“Perhaps my greatest hope as a parent is to have such a relationship with you that when the day comes and you look down into the face of your first child, you will feel deep within you the desire to be to your child the kind of parent your dad has tried to be to you. What greater compliment could any man ask?”
-G. Spencer Monson
Getting married changed a few of my plans. I knew that there was no way I’d be able to attend law school with a husband dead set on medical school. I tried to talk him out of it, but not with a lot of vigor. I didn’t want to distract him from his goals. Medicine just seemed all wrong for my Nate. He did his undergrad in mathematics with chemistry minor, but his real passion is computers. I can’t begin to illustrate his obsession with them. I will tell you that during his summer break from medical school he downloaded a computer science course from MIT and spent the entire break watching it. He wasn’t getting any credit for this. He did it for fun.
I noticed that when I asked him about anything in medicine he seemed remarkably uninterested, but when computers came up, his eyes glowed. Which is why I made some sarcastic comment about Nate wanting to become a doctor while we were at his mother’s house, not long after we were married. I used a more disparaging voice than completely necessary and his mom picked up on it right away. She turned to me and said, “Don’t you want him to want him to become a doctor?” The statement held all the matter-of-factness of “Any woman would want her husband to be a doctor,” and all the scorn of, “You are trying to distract him from his potential.”
But the fact was that I didn’t want him to go to medical school. Not because I still harbored a hope of attending law school. I knew that was not going to happen for a long time, if at all. I simply didn’t think Nate would be happy in medicine. It was not what excited him. He would never say it, but he had been instilled with a deep sense of duty. He knew he could do absolutely anything he aspired to do, so he picked that which he felt would best support his family. It was never about what he wanted to do. It was about what he wanted to have.
Still, this dialogue was completely unspoken. He had his mind set and I was going to support him. So, we attended college together. He worked toward the prerequisites for medical school and I worked on a degree in mass communication. He was doing what he felt was practical and I was doing what I was really good at. Neither of us were working on what we honestly loved. Despite that, we were very happy.
I remember loving being around other women talking about their husbands. Oh sure, they loved them. But their descriptions only solidified my assurance that I was married to the most wonderful man alive. It’s hard to believe, but Nate never criticized me. He never lied to me. He never implied that I ought to be doing more or different things. In fact, he never once made me feel like I was anything other than the perfect woman who he adored. We continued that way from our first year together and into our second.
On and off, however, I kept thinking about our plans and wondering when and where we would ever fit in kids. Nate didn’t seem to give it a second thought. He figured we’d go to school first and then we’d have a family. But it kept weighing on my mind how much school Nate was planning. We would be close to 30 before he finished medical school. Then there was residency. From everything I’d heard, he was going to be more absent then than while he was actually in school. Surely if he thought it was inconvenient to have a child during school, he would have the same thoughts about residency. So, he wanted to wait until I was getting close to thirty-five before even attempting to have a baby? I don’t actually know what he was thinking on that topic because he always smoothly avoided the subject.
I tried to be supportive. I didn’t bring up my thoughts because I didn’t want him to have extra stress. I kept asking myself how I’d feel if, ten years in the future, he felt like his dreams had been abandoned because of me and children. But I couldn’t stop thinking that we needed to have a family and if we waited for convenience, we would wait forever.
One Saturday it all came out. Nate must have been shocked because I’d barely touched the subject before. I sat him down and said, “I think we should have a baby now and we can afford it.” He listened to my explanations. He agreed that residency would not be the ideal time to start a family. He agreed that it wasn’t a good idea to wait until we were older
.
In the end he said, in a resigned voice, “Okay, let’s do it.” I thought that meant he agreed and wanted a child. I was wrong. It just meant that he was giving in because he wanted me to be happy.
The next few months were terrible for me. For the twenty percent of you who have ever really struggled with fertility, that probably seems laughable. But I remember throwing the negative pregnancy test across the bathroom after breaking it in half, the third month. Once you decide you want a baby, nine months seems way too long, you certainly shouldn’t have to wait to conceive. On the fourth try, I finally had the good news.
This is supposed to be the most exciting time for a woman. Most that I have known like to dream about wonderful ways to share the news with their husband. I didn’t want to tell mine. He hadn’t been an active participant during the previous months. I had circled the days on our calendar during which I had calculated that I would be most fertile. Nate pretended like none of it was going on.
When I finally told him the baby was on his way, he didn’t want anyone to know. It turned into a horrible fight. I didn’t understand why we should be ashamed. We were supposed to be thrilled. When I asked him why I couldn’t shout it from the rooftops, he replied, “This is a big source of stress for me right now, okay.” It hit me like a hard slap in the face, my first from Nate. I had to go to the back yard to be alone.
Alright, most people aren’t going to understand why that simple expression was such a blow to me. Normal couples fight and it doesn’t sound like a horrible personal attack. But our relationship, up to that point, had been completely free of any expressions of discontent, at least from Nate. He had never before implied that anything about our marriage made him unhappy, angry, anxious, or stressed. He had always made it quite clear that he loved everything about me and didn’t want me to change. In one statement, that history had been destroyed. Instead of being his strength and passion, I was a source of stress. It was the reason I’d never asked for children before. It was my worst fear materializing.
