Not This Baby

"You'll wait to have a baby though, right?"

The voices were well-meaning, the faces we loved laced with anxiety. "But of course you'll wait to get pregnant." We were a brand-new married couple, living in a house that had wheels and flooded when it rained, and we tried not to answer these people who cared so much. But we'd made that decision lying on our backs on a concrete slab, staring at the stars.

"Collin? Can I ask you something awkward?"

"Joy. You can ask me anything."

"How do you feel about birth control?"

The night was quiet, and I listened to him breathing. "Wow. When you say awkward, you really go for it."

We were a young couple taking German classes just for an excuse to see each other, stalling outside the college, waiting as long as possible to drive home. I spilled my guts, the experiences of people I loved, questions, worries, heartbreaks, dreams. Finally I told him, "I don't think I could feel at peace about saying no to a baby. Like, sure, we could have another baby, but we'd never have the chance to have that baby again."

He was quiet in the darkness. "I always thought, when I married someone- No. I can't say that anymore." I could actually hear him blush, he almost sounded mad. "When I marry you..." the warmth of those words almost overwhelmed me, but he stayed with them. "When I marry you, I want to be ready. I don't want to say no."

The concrete was cold, and the air was cold, and we pulled my shawl closer around us both. "I don't think birth control is wrong for other people," I said. "But I think it's wrong for me."

His hand held mine, warm in the coldness, the kind of warm you only get when you're choosing the hard thing together.

Three months after our wedding, we were expecting Sam.

None of the people who wanted to make sure we waited were unhappy about our baby boy, born in a bathtub and brought into warm arms, carted with adoration from Army-post to Army-post. But the same statements started again, immediately. "But you'll wait before you have another one, right?"

As the sleepless nights and milk-soaked mornings, tiny fingers and tiny teeth blurred together day to day, and my body decided that it really didn't matter if I was sleeping or nursing or any of the things that were supposed to change a cycle, fear poisoned the edges of long days, and those voices kept on, some of them fearful and some of them almost cruel, warning that another child would scar our precious Sam forever, as if my sister wasn't less than 2 years younger than me, as if Collin wasn't hardly a year younger than his brother, as if the existence of so many of my favorite people was somehow wrong. I cried.

There were no stars in the hotel room that had become our home, but he reached across a bed with a sleeping baby, and he held my hand again.

I'm pregnant.

I'm pregnant. 

This tiny little one is smaller than a bean, shaped like a seed, tiny dark eyes and a heart already beating. And it isn't the Most Convenient Time. We're in the military; we're new parents; we're in transition; he's deploying and I'm moving. Our business isn't built and my books aren't written and there are a dozen things I'm supposed to learn. I can't even play guitar. It's silly, but that scares me most. What kind of mother will I be if I can't even play guitar?

And if we had waited, if we'd put up shields, or stuck pills inside me, lied to my cells and tried our darnedest to close my womb against the hope of yet another little person, we would probably still have another baby someday. But it wouldn't be this one. It wouldn't be this Baby of the Hard Times, this Bundle of Joy in Transition, this life that's come to us in the chaos and bids me to build a hidey-hole for just us four. If we chose to wait, so many things would be easier. But we'd miss this. 

I hope we have another baby. I hope when the dust has settled and the deployments have stopped and the business is built that at just the perfect time, if there ever will be a perfect time, another little squirmy bundle drops into my hands. But I don't need perfect. I don't need easy. I just need this. I just need here.

When this baby is hardly dry in my arms and the new-baby cheese has barely been rubbed into its pink little baby-skin, the questions will start again. Maybe then, I'll be so full of peace and love that I'll answer. Because if we "wait," there might be another baby down the line.

But I hope we'll say yes again. I hope our hearts will be open.

As I cuddle my toddler to sleep, his warmth against my stomach where his little brother or sister is growing, this once-in-a-lifetime boy, every bit of me likes our choices.