A Daisy in My Hands

The way I view Satan, the enemy of our souls, is pretty elementary. Suppose I am skipping along, holding a daisy in my hands. It's pretty much his job to rip it out of my hands and tear the petals off. He cannot abide goodness and joy. As long as I am on this side of heaven, I will encounter him, especially since I bear the name of Jesus Christ. One afternoon in car line at the elementary school, I was gripped with fear. I called a friend and said "I REALLY need this baby. I don't need for anything to happen." She told me to speak to the fear, which had a demonic source. The Bible says the thief (Satan) only comes to "steal, kill and destroy."  Friday, January 21 rolled around. Matt had asked to "have a couple of friends" spend the night in honor of his birthday. Five showed up. It was fine with me, just as he had suspected. I was like a little kid at Christmastime, looking forward to my Monday ultrasound, having finally convinced myself that all of my fears were completely unfounded. When his friends left on Saturday, I spent the day in a mood of self-satisfied joy. Monday was on the way. I would get my pictures and my confirmation of the miracle that would knit our family closer together in ways all of my hokey ideas and scrapbooking could never do. I woke early on Sunday morning, still awash in the joy of my situation and the impending ultrasound. It was January 23, the one date on which both of my children had entered the world. A date that had altered mine and Gary's lives forever...binding us together with cords of maternity and paternity that wouldn't be ripped apart on either side of eternity. On this date, still giddy with joy, I got the evidence that I would not be having a baby, after all. I called my doctor's office. The on-call physician, whose name and voice I did not recognize, tried to console me. "How old are you," he asked in a soft southern drawl that I will never forget. "Pretty old. Forty-two," I choked out. "Honey, honey, look, you are not old. You are talking to a man sixty years old. You are just barely old enough to have a baby," he said, laughing outright. I laughed through my tears. "It could be a bad egg. Don't be upset, this does not mean you can't have a baby." He had mistaken me for one of the hopeful moms in fertility treatment, earnestly trying to conceive at an age at which it feels like lighting a fire from scratch out in the wilderness. I knew that I would not be trying again. I knew that U.S.S. Motherhood had slipped on past, some time in the preceding three weeks while I planned my child's entire future, from kindergarten through college. "You may be alright. We don't know anything at this point. Put your feet up for the rest of the day," the very kind doctor said. I have never met him, and I still don't even know his name, but his voice will be with me forever.