Letters from Pemberley

Seven years ago, I was bawling in the arms of our kingdom group, grieving the miscarriage of our second child.  Three months later, the day we moved out of our house in St Louis, I bawled again as I looked at a positive pregnancy test and feared the coming nine months.  The scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life was to get pregnant again after the miscarriage.  All my pregnancies have been hard in different ways, but Elizabeth’s was the most traumatic for me emotionally.  I had prayed joyfully that spring, asking God to take anything in my life that kept me from Him, and He took my child.  While I knew intellectually that His plans are better than mine, I was afraid to trust Him with the life of the new baby growing inside me, and I struggled to trust Him throughout the pregnancy.  I was midway through her pregnancy the week in December that our other baby should have been born, and that week I spent dozens of hours and a lot of money preparing for a Christmas party that literally no one came to (I’m still bitter).  Then I dislocated my hip and began the wonderful process of SI joint pain and physical therapy that continued through all three of my last pregnancies.  I was lonely and unhappy that winter in Chicago; only Hannah’s blessed friendship kept me from despair.  The last half of my pregnancy was the hardest and lowest point in our marriage, as Derek was on trial in Montana for seven weeks while I, in constant pain and forbidden to lift Tommy or anything half his weight, slugged it out at home (with a lot of help from Hannah!).  Then Elizabeth’s duedate came…and went…and I missed first my beloved roomie’s wedding, then John’s graduation from the Naval Academy and Peter and Cammy’s wedding.  The day (about seven days past the duedate) that we realized the trip to MD was impossible, I cried all the way up to Skokie to return Tommy’s ringbearer outfit to the store.  I couldn’t bear to even look at it.  Finally, on May 13, as I got up and into the shower on my way to be induced, I felt real contractions starting.  By the time we arrived at Prentice and got admitted, they were regular and strong enough that I didn’t have to go on any meds except the antibiotics for the Strep B.  I got my epidural and took a nap.  Dear Dr. Moses came in to check on me a bit later and found me reading The New Criterion.  We discussed economics, interdisciplinary study, and ancient Hebrew poetry as compared to modern Israeli poetry.  I felt calm, happy, and intellectually stimulated.  As we talked, I felt my water break, and he slipped out to deliver another baby while the nurse set things up, then came back in to catch Lizzie.  When Derek announced, “It’s a girl!” I started crying again, gasped, “I have my Elizabeth!” and began hyperventilating with joy.  Dr. Moses had to calm me down, but I assured him that I was just so happy…to have a healthy, living baby, to have the daughter named Elizabeth who I’d wanted since I got a second brother instead of a sister, and to be able to see that yes, God does delight in giving us good things along with the hard things.  I’ve been thinking a lot about this as I always do this time of year, and especially on Sunday, as it was Cammy’s first Mother’s Day without Beverly in her arms.  It is and always will be a bittersweet month for me.  No living child can replace a child in heaven; but if our second child had lived, Elizabeth would not have existed.  I truly cannot imagine my life without my sunniest, most joy-filled child, who is, as her name meaning attests, a testimony to God’s abundance.

And what is she like these days?  For the most part, sweet and capable, a mothering little soul who misuses superlatives because everything in her life is the best and her favorite.  Her CBS teachers adore her, all our babysitters rave about her, and everyone is her friend.  She does get frustrated at times with having to share so much with Susie, who wants to copy her in every way, but she doesn’t mind sharing with Janie, who she hugs and kisses at the slightest provocation, all day long.  Reading and math have been a little slower this year than they were with her brother, but her ability to memorize is as sharp as his.  She’s thrown herself into our Mark memory work (we’re into chapter 7 now!) with more or less a good attitude.  She loves audiobooks, currently favoring Louisa May Alcott and The Phantom Tollbooth as well as the old standbys of Narnia and Paddington.  She is getting so good at coloring now, adorning the walls of her new top bunk with her own artwork.  She loves to sing her own compositions as she plays or in the car.  When she gets overwhelmed, she dives for a hug or a snuggle.  She gives me hugs and kisses and pats on the back all day long.  She still sucks her finger and twirls her hair, but when she stops, I’ve promised her a date to the tea room in town, just the two of us.  She’s quite a planner: “Mommy, how about you make sandwiches, and we’ll clean up the living room, then we’ll eat, then we’ll watch something!”  She’s starting to sound out words to spell as she captions her drawings.  She is silly and funny and fun to be around.  Sometimes I expect too much of her and forget that she’s actually still a little girl–when she cries in exhaustion at the end of a hard day or when I’ve scolded her too hard for laziness (a problem) during schooltime.  But I’m already getting glimpses of the friend she’s going to be to me when she grows up.  We are going to call each other every day and talk, talk, talk!