Since then, time and time again, I’ve seen this side of Nate. And I know what causes it. I know exactly why it never showed up before. My sweet husband is a man of work and self-sufficiency. He believes America is the land of opportunity. He believes that anyone with a work ethic and a little integrity can accomplish anything he/she sets out to do. As a result, he often equates dependency and laziness. He believes firmly that if you cannot afford to support your own children, you should not have them. Acting otherwise shows a blatant lack of personal responsibility. That is why, after Ryan was born, Nate worked two jobs while going to school full time. He was determined to provide for his family and insure that I would not have to work. It’s no wonder he felt stressed. He knew what he was going to have to do to hold to his principles and provide for his family once he became a father.
Ryan was due at the end of March. I had examined the calendars very carefully. I took the spring semester off school, but Nate was still going. March 17-21 was the week of spring break. I told my boss that I would work through Friday the 14th. I wanted the two weeks before the due date to prepare my house. There was a lot to do.
Tuesday the 11th, a coworker called and asked if he could take my shift. Knowing how financially strapped we would soon be, I should have told him “no.” But I had a headache that day and really felt like I needed the rest. Ironically, by afternoon I was feeling great. I started working and, miraculously, got everything essential done that day.
It put me in a state of mind to worry about how our family would change and how Nate would adapt. I recognize that all women want their babies to be born before the due date. But I felt like it was an absolute necessity. I desperately wanted my baby during spring break. Nate would be very stressed the rest of the semester. Between preparing for graduation, applying to medical school, classes and work, I didn’t know if he’d even manage to pick his child out of a baby line-up. I wasn’t worried about me needing help. I was worried that my baby’s daddy would not have a chance to fall in love with his child.
I remember being very afraid that it was unrighteous, but I convinced myself that if it was, Heavenly Father would know that my heart didn’t mean it that way. I knelt down and asked for Ryan to come early. I explained everything that I was worried about and told Heavenly Father that I was sorry if it was not something I should pray for. I asked that if I needed to wait, for him to please find a way to help Nathan have time with his baby.
The rest of the week passed quickly. I went to work on Friday, for the last time. I even cried during my midnight drive home. I wasn’t sad, just uncertain of how my life would change in two more weeks. To my delight, it changed a lot quicker than that.
In answer to my prayer, I went into labor at six the next morning. Ryan was born at six Saturday night. I couldn’t believe it. I had hoped he would come the next week. Nate and Ryan would have the entire spring break, plus two weekends to fall in love.
Those first weeks went by smoothly. We both enjoyed being a family of three. But, it wasn’t long before we received a horrible bombshell. When Ryan was only a few weeks old, Nate got word that he hadn’t been accepted to medical school. He had a higher MCAT, more research, more community service, more work experience and a better GPA than the average person that was admitted, but the lottery simply didn’t call his numbers. He was devastated. This was everything he had ever wanted.
I left him alone. Nate is not the type to want to “talk about it.” I knew he was working through the first major failure of his life. In my mind, I wondered if he was questioning whether the choices he had made concerning his family had held him back. Afraid of the answer, I didn’t ask.
Later that day, I walked through the curtain that separated our bedroom from the rest of our garage apartment. Nate was lying on the bed with the baby, holding his fingers in front of Ryan’s little face. Ryan reached up and grabbed his daddy’s finger. I took a deep breath. I wanted to talk to my husband, but had no idea what to say. Was he staring down at that little face wondering if he was looking a huge mistake?
I asked, “What are you thinking?”
Nate didn’t look away from his son. He replied, “I’m thinking about him, about how much I love him.” Those words took my breath away and still bring tears to my eyes. He wasn’t wallowing in sorrow and disappointment. He realized, as I did, that no matter what we had to sacrifice, starting our family had been the right choice.
Over the next few months, I often questioned why Nate had not been selected to enter the medical school. The same answer kept returning to my mind. We were not going to have more children during medical school. Perhaps it wouldn’t be possible even during residency. That meant that Ryan would be five, maybe ten years old before he had a sibling. I felt very strongly that Nate wasn’t accepted to medical school that year because we were supposed to have another baby. It took four months before I got up the courage to tell Nate about my feelings.
This time I got pregnant the first try. When I was around ten weeks along, however, I started bleeding. As is my nature, I read everything I could find on the matter and discussed it with my doctor. There was about a fifty percent chance I would miscarry.
I was very upset when I talked to Nate about it. He simply put his arms around me and said, “Don’t worry about it. We’re supposed to have this one, remember.” I couldn’t believe I was hearing such words of comfort from the man who didn’t want kids, at least not for a long time. I relaxed immediately. Twelve months and 26 days after Ryan was born, we welcomed our second son, Sean. The next month, Nate was admitted to medical school…in Chicago.
One of the first things you learn as a parent is that things never work out the way you had planned. It doesn’t take long, however, before you learn that, despite that, they do always work out.
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