Celebrating the Season

  

Babies.

All around are babies, babies and more babies. Babies running around, babies bundled up, and babies still in the oven. All of our friends are either pregnant, on child number two or three, or trying hard. Never before has it been such a struggle not to define my worth by those around me. I see how their husbands look at them and pay them attention. They have a purpose, a plan, a direction to follow, and here I am—working my job each day, fixing dinner, grading papers and going to sleep before my husband does. It’s hard. But it’s times like these that I must learn to celebrate childlessness.

A voluntary decision I must trust.

We have decided to wait, or I should say, the world has made us wait. Money. Stress. The Mortgage. The Master’s. One thing stacked on top of another. It is a voluntary decision, and one that I hope we don’t regret later, but one that I have to trust.

We’ve only been married a year. Silly to feel useless already, I presume, but it’s still something that women inherently struggle with. We want to please our husbands, and if we aren’t married to a vocal man, it is easy to doubt. What is the greatest way to please a man—we’ve been told to give him a child! But, are we good wives without producing children? Only one verse in Proverbs 31 directly says that the virtuous woman has children, but the verse after is what clinches it, “As does her husband who praises her: ‘Many women have done wonderful things,’ he says, ‘but you surpass all of them!’” The world wants us to think that you haven’t been truly fulfilled yet until you have children.

Finding peace.

I find peace in Ecclesiastes, which says that for everything there is a season.

All I can do is enjoy the moment I am in, and look hopefully into the future, for soon my season will change, and I will be looking back on this entry and laughing, and wishing I had the peace and quiet I do now. . .