I locked myself in the bathroom and took the hidden pregnancy test out of the plastic bag. I’d used the half hour during Gabi’s piano lesson to go to our neighborhood Walgreens to buy it. I couldn’t have her with me on this errand because she could read, and I couldn’t handle the slew of questions my eight-year-old would ask. Her younger two sisters were safe chaperones, though. They had no idea what Mommy was buying at the store.
Dinner was cooking in the oven, and I couldn’t wait another minute to take the test. It had to be negative; we were just too planful, too responsible, too unspontaneous for this kind of thing to happen. But there was that one whoops incident a few weeks earlier that gave me just enough room to consider the possibility.
I ripped open the plastic pouch that held the test, a rush of past test-taking memories flooding my brain. As I prayed for the test to be negative, I felt like a teenager.
Two blue lines immediately appeared in the window. I knew this meant I was not only pregnant, I was well on my way in the process. I’d never miscarried; it was safe to assume I was having another baby.
My heart stopped, the beating frozen. How could this just happen? We’d tried for a year to get pregnant with Gracie. I’d had months of disappointing negative tests, and now when I was full to the brim with life and couldn’t imagine one more person needing something from me—this?
Gabi pounded out a new song on her keyboard in her bedroom. The notes pushed past the bathroom door, along with Gracie’s toddler screams as Genevieve chased her through the house. Their screams were of joy, but they were screams nonetheless, and I wasn’t sure I could handle any more noise in my life.
“Whaa?” Derek stood in the bathroom doorway after I sent Genevieve for him. He couldn’t even get the question out.
I nodded and started crying. I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t sad. I was simply emotional. And now on top of that, I was pregnant-emotional. I couldn’t believe we were going down this road.
He stepped into the bathroom, shut the door, and stared at me until he finally said, “This is great!”
I knew he was right; I just couldn’t wrap my head around it.
The next few weeks, I walked around in a daze. I believe wholeheartedly that God decides when new life is created. I’d believed it from the moment I felt found. I was no accident to him, and neither was this child.
During those weeks, I thought of my mom, imagining her as a single woman with the news of a baby coming. She’d always told me I was a surprise. But she always stressed that she’d been excited, and though I wasn’t planned, she loved me. But she must have had other feelings too. Was she overwhelmed? Scared? Apprehensive? I was having those feelings, and I was married and already in baby mode. Though overwhelmed, I realized this unexpected baby would just accentuate the chaos that was already present.
My mom came to visit a few months later. At the dining room table, between water cups spilling and a toddler taking her diaper off, she said, “I had a baby who was a surprise, and she was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
I knew this baby was a good thing.
As I folded laundry and loaded the dishwasher, I said many quick prayers for women around the world who were in desperate places. And I thanked God I wasn’t. Despite all of my expectations that needed adjusting, I knew I would get to a place of pure excitement and joy for this child. How could I not, with the three complete beauties surrounding me at every turn? And I was not alone. Derek was with me. God was working in my womb. Cocreating a new beauty for me to experience.
At work, I sat in my office and wondered if it was the right time to tell my boss, Karen. I was nervous. I knew she would be disappointed by the pullback this would require in my workload. But I also knew she loved me and really wanted what was best for me. And God had clearly spoken that I was to be a mother of four. I cried as I told her, embarrassed that I was sad about something so precious and miraculous, and also because I knew she was safe. I could tell her I was torn. She would let me feel exactly what I needed to, would journey next to me without judgment, instead offering encouragement for the unexpected ahead.
“I have no idea how much I’ll be able to work,” I said. She and I both knew that with three kids, I was already saying no to many work opportunities.
“You are a woman with many calls on your life,” she said. And then she offered pure wisdom. “Do what only you can do.”
I don’t know why it struck me as profound, but I knew she was right. God wasn’t calling me to do everything. He was calling me to do certain things. And for now that included having another baby.
In the months that followed I repeated that phrase in my head: Do what only you can do. Do what only you can do. As questions came up about assignments at work, starting a new MOPS group at our church, activities my kids would be involved in, I asked myself, Can somebody else do this? What part of this has God uniquely shaped me to take on? If any? Those questions helped me immediately let go of many things I knew were jobs others could do. I was reminded that what could be a task for me could be a calling for someone else.
And I grieved the plans I’d made for what the next few years would hold: to work more, to have mobile kids who could sit in restaurants and go to movies, to leave them overnight with friends for a weekend away with my husband. Plans that did not include a newborn. As much as I knew what I wanted, I trusted God knew what was best. It was starting to sink in: faith is believing when you still have questions.
A couple of months later, I was getting used to saying it out loud: “I’m having another baby.” After three babies, my abdominal muscles were as close to Jell-O as a human body part could get, so I started showing right away and needed to tell the world, and convince myself, that I would be a mother of four.
“Oh, how many do you have now?” a dark-haired woman sitting across from the bar-height table asked me. Her name was Rachel, and we were at a dinner for women from our church. She was new, and I’d seen her around, checking her girls in and out of Sunday school next to mine, but we were really just meeting for the first time.
“Three.”
“Oh, wow. We’ve talked about having a third.”
“You should,” I said, now a self-appointed recruiter for everyone around us to have more kids so we wouldn’t be the lone large family.
“If we’re going to, we should do it soon, so there’s not too much of an age gap.”
Neither of us knew that within a month she would go in for an ultrasound, wondering if she was indeed pregnant, only to be diagnosed with stomach cancer instead.