I've always wanted to be a mom. From the time I was little girl pretending to nurse my "baby" outside the house. (I had two younger sisters, they were breastfed, so babies didn't get fed from a bottle in my mind) Now as a 29 year old woman I know that it's not so easy. That there are so many things to consider before you just go out and get pregnant, that is if you can even get pregnant. All the financial and emotional changes that have to occur before you bring another life into this world.
Starting a family has always been in the back of our minds. Before we were married we always talked about how many children we would have. What their names would be. How we'd raise them. We'd joke about how Andre was going to be the softy, and I would be the disciplinarian. What we would do if we found out our baby was going to be handicapped in someway. Would we do genetic screening or just take the leap and have faith that God would only give us what we could handle? So many things.
Now as the time nears that I will be stopping the birth control pill we have started doing some digging about our families medical histories. What would we be passing on to our children? I knew for the most part already about my families history of depression, about the females and their issues with hypothyroidism, about my great-grandparents both passing away of cancer. Then Andre at my urging does some digging with the help of his cousin. I knew that he has an abnormally high number of women in his family that have passed away from Multiple Sclerosis, but didn't know how many until we looked at the family history.
As it turns out he had two great-aunts and two cousins both pass away of MS in their 30's and 40's. He also has two other cousins that have Lupus. It's all been weighing on my mind lately. Andre could sense how much all this new-found information was troubling me. He came to talk to me on Sunday night. He was very serious. We talked through everything and he expressed to me how much he wants children. I told him that I had a lot of things I will have to discuss with my doctor in the fall. Until then I told him we have to table the baby discussion.
This week all these things have been floating through my brain. Made much worse by the fact that I see young children and babies everywhere. From the little girl in the clinic that just kept smiling and waving, not wanting to leave with her mom but just smile and wave at me, even to the family of ducks that we saw on our walk this afternoon. Children are such a blessing, a miracle really. Andre would kill me if he knew that I was thinking this seriously about not having children. He is the rational part of my brain. The one who jumps into each situation with both feet. While I sit on the edge weighing the pros and cons before I take that step.
He would say "Jenna, it will be fine. Our children will be fine. Don't be silly. You're such a worry-wort". Maybe he's right.
We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies. ~Shirley Abbott
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