Pregnant in First Year of Marriage

From Sharon J. (Lancaster, PA)

My husband and I were not planning on getting pregnant this early. Selfishly we really wanted a year to adjust to each other, process life together, transition into a new life together in a new city without the "added strain" of a pregnancy and a new baby. Even now being pregnant the hard part isn't, "Oh no we aren't out of debt yet," or "Shoot I was wanting to go back to school." Instead it has been hard just thinking about giving up some freedoms. We were planning a trip to Colorado in the fall and now because I will be 7 months pregnant that probably won't be happening and that is hard to think about.

I think for both of us we feel the foot loose and fancy "freeness" of our life is slowly being pulled away. But, truly I think I would have struggled with this at any point of getting pregnant simply because I have been a single, on my own, go where I want when I want person for 10 years, up until I got married 4 months ago.

I wonder at times if I really have what it takes to be a mom. How in the world do you raise a child and not just raise them but build strong character into them and hopefully lead them to the Lord. It is such a huge responsibility to be in charge with another persons life and have them completely dependent on you. I am realizing more than ever the importance of my decisions now.

I know my husband struggles with the question of if he'll be able to provide for us. And he also has nervousness because he has never been around babies and really doesn't know how to hold them, change them, or care for them. Also hearing too from friends how tiring it is is really overwhelming to him because he is already completely exhausted every day from him job so the idea of getting even less sleep is depressing to him.

It also concerns me to think about what kind of world I am bringing my child into. As I think about our earth, pollution, crime, our country's moral character I can definitely be discouraged. But I just have to remember that we worship a sovereign, loving and just God and I just need to trust in Him for today. But with that I am also realizing I can have an impact on our future, disciplining women, and mentoring younger gals to help them contribute to a better society; to be God-fearing teachers, accountants, lawyers, etc. I can make a difference.

Fears and Anxieties

From Celesta B. (Canton, GA)

I remember loads of specific fears and anxieties, namely how would we affordcto relinquish a steady salary so that I could stay home and raise our baby. This wasn't some passing worry; this was the reason we prolonged the "act" so long after we finally made the decision that we did indeed want to have a child.

We agonized over how we could afford to be responsible for a tiny human. I remember this anxiousness hovered over all my waking moments and clouded my faith that God would provide for us and financially honor our commitment to stay home. To be honest, I can't say that I ever really had true faith that God would provide. I hoped He would. I prayed He would. But, I stayed unsettled and worried right through my maternity leave with my employer.

And then, moment by moment, "coincidence" by "coincidence", He was there helping us make ends meet, stretching my husband's salary farther than we thought it could go, bringing big name clients to my newly-established writing business. Now, three years in, those fears seem so far away. Yes, we still have big dreams for a financially secure future, but we've lived more abundantly in these three years than we ever did before our babies arrived. I smile to really finally internalize this promise (and reprimand):

"See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his glory was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, `What will we eat?' or `What will we drink?' or `What will we wear?' For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them."

How Can We Fit Kids Into Our Lives?

Ideals are great … until they meet the blender of real life. Having a vision for why and when to start a family can give you new momentum, but you’ll need all the extra motivation you can find once you start thinking through the logistics, the how. This is the place where the things that might be stirring in your heart meet the practical questions from your head: “How can we afford this?” “How will this affect our work?” “How are we going to manage all the care a baby will need?” “How do we prepare a home for a baby?”

“Parents have always had the primary responsibility for taking care of their children’s needs,” writes Barbara Dafoe Whitehead. ”What is new is that those needs are greater today. In a dynamic society and global economy, the task of nurturing, guiding and preparing children for flourishing adult lives requires higher investments of parental money, time and attention than ever before.”

Coming up with all that money, time, and attention is more challenging in a day when couples typically need two incomes to cover their current budget (especially those carrying hefty student loan debt). Beyond the practical financial questions, the psychological questions add more anxiety. Couples who had poor modeling from their parents wonder how they’ll be able to avoid the same mistakes. Those who have seen the extra stress children bring to a marriage might wonder how their relationship can weather having a baby. Additionally, any couple that has gotten used to the nicer things afforded by two full-throttle careers, will likely have nagging worries about changes to their lifestyle and identity.

Then there are the random questions that pop up in the middle of dinner or in the middle of the night: “What about the family reunion that’s scheduled near the time we’d be having a baby? What about that trip to Europe we have planned—the baby would only be a couple of months old?” “Can you even put a car seat in the back of a Mini Cooper?”

In the face of all these logistical questions couples can lose their vision for starting a family—or at least end up wanting to hit snooze on the process.

When couples reach this place in their thoughts about starting a family, it’s tempting to hold off until they can come up with a better plan—until they can figure out what to do with all the questions that have surfaced. But maybe a better plan is overrated.

Just as it’s okay to start your family without having detailed answers to every question “Why,” it’s also okay to not know how everything’s going to work out, to not be able to see but so far down the road ahead.

Most children have been born into the world without a strategy—without a detailed budget or contingency plan. (You have to wonder what life would be like for kids whose parents would actually write a strategic plan before having them; Eustace Scrubb in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader comes to mind.)

By saying you don’t need a detailed plan, however, we’re not advocating that you just plow into all the logistical details of launching a family fueled by a blissful hope that everything will come together. We’re not saying you should back your way into parenthood. It’s a significant responsibility to bring life into the world and then care for, provide, protect, and guide that life.

