“When times are good, be happy; but when times are bad, consider: God has made the one as well as the other.” 
Ecclesiastes 6:15

When I got the email from Mommies with Hope explaining this month’s writing topic my husband and I were on our way to North Dakota to visit our little Surprise. No longer little, he will be 30 next month and is getting married next fall. He is also the first to move more than 30 minutes away from home, darn him!

So it was an interesting time to think back to the waiting and the sudden pregnancy. Yes, I mean “sudden.” I was suddenly pregnant? How did that happen? Contrary to what you might expect, my overriding emotion during the entire pregnancy was cautious disbelief.

Another big thing going on in my life; I was thinking about leaving my husband. Anyone who knows him would think I was crazy, and even at the time I knew no one would understand. Both my family and Bill’s would have called me a complete idiot. [Which would have been true.]

I think ten years of infertility coupled with two pretty high stress adoptions were taking a toll on us. Also, adjusting to parenting had been really hard for us! Crazy, when we’d waited and wanted children so long. Before children, we had done everything together – really almost been newlyweds – for 8 years. Then suddenly I was stuck alone with a 10-month-old. And I was jealous of the way my husband fell absolutely head over heels for this (admittedly) amazing little boy.

He came as a foster child. After he’d lived with us more than two years we had to fight the state for him when he became adoptable. Later we were blacklisted when we tried to get a little sibling for him. Then when we were able to adopt a little girl (adoption stories, generally involving a very difficult “labor”, are as miraculous as any stories in the world!) they didn’t get along!

I was finally a mother and as much as I loved it, often I was unhappy as I had ever been. I wasn’t nearly as good a mother as I expected to be! My children weren’t as well behaved as I expected them to be. My idealistic picture of family was just not happening. As it all got more and more complicated, my husband tried to hide from it all. I had a boat load of background in my life that I wouldn’t even be aware of or begin to deal with for another five or six years. I didn’t have the life skills to deal with all that was happening. Since I felt like I was alone with the kids anyway, I was trying to figure out a way to leave.

Then “suddenly” I was pregnant? Seriously? I didn’t know what to do with the two I already had. How was I going to deal with three? Besides, I’d thought I was pregnant a dozen times; I didn’t want to be disappointed again. So we didn’t have the reaction to our amazing news we would have had 10 years earlier. I had given up hope so completely that I didn’t want to hope any more. And when they laid that little wet slippery thing on my bloated stomach one afternoon in September, part of me was shocked! I thought (I wonder if I said it out loud?) “It’s a baby!”

So that’s my Expecting with Hope, story. I’m afraid I neither expected nor hoped. And to be suddenly pregnant, when my life and marriage were falling apart, seemed sadly ironic, almost like a hurtful practical joke. But God was there. That’s the refrain that undergirds my entire life. Good times, bad times; God was there.  The marriage didn’t fall apart. The children all survived. I continued to grow until I was strong enough to begin to deal with some of my “stuff.” My husband and I kept growing in grace in a very one step forward, three steps back sort of way. God was always there.

My husband was talking to the Surprise a few years ago on his birthday. He told him, “There is never a day that goes by that I don’t think of the afternoon you were born and the amazing feeling of holding you the first time.” My feelings are always way more complicated than his. But I would say when that surprising birth happened, I began to understand the meaning of the word blessing.

@Roxana Currie, 2014
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