal. Therefore maternal affection lives on under whatever
difficulties.”
Total peace descended on me. These words rang true in a new way. I knew not a
single day had passed that I hadn’t thought about my child with love. Now I
could see the spiritual basis for my daily thoughts of love for her. They were
not an insidious reminder of a much-regretted and painful choice—they were a
mother’s prayer, maternal affection, that will always live on.
Many years after this night of insight, I take my appointment as her mother
very seriously. As I pray for each of my children’s spiritual progress and
awareness of their relationship to God, I include in those prayers the daughter
that I never held in my arms, but have held each day in my heart.
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