Two photographs taken 12 months apart tell quite a story. The first arrives the day before Mother’s Day, 2014, a day full of hope when we announced to our world that Sarah was pregnant, again. I guess we hadn’t anticipated this conception. But we were overjoyed that we were going to have another baby. If you were to look at the second photograph, taken on Mother’s Day 2015, together with the first, and not know what happened during the twelve months, you’d have no idea how much we crammed into one year.
For starters, where is the new baby? So much happened between those two Mother’s Days. From announcing that our son was going to be a big brother, that his older sisters and us would welcome another little bub, to be rocked by news that floored us at the scan, to carry our baby knowing he wouldn’t survive, to arrive at full gestation, to experience stillbirth, to leave hospital without our baby, to learning to live without him — all in twelve months.
In this time, we also changed church ministries and homes; our community and friendship groups (as happens in pastoral ministry) needed to change in that time. There was so much change in that year. It was breathtakingly hard and relentless at the same time. In 12 months, we had an initial eight-week period of bliss, followed by a four-month period of ambiguous loss and complicated grief, followed by six months of finding a new way to live having lost our baby.
One Mother’s Day was full of the hope of expectant joy, where in that little period of life all seemed calm and settled. Our married lives have been far from settled, however, and as we look back, we must’ve thought all our dreams were coming true. In 13 years of marriage we have lived in six homes and I’ve had nine jobs — only three of those full-time.
Sometimes you don’t realise what trajectory you’re on, and it’s only when you look back with the benefit of five or six years of hindsight that you finally get a grasp of what was really going on.
We had to deal with so much bad news in that year, that it is fortunate that none of us have a crystal ball, and yet it’s only through our faith, and having been carried by many faithful prayers, that we got through.
We often joke that in a leap year that 2020 has been, that it has felt like a year already, and we aren’t even halfway through. But the twelve-month portion of time between May 2014 and May 2015 feels the same way. How we packed so much life, sorrow and change into this time period is still beyond me. But that’s life, isn’t it?
Our family is by no means unique, and every family has interesting stories, and it is in investing in each other’s stories that we become richer as a society. Mother’s Day affords us these opportunities of cherished reflection.
Many husbands and fathers presumably are proud of their wives, and so many have such stories to tell. I know many men, most of us in fact, who married up. I know I have.
There were many more sacrifices that my wife made in this 12-month period than can be shared publicly. To have experienced everything that she did as a mother, and not least as a wife, the sorrow, the stress, the change, and the shock of it all, I’m still amazed.
Happy Mother’s Day to all mothers and families.
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