An Unexpected Gift

Do you remember what you thought when you first found out you would be a parent? 

Maybe you were excited or felt like your dreams were finally coming true. Maybe you had been trying to conceive for a long time and after scores of appointments and treatments, finally, you were going to be a parent. Maybe you were caught completely off guard, not expecting to be pregnant so young, so soon, or maybe even right now. Or maybe you were like me – terrified, triggered, and totally unenthused. 

I wasn’t ready for a baby, and in fact, I was going to be okay if it never happened for me. I thought I was too “messed up” to have a child, and maybe God thought I was, too, and wouldn’t let me have children. Clearly that wasn’t the case because there I was that Saturday morning in November 2015 – pregnant. 

I had only been married one year. I had just graduated in May from college. I had just started a job in June – my first job out of school. What was I supposed to do? 

I was triggered because every way I looked at being pregnant, my belly was going to get big, and I couldn’t even think about how I was afraid I would relapse into disordered eating behaviors.

I started to have flashbacks. I was afraid of being told “It’s a girl” because I didn’t want to bring a daughter into a world where people like the man who hurt me could come after my daughter. I wanted to save her from the hurt and pain I’d experienced but who was I to do it? I didn’t think I could do it. How could I protect a scared and hurting little girl when I still felt scared and I still hurt? 

I spoke over my suffering in an effort to remind myself that my current suffering was something I was expected to experience and should not expect to be “cured of” - “God did not save me from suffering but from ultimate defeat.” 

I coped by telling my wishes to the wind in the form of confidence. I said, “It’s a boy. I know it,” to everyone who asked for my prediction. My heart pounded through every ultrasound until the sonogram at 18 weeks. 

“I think it’s a girl, but I’m going to have someone else come in and take a look.” My heart started pounding harder. I said a silent, fearful prayer that she was wrong. The next person came in and said, “Well, it looks like a girl but the legs are crossed. They aren’t wanting to show us, so you’ll have to come back in a month and we’ll see. I’m pretty sure it’s a girl, though.” 

“Is there a chance it can still be a boy?” 

“Not usually.” 

“Okay.”

4 weeks later. 

“It’s definitely a girl.” 

The rest of the pregnancy seemed to fly past after finding out Norah was coming. Knowing didn’t ease my anxiety, and I didn’t know how to help it. I dreaded the day I would deliver her and then I’d be completely out of control. The walls I built around my body weren’t going to do her any good outside of it.

June 17, 2016, 2:00 a.m. 

My water broke. Five weeks to the day early. 

That was not part of the plan. I was beginning to really understand that my plans and God’s plans were not the same. I just didn’t think I liked that yet. 

I was still scared, all through labor. I didn’t want to deliver the baby, even when it was time to go. When she came out, I thought I’d seen a literal extra terrestrial being. But something happened. When they wrapped her in this swaddling cloth and let me hold her for just a moment, she immediately stuck her tongue out at me. 

That unexpected moment inculcating me into motherhood was a true gift. I have never, and will never, forget that as long as I live. I thought, “She’s mine.” 

If her sticking her little pink tongue out at me was her first act of defiance, or maybe her infectious goofy nature, every day has been a continuation of that moment. 

Every year has brought with it more unexpected gifts that gather in my heart as treasures that cannot be taken. 

I can now say that I understand what the Psalmist meant when he said, “Children are a gift from the Lord; they are a reward from him” (Psalm 127:3). 

New Understanding

Through Norah, I have begun to really understand God’s unconditional, unequivocal love. It doesn’t make any sense the way I love her, and I can tell you for certain it doesn’t make any more sense the way God loves me. 

Through Norah, I have been convicted of sin in myself, I’ve been made aware of the depravity we are born into, and our desperate need for the saving work of Jesus Christ. We need the Gospel. We need to speak the Gospel over our children, early and often, so that “when they are old, they won’t depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6). 

Through Norah, I have learned deeper empathy, I have observed and been able to identify childhood thoughts I still carry inside of me, messages spoken over me by adults and other children. It is only through self-awareness that we can truly begin to take steps toward lasting change in our lives.  

It is only through Norah I have been able to begin the hard work of accepting myself the way God created me because I see the way He formed her in my womb (Psalm 139:13). I am learning to accept my body because I believe with my whole heart and soul that my daughter is “fearfully and wonderfully made” and if she is, I am too (Psalm 139:14).

Through Norah, I’m relearning the art of play. Playing is something that I stuffed down inside of me to make room for social acceptance. I covered myself, my personality up, during my adolescent years to make myself more attractive to guys I wanted to date and gals I wanted to be my friends. The tough part is watching her go through the same thing, and I so desperately want to play her a movie of how doing so in my own life played out - how it diminished the person I am in His image to a person I made in my own. I can only live by example and provide her a safe space to be silly, to be five, to be alive when the rest of the world tells her to to lay down and be like them. 

Accepting this unexpected gift was hard at first. I had to remind myself that God was ultimately the gift giver, and “every good and perfect gift” comes from him (James 1:17, emphasis mine). 

As I continued to speak these truths over my body, my mind followed, and my heart with it. My faith in God grew because of this gift, because of Norah.

It was from this faith that I knew everything would be okay when she came five weeks early and would be born and placed in the NICU. It was from this faith that I knew everything would be okay when I struggled to make enough milk for her. It was from this faith that I knew everything would be okay when we were admitted to the PICU when she was only five months old for a severe case of RSV. It was from this faith that I knew everything would be okay when she started Kindergarten. Even if it wasn’t okay then, and I wasn’t okay then, and she wasn’t okay then, I knew that ultimately everything would be okay because God is good, he gives good gifts, and he is the one who sustains no matter what the outcome.

That’s not to say that I flippantly let her do whatever she wants like run into traffic because “God’s got it.” No, we teach her. We discipline her. We love her. In the same way, God teaches us; God disciplines us; God loves us. Thus, we must also do the same for our children as an example of the relationship we have with our heavenly Father. 

I hope that with each unexpected gift, you seek the Lord. Seek him and know that he is good and every good and perfect gift comes from him. Speak truth over yourself - preach yourself the Gospel, ransack the Scriptures with the desperation you feel in your heart to find him, and then enjoy the gift.