babies Archives - Kristen Anne Glover

The White Crib

My first baby in the white crib

*100 Beautiful Days of Motherhood: 34

I remember when we first found the crib. It had been tucked away in the attic of our seminary apartment building and forgotten. We were the supervisors of the building, so when no one claimed it, my husband brought it home because my swelling belly reminded him that we were going to need it.

All the parts were there, so we cleaned it and set it up in the walk-in closet of our one-bedroom apartment because there was nowhere else to put a crib. I cried when I saw it and shut the closet door. I was not ready for what that crib represented.

Just a few months later, my first little baby was asleep in that crib. I would stand there next to her and watch her sleep, rolling the word “daughter” around in my mind as if to make the idea less foreign and more real. Some things just take time, I learned. But I didn’t know it then.

There was another baby soon, and another—enough to dull the edges of early motherhood until it did not feel strange to call another person mine.

Every single one of my babies slept in the simple white crib with the arched wood ends and the wheels that liked to fall off if I tried to move it. There were scratchy little teeth marks on the railings from slobbery, teething toddlers and places where the paint had been chipped off by Matchbox car wheels when the twins were supposed to be sleeping, but weren’t.

Years passed the way years do, and it came time to take the crib apart and move the twins into real beds. But I couldn’t do it. I kept them in their cribs even though I often found that Paul had climbed in with Micah. Once or twice, he even got his fat little leg pinned against the wall as he tried to make his escape, and once or twice, he even fell headlong onto the carpet and Micah had to tattle all about it in pantomime because he couldn’t say all the words for “That fool tried it again.”

They needed a real bed, and I knew it.

But there was that crib. The crib that held all the babies that softened my independent, selfish heart into the heart of a mother. How different I had become over the course of the years. How different it felt to set up that crib for the first time than it did to take it down for the last time!

The last time.

That was the thing. Every other time the crib had been vacated, it was because a new baby was getting too big to sleep in the bedroom with me. A new baby needed the spot occupied by a now-big-brother or sister. A new baby had come into the home.

But these little babies stretched up and thinned out and turned into little men right before my very eyes, and there were no more little babies to take their place. There aren’t going to be any more babies.

I took a screwdriver to the old white crib with the scratchy teeth marks and the chipped paint and the railings where five little babies had learned to stand up before they had learned to sit back down.

And I cried hot, mama tears for all of it.

My husband walked by and crinkled up his eyes at me and wrapped me up in a hug because I really am the most psychotic person on the planet.

The white crib has stayed in the garage next to a gnarly old bookcase that needs some attention. I came across it this weekend while I was attempting to organize and straighten out and clean up all the stuff that has piled up in this house. “You should sell that,” my husband said.

I should.

But I am the kind of mother who likes to keep the things that remind me of where I’ve been and what God has done. That simple white crib represents many years of God at work in my life. It is a symbol of my stubbornness and my redemption and the incredible mercy of God. It seems as if things like that should be set up and looked at and remembered. But you can’t very well keep an old white crib forever.

Or can you?

My mind started spinning when I saw the crib in the garage, and while I really didn’t intend to keep it, a crazy idea came into my head. Perhaps I could set up a stone of remembrance in the form of an old white crib. Perhaps I could find a way to keep a memory of the incredible miracle of God in my life. Perhaps the old white crib was not quite ready to move on.

Join me tomorrow to see what became of the crib I couldn’t seem to give away.

My last baby in the white crib

100 Beautiful Days of Motherhood: Faith {12}

This is a reprint of a post I wrote for Mother’s Day 2012. Come back tomorrow and see how God wrote the rest of the story using a reluctant mother with a little Faith.

It was the day before our first wedding anniversary when a home pregnancy test confirmed my fear: I was pregnant. The second pink line was so faint, I almost convinced myself it wasn’t there. But when I walked out of the bathroom and showed my husband, his face lit up and he wrapped me up in a huge hug. “Baby! This is such great news!” he beamed.

I burst into tears. It most certainly was not great news, and I was hurt by his excitement. I wanted his emotions to match mine; instead, they revealed the ugliness of my disappointment and fear, the ugliness of a woman who didn’t want to be pregnant with her own child.

It’s not that I didn’t like kids. I adored them. I had worked with street kids and orphans. I paid my way through college by being a nanny to a wonderful little boy. Everywhere I went, I drew kids to me like a magnet. But I didn’t want my own. I never had. I did not dream about being pregnant or holding a baby or decorating a nursery.

Everyone always said that when the time was right, I would want to have kids, and I believed them, partly because it was easier. It’s a solitary thing to be a woman who does not want children. There’s something abnormal about it. “I should try harder to want children,” I reasoned and tried to muster up some maternal instincts by sheer will-power. I wanted those feelings. They just weren’t there.

I held on the hope that one day, my desires would change so I could stop feeling like a foreigner in my own gender. Surely one day, I would want to have my own children. Someday, I wouldn’t have to explain that I didn’t hate children. One day, I would feel like a normal woman.

I did not expect to get pregnant first. I did not expect to have a baby before I was ready to be a mother.

A few weeks later, a blood test confirmed the home pregnancy test. Soon it became obvious that my stomach wasn’t flat anymore. I couldn’t quite fit into my jeans. I stood in the dressing room of Motherhood Maternity with a belly form under my shirt, trying on clothes, while tears streamed down my face. I walked out without buying a thing.

An ultrasound showed the baby was a girl, but I didn’t want anyone to know. Somehow, it made it worse to verbalize the fact that we were having a girl, not just a baby, but a girl. Deep down in the darkness of my heart, I hoped I would miscarry the baby. A friend of ours had lost her baby, and I wondered to God why He would take that baby, that loved baby, instead of mine.

