Beauty Not Burden

Six years ago my wife Margot miscarried our first child just before the end of her first trimester. It shattered her heart. Four months later we lost our second child in the same manner. As a man with a wounded wife whose pain I could not fully comprehend, I felt truly helpless. It was a difficult time for us newlyweds. It was something that set the tone to our first year of marriage. We wanted a child so badly.

However, to every crucifixion there is a resurrection. Thankfully two years later we celebrated the arrival of the first of our three daughters (who today are all under the age of four) to nurture and love whole heartedly. The moment she breathed and I heard her first cry, a cry that pierced my heart and awakened my soul, I wept as did my wife. This child was what we at that moment were created for.

That night as my tired wife slept, I held my new daughter in my arms. The light creeped in under the frame of the hospital door. It was sufficient enough for me to watch my firstborn try and open her eyes for the first time. I kissed her continually on her then cone head and I recall the feeling inside of my heart. 

It did not have words to it, but it spoke. It called out so clearly a definitive action that alerted my senses and gave me a job and a mission. If voiced it would have said, “Mia Marguerite I have hardly met you and I would die for you.” 

I have died daily for Mia and her two sisters in so many ways. 

Raising three children—three girls at that—has granted me a life filled with joy. It is a tiresome joy. There are nights when my wife and I think we are alas going to enjoy time in a romantic setting: low lights, a glass of wine, and time alone on a couch stained by chocolate candy or popsicle hands—when it happens. One of our little innocent beings, created in love, will wander or whine and wreck the moment. 

A coin will be tossed by a glance between the distance of a pillow cushion which separates us, most likely I will lose, and will arise into the not so darkness of our daughters’ room lit by a three foot pink Christmas tree that I have not had the heart to take down even though it has been eight months since its first arrival upon their bedroom dresser. Why? Because my two and a half year old asked me not to. 

Though typically it is a glass of water wanted, a stuffed animal that has fallen off the bed in need of being rescued, or the reassurance of my presence, there are those nights when it seems nothing is sufficient in aiding them back into the land of dreams laced with Tinkerbell, Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. They are making me selfless. They are making me a better man. They are making me holy.

My daughters may in fact be little creatures of want, but it is a want I gladly seek to understand and fill within reason. Within reason? Within what reason? It is within the reason of bringing them to know that the world is not perfect, nor are their parents, but for now I will do everything within my limited contingent self to aid them in meeting the non-contingent “Being” when that day does arrive. Why? Love.

When I get stares from people that I do not know, or questions from acquaintances, friends or family members as to when I will stop having children, I am baffled. It is as if the world sees children and creation as something that is supposed to have a red light or green light to it. 

My question to the world is such, “What is so wrong and awful about approaching the ability to procreate from a yellow light point of view?” Like Aristotle's exegesis on virtue, I approach the ability to create not cowardly or recklessly, but courageously yielding to discernment. 

I do not hate anyone, but I do at times hate the questions people ask me. They see my wife and I with our three daughters and instead of seeing the beauty in my children they see the burden. When did the world get so frustrated with the burden of children? When did it get so frustrated with people who have numerous children? When did human beings become perfect to the point that they have no need to be uncomfortable? 

People who can have children want children. They want to create. We are designed to create in conjunction with the ultimate Creator. From the point of natural law, our existence is an action that requires us to begin and end some thing or task.

For me becoming a father or a fully human being involves more than conception and birth. In the words of Johannes Metz, “…it is a mandate and a mission, a command and a decision.  A human being has an open-ended relationship to himself.  They do not possess their being unchallenged; and cannot take their being for granted as God does his. Other animals, for example, survive in mute innocence and cramped necessity. With no future horizons they are what they are from the start. The law of their life and being is spelled out for them, and they resign themselves to these limits without question.”

Innately inside every single soul is a yearning to bring life into lifelessness. People ask me questions about my “sex life” with my wife and the fruits of it—we make love and then nine months later welcome and name that love—because they do not have the courage to create what we have nor do they dare to and thus they mock the unknown. Their contraceptive sexuality breeds them into a world of contraceptive thought and spirituality. 

What if people stopped mocking the unknown and embraced it? What if people decided to live outside the comfort of themselves?

My life is a radical one. I am raising a family of saints and I am not a saint; and yet I want more saints to raise. I am seeking to bring my stained self into the unstained hearts of my children in hopes they will be able to do the same one day by seeing their imperfect father as a human being that tried to embrace the unknown. They are the unknown. Everything about their future is a mystery except one thing. I will love them, always.

My halftime is the distance between work and home. It is not long considering I work above my garage in a makeshift office. When I walk through the patio gate I am greeted by a shedding German Shepherd named Rosie, a wife that is typically tired, a drooling five month old baby named Colette, a middle child syndrome two and a half year old toddler named Marcella, and a four year old preschooler named Mia. I am surrounded by estrogen and I am somehow asked to guide, provide, and protect this group of people (Rosie takes care of herself—so she’s not included in the invoice). It is hard. I am often uncomfortable. I am tired seven days out of the week. Yet I am happy. How?

Because I get to watch life unfold. I get to put all of myself into the creations I created, and I love it.  Try it more than once or twice. You might find more of yourself in the giving away of yourself.