Living Vicariously

My good friend had a baby yesterday. A huge, beautiful, girl baby, at home, in the water. Jenn is now my hero.

I was literally jumping for joy yesterday when I heard. I was so terribly excited, and I had no idea why. I'm not related to Jenn or the baby. Honestly, it really doesn't have that much to do with me. But I was unspeakably thrilled with the whole thing and couldn't wait to see her and the baby and hear all the details.

I rationalized my excitement with the theory that (besides being thrilled for a good friend's good fortune) somewhere deep down, there's something in me that still craves multiplication. Somehow, despite my brain's objections that I want to be done with childbearing, some part of me must want more.

Then, late last night, I proved myself wrong. Despite all our meticulous precautions, we discovered a birth control malfunction, completely beyond our control and irreversible, and on a fertile day.

And you know what I did? I panicked.

PANICKED.

Now, I am not a girl who panics. In Venezuela, at the age of 15, men pointed handguns in my face and waved them around behind my head, and I didn't panic. I sat there, forcing myself to play the sound of a gun shot over and over in my mind, so that if a real shot sounded, I wouldn't flinch. I sat there, calmly deciding whether I should let on that I understood those men, shouting at us in Spanish to put our hands on the table, while our hands were in the air. I sat there, knowing that if I lived, I lived, and if I died, I lived, and that living or dying God was in control and would not fail me.

Yet last night, in the safety of our home, when my attempts at planning and prevention and 'responsibility' (as society likes to call it) failed me, I panicked. I was not in control of my life, even though I was trying so hard to control it. I wanted so much to control it. But I can't. There is nothing I can do to absolutely guarantee that my family will remain the size it is.

So why do I try? I guess I wanted to prove to myself and everyone else, beyond doubt, that it is God, not my lack of decision and action, who gives me my children, however many they may be, just as it was God who decided eleven years ago that I should live to marry Jason and bear children and help plant a church in a needy, nowhere town. It was Him.

After Naiah was born, I felt right about making a decision to use safe, non-hormonal birth control. It was like stating a preference. It was like saying, "God, I would really like to have these four children, and no more. But if you choose otherwise, at least I'll know it was your hand overreaching mine."

But last night, all I could think was, I failed.

That's wrong.

If I'm pregnant, God wanted me to be pregnant.

If I'm not pregnant, God prevented it.

And that's how it has been all along.