What we are saying is you don’t need a detailed plan, but a few timeless principles can make all the difference.  …

[This is an excerpt from the “How?” section of Start Your Family: Inspiration for Having Babies.

When's the Right Time to Start Our Family?

Most couples have some kind of timeline in mind for when it feels right to have a baby. Maybe it’s vague, maybe you haven’t talked it through as a couple to land on a precise target, but you likely have a sense of what you think needs to happen first and what conditions you think would be optimal for a good start. “We’re going to pay off some debt and explore Colorado a little more and then get started,” we used to tell people. “We’re thinking we’ll try in a couple of years depending on how work is going,” or “We’re going to squeeze in another degree before we have kids,” we’ve heard others say.

Conventional wisdom says timing is everything—it’s essential to find the optimal time to launch your family. “Now that the baby is only a theoretical possibility rather than a biological inevitability, the pre-requisites for baby-readiness in the mind of the modern couple grow every year,” wrote Read and Rachel Schuchardt. Fifty years ago, nearly three-quarters of couples had children within three years of getting married. Now, only about a third do so.

It seems that more and more couples believe that if they get going too soon they’ll get themselves and their babies off to a bad start. Admittedly, there are few things in life more daunting than launching a new life into the world. Anyone who soberly reflects on the magnitude of the venture and of the things that could go wrong can be motivated to think more cautiously about their timing. But for today’s couples, the factors guiding timing have grown more complex.

Couples have always worried about being able to provide for a new family—economic changes, job situations, and debt issues have always been considerations. Today couples are more likely to go into marriage with much greater consumer and educational debt than their parents did, leading many to put off having children. In fact, the percentage of college graduates citing education debt as their reason for delaying children nearly doubled between 1991 and 2002. Additionally, many now have the mentality that getting established—a common prerequisite for having children—means attaining the standard of living that their parents spent decades accumulating.

The promise of a longer life also complicates a couple’s timeline. People who only expected to live for sixty to seventy years knew their life span would affect the amount of time they would be able to spend with their offspring. In the midst of what Robert Butler calls a “longevity revolution,” however, it’s a lot easier to think about starting a family at a much later age.

Adding greater complexity to a couple’s timeline is the growing perception that reproductive technology can make it possible for a woman to become a mom just about whenever she wants. Where the limits of fertility once seemed unyielding, they now seem highly flexible.

In the face of ballooning debt, ever promising breakthroughs in artificial reproductive technologies, and faith that we can live longer than our forebears, couples have more reasons than ever to delay starting their families, alongside few if any cautions about how long they wait. In such conditions, a more stretched out timeline seems prudent and ideal for both them and their future baby. But is it?

Our concern is that even couples with the best intentions tend to underestimate the power of inertia, while overestimating the flexibility they actually have in their timing.  …

[This is an excerpt from the “When” section of Start Your Family: Inspiration for Having Babies.]

Why Have Kids?

It’s okay to start your family without a specific reason why—to not have a grand vision or a driving purpose for launching a new life. It’s all right to let the love and joy you share with your spouse drive you forward into family even when people tell you to stop and think gravely before having kids. Ever since time began, men and women have brought new life into the world and the great majority of them did so without clear answers to the question, “Why?” At a simple level, it’s because humans share a lot of reproductive similarities with creatures of all kinds. We were designed with a sex drive that leads to coupling and a fertilization process that can trigger the miracle of life.

If you were to ask your grandparents or great-grandparents why they had children, they would probably give you a baffled look and say, “That’s what married couples did.” In one of their several books on generations, authors William Strauss and Neil Howe observe that the family was such a powerful institution at the midpoint of the 1900s—what they call “the American High”—that it was taken for granted. “Once World War II ended,” they write, “family formation and parenthood weren’t a choice, but a social expectation. To the mind-set of that era, everything was on autopilot.”

In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz echoes such observations on his way to showing how things have changed. “In the past, the ‘default’ options were so powerful and dominant that few perceived themselves to be making choices. Whom we married was a matter of choice, but we knew that we would do it as soon as we could and have children, because that was something all people did.” In the past half century, however, choice has grown into one of our greatest commodities.

“Today,” Schwartz writes, “all romantic possibilities are on the table ; all choices are real.” It’s a trend Howe and Strauss spotlight, writing, “Once the Consciousness Revolution ended, family formation and parenthood weren’t a social expectation, but a choice, even a profound personal statement.”

And so we, of the Xer generations and following, stop to ask, “Why?” We don’t just do things out of tradition or expectation. We don’t just have kids because that’s what’s expected or because it’s what our parents did. We’ve moved beyond that. We have kids as a statement, as a lifestyle choice. But the choice to have children now sits on a shelf in a growing supermarket of options leaving couples asking why that choice would be better than any other.

For many couples, the choice to have a baby faces more than just competing options—it’s under serious scrutiny. “In our society today, parenthood is on trial,” says Po Bronson in his book Why Do I Love These People? He describes skeptical parents like a jury “considering the facts, making their calculations, collecting more evidence.”

…

Where can you find compelling answers to the nagging question, “Why have children?”

[This is an excerpt from the “Why?” section of the book Start Your Family]