I absolutely love the changing of the seasons and consider myself blessed to live in Kentucky where we get to experience each one to the fullest. Right now I’m looking forward to fall and the cool crisp evenings, pumpkin spice everything, and the leaves changing to beautiful colors. Halfway through fall I will start looking forward to winter. Let me rephrase that; I will look forward to Christmas and every single thing that goes with it including cheesy Christmas movies. I also look forward to the first big snow of the year! I have been known to let my boys start filling up our house with their friends at the first promise of a few inches of the white stuff (before they have officially even called off school) so they can spend the whole next day sledding.
But After that first big snow I am done with winter. I am over it. Winter is so hard on this momma. It is bitter cold, the days are short and there is just way too much darkness. Although it is the same length as all the other seasons, it just seems to last way longer. By February I’m usually in a full on “winter funk” and I’m convinced it will never end. But then one day, out of the blue, the ground thaws, you look outside and where there had only been darkness and death there are suddenly signs of life everywhere. Springing from the ground there are fresh green shoots and tiny buds on the trees. Winter is over, spring is here, and finally there is new life!
The seasons in our life are not nearly as predictable as the ones marked on the calendar but they are present nonetheless. We all go through our own winters, times that are hard and dark. The winter weighs on us and sometimes it feels like it will never end. We look out the windows of our life and think, “will spring ever get here?”
In March of 2011 I was just coming out of a long hard winter and although I can’t remember much about the calendar season itself, my “winter” had began two years before when my mom found out that her breast cancer was back and had spread with a vengeance. I don’t want to spend a lot of time there but If could sum it up in a sentence it would be this. Those two years left me completely exhausted, depressed and ultimately grieving the loss of my momma. Maybe I’ll write about that someday, but for now I’ll just leave it at that.
That March I was just starting to see signs that winter was perhaps coming to a close. I was feeling more like myself every single day. I was rested and had put back on most of the 20 pounds I lost during my mom’s illness. We had sold our house in a nearby subdivision and remodeled the house mom had left behind on my family's farm. Mom’s house only had two bedrooms, and we added a third so the boys would each have their own room and did some other things to make it our own. Even though we had lived in our old house for 14 years, our new place on the farm felt just like home in a few short weeks.
In mid March we were at the SEC basketball tournament in Atlanta with our boys and Marty’s parents. The guys had tickets to all the games and Peggy (Marty’s mom) and I were planning on taking in all the retail therapy that we could squeeze in while we were there. The first morning of our trip I was putting on my makeup and glanced down at a brand new prescription that I had just gotten filled. In bold letters it said “DO NOT USE IF YOU ARE PREGNANT.” I then began to think about what day of the month it was and did the math. I decided that in good conscious I should probably take a pregnancy test before I started the new medication.
I guess I should back up and say that just a few months before this Marty and I had some new discussion as to what was a good fit for us in this season of our lives for family planning. Let me be clear, when I say "family planning", my definition of these words were “the plan to not have another baby.” We had decided that we were two college-educated adults and were smart enough to prevent pregnancy without medical/prescription intervention. Marty’s take on it had been“and if something happens and God blesses us with another baby, then hey, that’s great.” My stance was “not on my watch.”
You can imagine my surprise when later that day I saw the two little lines appear. The two college-educated adults in their mid thirties were successful at "family planning" for all of four months. Within 30 seconds I had done the math and was talking to myself as I counted on my fingers.
"This baby will be due in November. When this baby is born Maxton will be 9 Noah will be 12. Wait, that means that when this baby starts kindergarten, Noah will start his freshman year of college and Maxton will begin his first year of high school. People will ask if I’m its grandma in the preschool pickup. I am 35 years old; when this baby gets married I could be 60 years old."
I was in full on panic mode and I was pacing the tiny bathroom floor of that hotel room. What made matters worse is that Marty’s mom was in the adjoining room with her Vera Bradley Hipster ready to shop. I looked in the mirror and told myself that I was going to have to snap out of it and pull myself together! Marty needed to be the first to hear this news so I was going to have to put on an Oscar winning performance with my mother in law so she wouldn’t know something was up before he did.
I am a terrible actress and I am probably even more terrible at keeping secrets, especially secrets that involve me being pregnant with a surprise baby. That pep talk I had with the mirror lasted all of 15 seconds because as soon as I saw Peggy the words “Come look at this!” were out. I led her to the bathroom to show her the test. I then went into a 15 minute stream of conscious monologue where I gushed about how not only this couldn’t be happening, but also the great lengths I had went to keep it from happening, and my calculations about what I considered to be my geriatric pregnancy.
I am convinced that I have the absolute best mother in law in the world. Peggy was overjoyed, she laughed, squealed and threw her arms around me. “You’re going to have another baby!!!!” She then assured me that I was going to be fine and that she would be there for me every step of the way. Even today, we still laugh every time we talk about how she found out I was pregnancy before anyone else and what I mess I was.
By the way, I did get around to telling Marty via text that we were expecting again because he kept asking me from the basketball game. He wasn't even mad that his mom knew before he did! In true Marty fashion he was over the moon excited and thought it was the most awesome news ever. He said, “I always wanted another baby!”
Why didn’t I know that? How can you be married to someone and they always wanted another baby and you didn’t know that? Apparently I had been too wrapped up in my own plans to listen or notice.
We went to the doctor when I was 10 weeks along and saw a strong heartbeat and decided it was time to tell the boys and the rest of the family. They did not appear to be embarrassed or show signs that they felt like their lives were ruined. Maxton’s only one concern was when he asked, “Mom, are we going to be like the Duggars?” When I assured him that the answer was no he seemed fine and both boys were really excited. They couldn’t wait to tell everyone and we let them because their delivery of the message was much more adorable than ours.
The funny thing is, the more people we told the more excited I became. Come to find out, I come from a long line of women who had little ones after 35 and they were all so encouraging. I grew more and more at ease. Things were going to be fine, possibly even wonderful! I began to imagine this new baby taking its place in our family and what that would look like. I found myself feeling hopeful, something I hadn’t experienced since my mom had died.
I share all this with you because I wonder if any of you out there can relate to this; having a plan and discovering God has a different one entirely. Maybe at first you were like me and panicked just a little or a lot! For me it was a surprise pregnancy but it could take the form of so many different things from the loss of a loved one way too soon, to a dream that just didn't come true. When I look back, up until that point I had held on to my plans with everything I had in me. Now, for the first time in my life I was beginning to feel like I could lean into the unique plan God had for me instead of shaking my fist at it, fighting to take back control as if I had any in the first place. This was just the beginning of a work that was taking place in my mind and in my heart.
After a long winter, it was finally spring. There was new life.
The day of the big announcement!