I consulted with a new physician the other week.
We will not here undertake a treatise on state-regulated healthcare bureaucracies, but when your regular practitioner is booked solid for several weeks in advance, and you need medical advice yesterday, you must perforce meet new doctors on a fairly regular basis.
Gentle reader, you need not fear that this involves the same cardiac concern about which I last wrote; this is a new investigation.
One of the joys of middle age includes the fulfilment of an older friend’s warning: the closer one gets to achieving the half-century mark, the more aches and pains you wake up with each day.
It’s a bit like Russian Roulette, not knowing which pains to ignore and which to investigate.
One hates to be constantly running to the doctor, but one also fears the prospect of a dismal prognosis delivered with the admonition, “If only you’d come to us a few months ago…”
When you are a woman, no matter what the health issue may be, you must answer questions about your obstetric history.
In the course of this interview, it came to light that I am the mother of seven children.
The doctor seemed surprised by this (most people are).
I did not see her face when she said the following, as she had turned away and was entering data into a computer terminal, but her voice sounded cautiously sincere (if there is such a thing). “Seven: that was a brave number of children to have.”
How exactly does one respond to such a statement?
I said nothing, but had I been thinking on my feet (never easy to do when perched nervously on an exam table, wearing a cold, crinkly paper robe) I might have responded as did Elizabeth Bennett to Miss Bingley in Chapter 8 of Pride and Prejudice: “I deserve neither such praise nor such censure.”
On the wall behind me was mounted a massive glossy poster displaying every toxic, invasive and intimacy-destroying form of contraception known to man. I suspect it was not placed there at the behest of the clinic janitor.
Tending toward cynicism (another personal flaw exacerbated by middle age), one is tempted to think the doctor was being mildly sarcastic.
That in this enlightened age, parents of seven are ‘brave’ only in the sense that fools rush in where post-moderns fear to tread.
In an overly planned, cautious, litigious, regulated and sanitised world, bravery is synonymous with stupidity.
From such attitudes comes the notion that fertility is a disease to be treated, not a gift to be accepted and lived with harmoniously.
It is catastrophic for civilisation in general (but women in particular, for they bear the brunt of most of contraception’s ill effects) to see the normal functioning of our bodies as some sort of terrifying alien force that must be subdued or eliminated.
When Dan and I married 27 years ago (celebrated our anniversary only last week), we did not set out to have exactly seven children—much less to prove our bravado in any way. (Though with current rates of cohabitation and divorce, just getting married has become a courageous undertaking.)
Because we were committed to following the Church’s teaching on marriage and sexuality, we were open to having children—and on God’s timetable, not ours.
I even daresay we were open to having a “large” family, which in North America means more than two children.
Among the West’s über-wealthy and Eco-hysterical, it means having more than zero.
In my humble opinion, in order to deserve the adjective “brave” you need to know what you’re in for, and parents never do, not really.
You can imagine you know: you can hearken to the tales of horror, or hope in the stories of Parenting Sweetness and Light, but you never really know parenthood until you are there, and then… God help you (and he does).
We set out in faith and hope to do God’s will for our lives, no more, no less.
You don’t become a person of faith and hope because you are brave to begin with; you receive courage and strength from God if and when you are willing to put your trust in him.
Incidentally, the word “brave” derives from the Latin barbarus. One might cheekily extrapolate (and many do) that only barbarians have large families.
I don’t know if the ancient Romans espoused this view, but we know theirs was a culture of death—to which the empire eventually succumbed.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.