are you just not the mothering type?
>> Wednesday, July 15, 2009
On our next anniversary, we'll celebrate seven years of marriage. The last four years have included not only active church involvement, domestic travel for speaking engagements, and international travel for my work in training pastors for evangelism.
As a result, I often field questions like "What is your position on women's ordination?" and "How do you juggle being a local pastor's wife with three or more months of international travel each year?"
And of course, there's the inevitable: "When are you guys going to have kids? Or are you just not the mothering type?"
I learned quickly that nobody particularly wanted the real answer. They just wanted to probe. To be a little nosy. How will she react? Is she feminine or feminist?
So my standard answer became, "Well, it just hasn't happened for us yet." At which point people either nodded and moved on, or launched into detailed personal stories about all the other people they knew who were experiencing infertility, too. Which, of course, wasn't exactly what I meant. But anyway...
The real answer?
I'm definitely the mothering type. But there's no way I was going to become a mother before I could be the kind of parent that I think God calls today's mothers to be.
We weren't ready yet. We believe that whenever possible, it's best to have a marriage before adding a family. We wanted time to travel and explore the world together. We spent the first 4.5 years sharing our home with always at least one member of extended family. We wanted some time alone together after the last family members moved out.
And we have very distinct and definite ideas about the kind of home we want to create for our children.
Those ideas do not include daycare, absentee parenting, or using the TV as a babysitter. And we plan to do weird, old-fashioned things that lots of people think are unusual these days - like breast-feeding, gardening, homeschooling, and so on.
None of which are exactly compatible with Mommy jetting off to the UK or Australia or Russia for 2 to 5 weeks at a time.
Hence, no kids. Doesn't mean mommy won't do some work at home or earn some money on the side or stay involved in ministry and other contributions - after all, she has at least a decade left of paying off the loans for her master's degree!
Now, while the news about Munchkin #1 was a bit of a surprise - it did come at a time when the house was empty of relatives, the cars and credit cards were paid off, and Mommy's work was flexible - at least until September, when she'll be back on the job hunt - but we digress.
So why didn't we have kids for so long? Because we wanted to give them the kind of home life that we believe God has called us to provide. And until that time came, we were willing to wait.
