H A P P Y B I R T H D A Y T H E O D O R E

“Children are a gift from the Lord; they are a reward from him.

Children born to a young man are like sharp arrows in a warrior’s hand.”
Psalm 127: 3 & 4

Our son will be two tomorrow, June 16. Two years ago we welcomed our miracle baby and now he is growing up, we have no baby anymore. We will not be celebrating his birthday in any public way, we will doing something private. We are not big on throwing him birthday parties, instead we try to invest in more tangible and meaningful things for him and that was one of the reasons why we made the effort to have him visit with his grandparents recently and believe me, the bonding I saw with his grandparents was better than any party you could have thrown him.

I have learnt so much about parenting in this short time. I have learnt what it really means to love unconditionally. To have to discipline our son because of something naughty he did and then watch him run into your arms a few minutes later with a special hug or kiss for you, totally forgetting the discipline he just received. I would imagine that, that is how it should be with our relationship with God as well. He disciplines us and wants us to run into his arms soon after when we need comfort.

Throughout our struggle with primary infertility, I have often heard mothers say that whenever their children hurt, they feel that hurt in the bottom of their stomach, some even hold on to the bottom of their stomachs and cry in pain. I always felt jealous of these moms because I was not sure I would ever be able to relate in this way to what they were feeling. Thank goodness I now totally understand and can relate, even though thankfully my son has not suffered any real hurt, only the occasional falls where he hit his head on the floor. Those do terrify me and I do feel the hurt in my stomach, especially that he cries so hard whenever he suffers one of those falls.

Last night we were watching the movie, ‘not easily broken’ by T.D. Jakes and the physiotherapist in the movie lost her son to a swimming accident. He won his race but he went too hard into the wall of the pool and seemed to have suffered a head injury and sadly died. This overwhelming sadness came over me and I suddenly pictured myself in the same position. Believe me, this was not my child and it was acting, but I felt the pain deep down in my stomach as if it was my child, it was frightening. I saw my husband turned on two occasions and looked at our son who was sleeping on the sofa beside us and I knew he was going through the same thing I was going through. What came to me forcefully was that this child was an only child and his mom was a single mom and so she is now all alone. I revisited the whole issue of having an only child and vowed again that there is no way I will settle with just one child, as long as I can do something about it.

I had no idea parenting was so challenging, but so worth it. Mind you I have heard stories and I have witnessed enough parenting going on around me, but you never know the extent of something until you experience it yourself. At times it has me wondering if this is probably why God seem to not have wanted to give me children, the fact that I might not be able to co-op with it. Trust me with a child as active and daring as ours, you would be wondering too, ‘what did I get myself in.’ The thing is, the minute I start having those thoughts, he does something so sweet, so cute that those thoughts immediately disappear and I start thanking God for him all over again. While visiting with family recently, one of my brother-in-laws said to me that I deserved a medal for parenting, after seeing the amount of energy that our son has and how you constantly have to have an eye on him in case he hurts himself or someone else. I was able to respond to him in the most practical way, that I came into this experience with an open mind. Of course we all would like to think that we will have the calmest and easy to control children, but what a quiet and dull world that would be. Can you imagine it? Quite frankly, I prefer the noise, to me its a sign of life and good health.

What can I say, parenting has taught me unconditional love, unselfishness, patience, “to cry a little, live a little and let my poor heart break just a little, for that’s the glory of, that’s the story of love.” These are the words of a song I heard sang once and I have remembered them since. Parenting has also taught me trust in a new way, because when our efforts to be the parents we ought to be to our son seem insufficient, we can only move onward through faith in God, that everything will turn out well.

One of the vows I have made is to ensure that our son enjoy and live in the moment of his childhood as much as possible, so that when he is older, he does not come up missing anything.

To all of you struggling with infertility, my prayer is that one day you will be able to write a post on your blog site such as this, but you have to hold on to hope. You have to picture it happening for you. You cannot afford to lose heart or hope or else you lose everything.

Until next time, keep clinging to this hope.