I’m a big believer in divine appointments. You know, those moments when just the right person comes into your life, just the right word is spoken when you desperately needed to hear it. When just the right job opportunity comes up, or something that feels like devastation unfolds into a blessing beyond measure. There are moments I believe we all experience that are so specifically tailored to us that only God could orchestrate something so timely and redemptive.
I didn’t know it on my way to meet Zeljka, but I was about to have a divine appointment. With the deep shifts happening within me concerning children, Zeljka would become a poignant living example contradicting all the negative bull roar I had heard about marriage and children, that you had to sacrifice one to successfully do the other. Most of the women I had interviewed up to that point were older than me. And I love that. I soak up sage wisdom as if my life depends on it (because it often does). But there’s a different power when you gain trustworthy perspective from a peer, someone in your own age group who faces the same pressures you do while managing more than you currently handle. Zeljka was exactly that: a wife, mother, and successful career woman. She was one of the few exceptions of my “twenty-five years or more” filter in finding women to learn their secrets. She is here with us because the secrets she’s learned relate to contemporary life—not, say, raising children forty years ago—and there are lessons only a contemporary woman can express.
At the time of the interview, Zeljka and her husband had been together for thirteen years but married for nine. They’d married when she was twenty-eight; he was one year younger. Their first child, a son, was born one month shy of their first anniversary. They had dated for four years and decided, as soon as they got married, that they would grow their family.
When Zeljka and I met for coffee, I could feel her sweet spirit from the moment she said, “I’m so sorry I’m late. I had four meetings today, and the fourth one just ended.” I was just happy she could make it. She’s a director of marketing for two of the top Croatian newspapers, and prior to having children, worked twelve to fourteen hours every day. When she became pregnant, she made a decision. Her family would come first.
She met with her company and told them she’d need to change to an eight-hour workday and keep it to five days a week. She assured them if that required she be demoted, she would not complain because she knew her priorities had changed.
“In the beginning it was tough,” she recalled. “I went from working incredibly long hours on most days to staying at home, feeding my son, and watching him take naps.” She got a little choked up when she talked about breast-feeding and the early difficulty she had. She wasn’t producing enough milk and felt guilty. Meanwhile, she got the standard line from marriage troublemakers: with a baby on the scene, all her good years with her husband were now in the rearview mirror.
She didn’t realize it at the time, but she partly believed the negative hype. “Misery loves company, I guess,” she said, reflecting back on those tough, early times. Once they had made it through the hardest season of sleepless nights (“no more than three hours at a time for months and months”), she and her husband sat down to put a line in the sand.
“We decided the only voices we would listen to were our own, to the dreams we both had and the optimism that had always been a part of our relationship. We decided to do our best to enjoy the present moment.”
It’s clear that she had given this approach to life a lot of thought and practice through harried days and loaded seasons of hectic work, around-the-clock child rearing, and maintaining a relationship with a husband she dearly loved. “Those who live in the past,” she said, “will never move forward. Those who are waiting for the future will always miss out on the present.”
Listening to Zeljka, I saw that the decision she and her husband made wasn’t a silver bullet to the actual pressures of their lives. Instead, it was a buttress to them as people, a posture toward life that helped them tackle the day-to-day while acknowledging that infants grow. With that growth comes maturity and a shift into different needs (that usually allow for more sleep, thank the Lord).
Zeljka certainly didn’t look like a woman working in an influential, demanding position with a husband who still works twelve-hour days and a six-year-old and one-year-old at home. She looked happy. There’s no better way to say it. She looked genuinely happy and content. And not a forced happy, with a forced smile through a sour face. I’ve had enough interactions with married women to easily tell the difference.
“What would you do differently if you could go back and start with your first child again?” I asked.
She seemed amused by the question, wistful even imagining the possibility. “I’d worry less,” she said through a smile.
“With all that’s on your plate, do you put your husband first?”
“Of course,” she declared. But then she added, “And I put my children first.”
“How do you mean?” I probed.
“You know how parents tell their children that they love them all equally, that they don’t have any favorites? It’s kind of like that,” she said. “I’m only human, so I’ll never love anyone—not my husband, not my children—perfectly. But I strive every day to give them the love they need in the way they need it. Putting my husband first doesn’t mean neglecting my children, or vice versa. It’s a balancing act every day. I’ll never do it exactly right, but that was the case before I had children. We just try to be in the moment with each other, love and give unconditionally.”