Another couple we knew was struggling with infertility, and we had to call and tell them that we had gotten pregnant without even trying and I had to pretend to be happy because I couldn’t imagine how much it would hurt them to hear that I didn’t want this baby. I didn’t understand why God chose us and not them. Why not them?

The months passed. We found a hand-me-down crib and set it up in our walk-in closet because our one-bedroom apartment was too small to accommodate a baby. I came home from work and saw it there up against the back wall between my husband’s clothes and mine, and I bawled. I wanted to run away. I didn’t know where to go but I didn’t want to be in my own body anymore. I didn’t want to live my own life anymore, but how could I undo it, once it had been done? Something fundamental had changed and I could not put it back. I could not reverse it. I could not run away from it. I wanted to accept it, to embrace it, to be happy about it, but I couldn’t.

I couldn’t be happy because to be happy meant to let go. I was afraid to let go. I was afraid of what God might do if I let Him, as if my fighting and struggling could keep Him from doing it anyway. I was afraid that accepting this baby might make it okay, and I wasn’t ready for it to be okay.

The thing is, I did love children. I loved them so much, I couldn’t tolerate the idea of giving a child anything less than my best, of loving her any less than she deserved. I knew what would be required of me to be the kind of mother I knew I needed to be, and I wasn’t ready to do it yet. I wasn’t willing to do it yet.

But God has a funny way of taking our wills and conforming them to His own. He has a funny way of using babies to shake things up, of using the small things to take down the big things and to bring to light the stuff that shouldn’t be there at all.

The sun was just beginning to come up when we drove to the hospital to deliver the baby. I couldn’t stop shaking. I shook when they prepped me for surgery and I shook on the operating table. Even with a system full of drugs, I couldn’t keep my teeth from chattering. I saw a bright red, squirmy baby pee all over the doctor. My husband named her Faith.

Faith.

It doesn’t take much faith to move mountains, and I certainly didn’t have much faith. I couldn’t even pray for more. But my husband did. He loved me through the ugliness and encouraged the tiny glimmers of love he saw in me. Somewhere in the depths of a very dark heart, that very little love began to grow. It was not immediate and it was not easy, but the more it grew, the more it wanted to grow, until one day, I realized how fiercely I loved this child of mine.

Then I cried. I cried every time I held her. I cried while she slept. I looked in at her and my heart broke because I had not wanted her. I cried because God had trusted her to me anyway, even though I was not ready or willing to open my heart to her. I cried because something I had never had but always wanted was slowly awakening in me, and I did not deserve it.

Over the course of the years, I have grown into motherhood, but it has not been an easy journey. Every year, when the Mother’s Day cards come out on the shelves and the local florists get a surge of business, I feel a sense of sadness. It is still difficult to accept the words “you’re a good mom” because I remember when I wasn’t. Some days, I’m still not.

On this beautiful day, I am reminded that I did not want this life. And I am so thankful I did not get what I wanted.

100 Beautiful Days of Motherhood: I Have a Little Girl {7}

He was a very old man. Hunched over and faded, he looked like a wisp, a memory, an hourglass whose sands had almost all slipped from one side of eternity to the other.

My little baby was sleeping in my arms, young and pink and new. He saw her. Slowly, he shuffled toward me on the arm of an aide who looked like she wished she could do something more than walk the hallways with an old man.

“Is this your baby?” he asked in a deep voice that still held some of its strength.

“Yes, it is. Would you like to see her?” I uncovered a bit of the blanket to reveal the dark hair and curled lashes of my child.

He looked in but didn’t say anything. I wondered if he could see or if his eyes had already abandoned him.

After a minute, he said from some far-off place, “I have a little girl.” Then turning to his aide he asked, “Is this my little girl?”

“No, it’s not Charles,” she said, her face softening to him.

He nodded slowly. “I have a little girl,” he repeated.

“She’s all grown up now, remember?” the young woman pressed his arm and smiled.

“Yes, yes,” his voice trailed off.

“What’s her name?” I asked, then immediately regretted it.

Charles peered up at me but didn’t see. He was looking for the memory he couldn’t find.

“What’s her name…?” It was not there. Shame filled his eyes in hot pools of tears. Desperately, he looked at the dark-haired woman by his side. “I…I…I don’t remember her name.”

But he remembered enough to know he that he should.

This woman did not know his daughter, not really. “Isn’t it Susie?” she offered. “The one who came to visit you last week?”

“Susie,” he tried the name on his tongue and then looked at my daughter to see if it fit.

“I’m sure she’s beautiful,” I offered.

Something in Charles changed. His eyes lit up with old light and he smiled at me like a brand-new daddy. “She’s perfect. Don’t tell her momma but I think she’s the most beautiful thing I ever saw.”

“I’m sure her momma feels the same way,” I grinned.

Charles rocked back and forth like he could almost press into the memory.

“Would you like to hold her?” I asked.

“Naw,” he said sheepishly. “I might drop her.” But he reached out his curled fingers and stroked her hand. “I have a little girl,” he whispered. He could not take his eyes from her so he could not see the tears in mine.

Some days, I think that parenting is my undoing. It is not. It is my becoming.

From the moment I knew I held a child in my womb, I was changed. Something in my heart opened that could never be put back. I was altered. Every woman who has ever known she was a mother, whether her arms ever held a baby or not, knows it is true. A mother can never again be anything but a mother. It stays there, in the deepest part of her being like a healing scar, a memory of being all at once undone and all at once completed.

Years from now, when I hold another baby, it will be my baby. When I long to go back in time, it will be to these days. I will think of my children when they do not think of me. I will look on their grown-up faces and drift back in time to a place where they are all with me, like before, and I will long to have them with me still.

These are the beautiful days that define me, the beautiful days of my making, the beautiful days that are mine all because I have a baby girl.