This year, the March for Life’s theme is “Life is a Gift.” While I won’t be able to make it, the theme has a special resonance for me.
I had my first baby two weeks after my husband graduated from college, a week after we moved into a new apartment, and five days after our first wedding anniversary. When we told our friends that we were expecting, a few months after my own college graduation and as my husband began his senior year, we were asked if the baby was “intentional.”
The baby was, though some people might say that the timing was inconvenient and that we – who were both 22 at the time – might be too young and too recently married to be having a child.
So why, as several people asked, did we choose to start our parenting adventure at that time? I think it’s because we knew that children are a gift in the same way that our marriage was a gift – something that God gave to us that we didn’t deserve. And all He asked of us was our trust.
It could have just as easily been that I had never met my husband, who grew up on the other side of the world in Brazil. If his older brother had never met somebody in Rome who told him to go to a small Catholic school in the U.S., my husband probably never would’ve even heard of our alma mater. If I hadn’t listened to my mother and applied there (I already had applied to nine other schools), I almost certainly never would’ve met him.
And yet God had a hand in our paths – and in the challenges we had already faced in our life that prepared us to clearly see our vocation.
God also surrounded us with people who beautifully witnessed to the importance of marriage and parenthood.
One of our friends got married in college and had two babies before she graduated. One of our professors and his wife joyfully welcomed their sixth baby even after she had been put on bedrest for months during her pregnancy with their fifth. My own parents welcomed their youngest child when they were in their late 40s, despite the fact that my mom had a record of difficult pregnancies and seven other children.
Each of these couples showed us that parenthood means recognizing that a child’s ultimate destination is eternal salvation, which helped us prioritize what babies need. Children need loving, married parents who witness to them the unconditional love of the Father. They don’t necessarily need a four-bedroom home or a color-coordinated nursery.
Just as God had blessed us with our vocation to marriage, He blessed us with a child that we both longed for – and provided everything we needed to care for that baby. Early on in the pregnancy, we weren’t sure where we would be living or what my husband’s job would be by the time I gave birth. But God provided above and beyond our expectations.
I am part of a generation with the lowest marriage and birth rates in living memory. I am so grateful that I met my husband at a young age, and that we have people in our lives who encouraged us to say yes to the gifts of marriage and children, instead of putting it off until circumstances were “ideal,” as society often pressures young couples to do.
Now, my husband and I are experiencing the beautiful, exhausting, extraordinary adventure of parenting while we are still young. My hope is that other young couples who are dating are able to say yes to the vocation of marriage – and to the children who come along with it.
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