I heard another mom use a sweet analogy along those same lines. At the time, she had one child, with another on the way. When the daughter came and asked if having a little brother meant that mommy would love her less, the mom pleaded that would never be the case. But like any precocious child, the daughter wasn’t satisfied by her declaration. What assurances could she have, right? So the mom did something rather clever. There was a lit candle nearby, and she told the girl to sit tight for a second, while she left the room.
Moments later, this wise mom came back in, holding an unlit candle. “See these two candles?” she asked. “You’re this candle”—she pointed to the lit one—“and this little fire is a sign of my love for you, which keeps going.” Then she raised the unlit candle. “This candle is your little brother. When he comes,” she said as she lit the candle from the first candle’s flame, “I’ll love him too, just like I love you.”
The little girl looked in wonderment as her brain processed the lesson.
“See your candle?” the mother asked. “Did the light go out because I lit your brother’s candle? Did it burn any less?” The little girl answered no. “That’s exactly what will happen with my love for you. When your brother comes, I will love you both just the same.” Because love is something that can multiply infinitely.
Zeljka told me more. “When my son asked me if he’s the most important person to me, I told him yes, he is, and his little sister is, and Daddy is. I had to explain to him that they are all equal, and just as I spend time alone with him and his sister, Mommy needs to have alone time with Daddy. I give all the love I can possibly give. And I split it up between them. They all know they are more important to me than anything else.”
I next asked how she kept her husband from feeling neglected or her children from feeling less important than their dad. It’s quite simple for her, she said: they’re all first, so no one gets neglected. But did she ever feel the strain of her job, her husband, and her children pulling her in different directions? The answer was yes. “But it’s temporary,” she said, as if reminding me of something fairly obvious. She contends, as does every other couple I’ve interviewed, that the kids will only be here for a short time, the next twenty years maybe, and then they’ll be adults as well.
In a few years, both of their children will be in grade school, and she and her husband will have more time for each other again. Right now, they share their time between each other and the kids. But for them, it’s wonderful; it’s family, and they’d have it no other way.
Zeljka loves being a mom. She loves being a wife. She enjoys being a businesswoman. And she doesn’t feel any of those roles have to be sacrificed. There is compromise involved, but that’s a part of everyday life.
I left my time with Zeljka and felt like a gardener plucking negative weeds that had cropped up in my heart. Happy wife after happy wife—whether married nine years or fifty years—continued to assure me that the early years of parenting can be challenging, but it’s a good challenge, and it’s temporary. Life is designed for growth, and children don’t stop when they’re infants.
My marriage may momentarily shift focus to babies who cannot take care of themselves. But it’s worth it. And as long as we continue to keep our marriage a priority and don’t allow it to become second-class in our home, we will emerge stronger, we will love each other more, and we will have come together in the greatest partnership in life. The women I’d spoken to so far had all confirmed this in one way or another. It was encouraging and emboldening.
I walked along the streets of Zagreb for another hour, contemplating my divine appointment and the paradigm shift happening in my own heart. Then I returned to the hotel and called Keith.
“Honey, when I come home, I’m ready to go to the doctor and see what we need to do to begin working on having children.” A while back, Keith asked me to consider in vitro fertilization (IVF) if we couldn’t have children without assistance, since our insurance covered it. I’d been opposed, mainly because I knew that could greatly increase our chance of pregnancy. But on this call, I assured him that if we learned we’d waited too long and couldn’t get pregnant on our own, I was ready to consider everything from IVF to adoption.
I knew he’d long put his dreams of fatherhood on the back burner until I was comfortable moving forward. He’d comforted me many times before with reassurance that he loved being married to me so much that he would be perfectly fine without children. They’d be nice, but our life was so beautiful without them it wouldn’t be right to force it if we weren’t both ready. (Oh, how I love that man!)
My fear was melting. My heart was growing. My God had orchestrated a beautiful progression for me, and Zeljka was the final mouthpiece to this divine call I felt to move away from my old wounds.
But reversing years of hesitation can’t be undone in an instant. It would take an ancient city, and another long walk down alleyways and streets in a foreign land, to eradicate that fear and allow me to return to the days of desiring a family. As I sat on my hotel bed, overwhelmed by what was happening, an odd sensation came over me. I distinctly remembered what it felt like to hold baby Tyler in my arms for the first time.