A View Worth Keeping

by Nancy Montgomery

In the mid-1990s I closed my heart to new life. My husband and I had two beautiful children—a boy and a girl. So along with the flow of our American culture, I loaded up the baby clothes, portable crib, and more and headed for the citywide yard sale.

I thought it was better to cash in on freedom by unloading unneeded clutter. So I would forever ignore that nagging maternal urge that I might want to hold another baby in my arms.

I could highlight my “burdens” that would come with another baby—morning sickness, diapers, fatigue, and loss of personal freedom. But my lens was defective with these flat vignettes of negativity. Truncated from the teachings of the Church, my worldview as it applied to openness to life was somewhat odd. I was pro-life—for anyone else who might be pregnant. But another baby for me would be a sponge guaranteed to soak away everything that I hoped to drink from the oversized goblet of worldly enjoyment.

A Greater Gift

I was rolling my eyes at the idea of becoming a foolish procreating victim. Meanwhile, I sipped seven-dollar lattes twice a week and threw away money like dryer lint at the local mall. But then my festival of self-absorption was interrupted when I met one of the most counter-cultural women I’ve ever known.

She was a poor Mexican mother going through hard times amid the palms, fig trees, and stucco of a typical Southern California home. She had registered her family for assistance at the holidays. We had registered to adopt a family.

I was ready to crusade in and solve this crisis with gifts and food in my saddlebags and a Christmas tree lashed to the roof of the family car. I never expected that she could offer me a greater gift than those temporal goods we provided them.

As we stood in her living room she looked up toward my freckled face with a broad, round terracotta complexion. She said something in heavily accented English that secretly shocked me: “For a long time I was not able to have another baby because of a problem with my womb.” Then she gleamed with happiness toward her littlest one—the baby of her three children.

I smiled politely and nodded with false sympathy while my brain screamed in modern hysteria, “A problem, lady? Here you’re having trouble making ends meet and you’re grinning over the arrival of another mouth to feed?”

One of the last times I saw the family, they gave me a gift—a large, heavy snow globe mounted on a gold base. Inside the globe were Mary, Joseph, and the Christ child, grouped in a nativity scene posed under occasional cascades of glitter. I thanked them for their gift, touched by their kindness.  

Giving Control to God

In the years that followed I was learning the teachings of the Church but keeping the contraception issue an arm’s length away. But one day I was talking on the phone to a close friend about women having children when they aren’t as financially well off as we were. “Sooner or later,” my friend said, “these women will wake up and say, Hey, this is costing us money.”

I agreed—externally—politically correctly. But my memory flashed back to the face of a dark-eyed mother sending mommy-love-beams across the room to a human child. I wanted to get inside her eyes and see that child too—because what we were saying seemed somehow wrong.

This woman had seen her blossoming belly as a blessing—not as a leading economic indicator of doom. She and her husband worked hard to feed their family; but hard times didn’t reduce the humanity that surrounded them. The value of a human being was, in her view, unaffected by life’s circumstances. And she had only seen that maternal urge as a nag because a medical problem was preventing her from acting on it.

I began to rerun everything I’d absorbed that shaped my views on openness to life. Billions of images, perceptions, comments, and popular opinions were imprinted on my mind. I had laughed at movies with appalling stereotypes, like “Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life”—with the poverty-engulfed Catholic family receiving babies via frequent-flyer stork. Their squalid home contained an ocean of marginalized urchins spilling out of every corner.

Through much wavering, discernment, prayer, and God’s leading, my husband and I began to assimilate the elements of a new view. Thanks to excellent Catholic writers explaining Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae, we now considered replacing those elements that were devoid of the natural purpose of our spiritual, physical, and marital existence.

We began to understand the Catholic teaching on openness to life as a positive invitation to tell our God personally that we are prepared to always be open to His act of creation. To do the opposite would be to take control from the God who made us and fail to glorify Him with our bodies.

We started to see the unified bond of intimacy and procreation in the marital act. We also learned that we were mistaken when we believed that Catholics don’t take the mother’s health, financial stress, or other factors into consideration when planning a family.

With the facts accumulating, coupled with the 99 percent effectiveness of some forms of Natural Family Planning in avoiding pregnancy for morally permissible reasons, our arguments for being closed to new life crumbled. Fed up with our own indecisiveness, we decided to comply with the Church’s teachings.

Sight to the Blind 

Through a third, difficult pregnancy our full understanding of openness to life was a work-in-progress. Finally, when our new baby was born, all things came into view through the lens of Christ.

A brand new soul had been created. We nearly missed out on so much, like smelling her new baby fragrance; remembering that infants smile with pink toothless gums; and watching our first two children fall in love with her.

When the baby became a toddler, one Christmas the heavy snow globe of the Holy Family toppled from her tiny hands and shattered all over the kitchen floor. It turns out the globe was plastic. It had become a pile of broken shards as the ornament bled a flood of glittery liquid.

Now the Holy Family was all that was left—posed eternally on the gold base—no longer breathing sterile water but now exposed to the atmosphere of our home. No longer viewed through a crystal ball distortion or subjected to artificial snowfall whenever human hands felt like being in control.

My selfish viewpoint was crushed. I am a witness that Christ still gives sight to the blinded. I can see that the human being is not just a walking nervous system encased in flesh with an attached mouth to feed. The human being is a soul journeying with and to a Creator who draws all things to Himself. A loving God did knit us together in our mothers’ wombs after all, and He knew us before we were born.

It is staggering to think that we might never have known our third child if we’d remained closed to new life. She simply would not have existed. What greater cost could there be than that potential loss?

Now if anyone should ask me why we have a six-year gap between children, I’ll just smile and say, “For a long time I was not able to have another baby because of a problem with my heart.” And I can refer them to the best cardiologist in the universe, too.

When my heart was softened and my eyes were ready to shed their scales of self-absorption, the joyful news was that creation didn’t end in the Book of Genesis. The Creator loves us enough to create through us.

Morning sickness, diapers, fatigue—all transient things. As for personal freedom—without our children we would look back on our lives through the spyglass of a selfish legacy. How disappointing it would be to see that malls, coffee bars, and material things were the investment of our past. The children are our personal freedom.

That’s a view worth keeping.

Nancy Montgomery writes from Edmond, OK.

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