It was one night, some couple of weeks ago, when my son, with all sincerity, blurted this out, “I am so lonely in this family, Mama.” Now here’s to give you the context, in the form of the conversation we had, leading to this bomb he dropped.
Me: Jed, are you sleeping now?
Jed: Mama, you disturbed me.
Me: Why?
Jed: I was praying.
Me: But we just prayed before I tucked you to bed.
Jed: I was praying for something else.
Me: What’s that?
Jed: Mama, you know what? I’m so lonely in this family.
Can you just imagine the impact of these words to a mom’s heart? I swear, I could have panicked. But decided to take a step back and probe instead.
Me: What do you mean?
Jed: I don’t have a brother, I don’t have a sister…
Me: Maybe it is God’s will for us to have just one child in the family. We have been praying for a sibling for you for a while now, right?
Jed: But Mama, we haven’t been praying hard enough.
In all our son’s joyful countenance and disposition, he has these thoughts in his head. Truth to tell, he has been at us for years now, praying for two brothers and one sister. Yes, he is that specific. Aside from us not wanting for our son to have no sibling to turn to as he grows old, we have been praying and have undergone fertility work up for less than a year. Some two years back, to be exact. Because I was not getting younger, we decided to quit with the work up just before I turned 36.
If I did not miscarry twice, first in 2006 and second in 2007, we probably would not have considered a work up necessary. But because we wanted to know if there are things we needed to look into, we just thought we can do our last hurrah (actively try) during my 35th year. The next step to our work up which we did not push through with was the Hysterosalpingogram (HSG). An HSG is done to check for a blocked fallopian tube. Our circumstances stopped us from going forward. Later, we were told by our Ninang doctor that this could have been a risky procedure. She told me of a woman who underwent HSG who experienced complications and passed on.
Then supposedly after HSG, the next step would have been IUI or Intrauterine Insemination, a procedure done in a doctor’s office that places sperm directly into a woman’s uterus to aid in conception. This is something my husband and I are not comfortable with. We find it unnatural. But that is our conviction. We just kind of wanted to know if getting pregnant for us is still possible.
Now, all these said, we figured that the stress of a fertility work up is not for us. God gave us peace to just wait on him after knowing that I ovulate like clockwork every single month without medical aid – the monthly monitoring we did during the time we were doing the work up proved this. It was too stressful, if anything, to wait for pregnancy signs month in and month out. If it has to take a miracle like Sarah and Abraham experienced, so be it. But if it is not God’s will for us to have another child, then we trust fully in his will.
Our God is the same yesterday, today and forever. If it is His will for us to have another child, He can easily renew every cell in our bodies to make us conceive. But if it is not, we will trust in His sovereignty still. Praying as well that He provides the grace that we need and possibly take away the desire of having another baby. I have several girls in the ministry that I consider my children too. Although it is sweet to be able to disciple our own children, for now, that’s the kind of discipleship God wants for me to focus on.
“We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” 2 Cor 4:18
As I go back to what concerns our son the most, of his being “the lonesome child” in the family,” we later gathered as we talked more about it, that he translates being the “only child” as “lone”some, not exactly sad, in its sense of the word. But he vows to pursue on praying still for a sibling – two brothers and one sister, he insists. 🙂
For a while, I was also convinced that we should enroll him in a regular school. But he still continues to talk us out of it every time. We see anyway that he is socially maturing through the regular times he spends with his peers – neighbors and Sunday School classmates, so we will see. If ever we decide to enroll him, we will still opt to register him with a school that uses the School of Tomorrow curriculum. Since we have seen the benefits homeschooling has brought him, this is something we will have to prayerfully decide on.
