Marriage, for me meant children. I wanted babies…but my first baby to a while to come. Finally, he made his appearance in 1967. I had named him long before his birth and…on the day he arrived, after a very short labour for a first-time mum…nothing could have been greater than the joy I felt when I held my Andrew in my arms.
Another three sons arrived in quick succession, four boys in four years and nine months. From a woman with empty arms, longing for a family, I morphed into a frantically busy mother of four sons under the age of five. Those years slipped by in a flurry of cooking, cleaning, and caring for my husband and lively family.
I think that my husband took to doing his “ministry” away from home as much as possible during those years, to escape his fathering role. He opted out, first because he had no idea how to be a father…his own father had finally rejected him years before when he was in Bible College…and second, because raising his sons scared him and he distanced himself from them as much as he could. They were there, but he left them to me to handle.
The outcome was that I was building up a head of steam inside…a volcano of anger and frustration that threatened to blow from sheer overload!
One day, the volcano erupted! I was 35 weeks pregnant with my desperately-longed-for daughter. One of my sons defied me at the breakfast table. My pent-up anger exploded. I grabbed him by the hair and pulled him from the table.
I have no recollection of what I did next. I only remember falling in my knees at my bedside after the family had left and sobbing out my irrational rage to God.
Later that morning, I drove to an appointment with my gynae for my regular pre natal check up. She expressed concern that the foetal heart sounded distant and faint. I thought nothing of it but…on my drive home, I was aware of an unusual feeling, as though the baby had slumped down in my womb. As a midwife, I was acutely aware of and followed the progress of my baby by the movement inside.
There was no feeling of life that day…not the usual thump or flutter that I so enjoyed…those tiny interactions between my baby and me. Nothing! Just an eerie stillness and the alarm that grew as the hours passed.
Finally, when I could handle the apprehension no longer, I made a hurried visit to my local GP to check the foetal heart. Nothing! No a sound! No familiar beat of a healthy little heart! Only the rhythmic woosh-woosh of blood rushing through my uterine vessels.
My GP immediately called my gymae and sent me off to the maternity hospital. After a few hours of induced labour, my daughter was born…beautiful, perfect, but wearing the mottled purple colour of death. I lifted my drugged head to take a quick glimpse of her before she was whipped away to be prepared for the mortuary.
My baby was born in the era when it was thought wise to protect mothers from the sight and experience of bearing a dead baby. No closure! No “goodbye”! No final feel of her tiny body close to mine! Only empty arms and a shattered heart!
After the birth, I was wheeled into a private ward close to the general ward where mothers had their babies in cribs alongside their beds…to bond and care for until their discharge. This practice changed the practice, during my training year, of keeping the babies in the nursery, only to be taken to mothers at feeding time.
My room was close enough to hear the babies crying…adding to the pain of my own loss…like digging a knife into an already deep, bleeding wound but…greater than the pain of loss was the agonising awareness of guilt. I had inadvertently killed my own baby by my angry outburst. I could not escape the truth. It overwhelmed me like a dark, threatening storm cloud.
As I lay there listening to baby wails, I felt the weight of my guilt. I offered no rational reasons…no excuses. Then, in the midst of my deep despair, I began to feel, creeping over my whole being a warmth, as if I were being wrapped in a soft, protective blanket…a Presence…forgiveness flooding my heart…peace driving out the guilt…quietness in my spirit that completely replaced the agony of my sin. I felt God’s love so real, so overwhelming, so liberating, that I was free, free inside from the crushing weight of what I had done. The memory still remained…but not the pain.
God had spoken…not in judgement…not even in words. He was there. He had been there all the time but now…He had made Himself real, His own presence the greatest word of all…wordless but speaking of His deep love and forgiveness, of His unfailing mercy and grace.
I was discharged from the hospital that morning…carrying with me the memory, but not the pain, of my loss. So transformed was my experience…from deep grief to deep gratitude…that I was free to reassure, first my doctor and then my friends and family, that I was not suffering from delayed hysteria.
There is a past script, a closure to this story. A few weeks later, in the early spring, I was preparing for a move to another town. I took boxes of unwanted clutter to the dump which happened to be close to the cemetery. On an impulse, I walked through the area where babies and children were buried, hoping to find the spot where my little angel lay. My husband and I had been debating whether to put a memorial stone over her grave or not.
For some reason, despite my searching, I could not identify her resting place. As I walked up the path, through the trees in fresh spring growth, I felt a whisper in my spirit. “She is not here!” Of course, her tiny body lay in the ground, a seed sown in death but she was with the Lord, waiting in hope for the moment of glorious resurrection.
I left that city and the child I had so deeply desired, in peace. I carried with me the assurance of a love so deep and so real that nothing in the future…and there were many deep and stormy waters to navigate on my way to the Father…that I forever treasure what I learned from the loss and the love that sustained and still sustains me every moment of every day.
To be continued