The Unexpectedly Beautiful Mess from an Unexpected Life
Abortion is often defended from the perspective that a new life, a child, disrupts the patterns, hopes, and aspirations which preexisted this nascent human being. People have plans, they have lifestyles, they expect tomorrow to look something like today. When we introduce a new being into our lives, we introduce resistance, unexpected challenges, and unpredictability. A new child changes our lives beyond recognition. This is true, but not a truth we need to fear.
My house is a mess, a mess almost entirely caused by my children. To be clear, my children are not young. My son lives at home while he attends law school to save money, at least until he gets married in March of 2027. Our older daughter graduates from college this spring and lives at home to save money before she gets a job and gets married this September. Our youngest is a junior in high school visiting colleges and playing lacrosse. They are tremendously busy and expensive human beings who take out their overwhelmed schedules on my house. They run in, drop things, run out, get cleaned up, drop things, run out, eat quick meals, run out, drop stuff, spill stuff, and run out. It feels as if I spend half of my time begging them to help me clean. We all work, all do extracurricular activities, and live in a house with four other people and two golden doodles, and the clutter requires I stop doing very important things to deal with the Tasmanian devils in my house. My kids act like crazy fast whirlwind monsters sucking up food and leaving devastation behind.
In the not-too-distant future, my children will all have jobs and live in new homes with new families. My house will be clean, and I’ll have resources to complete projects on our home which have been put off for years while we focused on launching three moral and resilient human beings into the world. The chaos, the resistance, the arguments, the attitude, the mess will be gone and order restored. It breaks my heart just to think about it. Predictability is boring, and control over the future is an illusion. Family is messy, expensive, and wonderful.
Shortly after Trayece and I married and moved into our house, we adopted a horribly abused Chinese Shar Pei named Bruno. I once considered writing a book about the spiritual lessons I learned from Bruno. According to the animal control agents who rescued him, Bruno had been used as a bait dog. He lacked the temperament to kill other dogs, so his owner used him as bait for fighting dogs to attack. At some point he must have decided Bruno was useless, so this six-month-old dark brown Chinese Shar Pei was left chained up and neglected to starve to death. A neighbor reported a dead dog in his neighbor’s yard to animal control. When the animal control agent found him, Bruno was emaciated, covered in wounds, incapable of movement, and barely alive. His medical bills were considerable, but a generous veterinarian tech decided she wanted Bruno to have a chance at life.
We needed a dog, and my wife was comfortable with Shar Pei’s having dog sat one for years. She found Bruno on a rescue website, I took her to meet him, and it was love at first sight. Bruno ran into her arms the second he saw her, and he was Trayece’s dog from that moment on. He found his home in her.
Me? Not so much. At least not at first, but, as I said, Bruno was weird. As near as I can tell, a man in a baseball cap who held a cup in his right hand must have made Bruno’s life hell, because Bruno was slow to trust men, even slower to trust a man in a baseball cap (which I almost always wore), and a man with a hat and cup sent him into PTSD episodes. Bruno followed Trayece everywhere for the first few weeks in our house, but he eventually settled in and we became friends. Trayece was his world, I was his buddy, and we spent the next five years living with the strangest dog I have ever known.
Like all dogs, Bruno needed to be cleaned, cleaned up after, and fed. In addition, Bruno had an especially obnoxious way of expressing he was upset with me; he picked out a book of mine destroyed it. It must be understood; I have never encountered a dog that understood the idea of possessions the way Bruno did. He knew what belonged to him, he understood what belonged to Trayece, and he absolutely knew what belinged to me. Bruno never messed with anyone else’s stuff, even food, except when he got upset with me. If he felt I had neglected him, left him alone too long, etc., he picked a single book and tore it up. Always one book. Always one of my books. Always to send a message. I found out years later it happened far more than I realized, because if Trayece found the book first, she threw it away and ordered a replacement before I noticed it was missing. She kept a hidden stash of destroyed books to protect Bruno’s reputation.
Bruno, like many other dogs, blew his coat. Some dogs don’t shed the same way all the time. They shed very little most of the year and then twice a year dropped their coat like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree dropped pine needles. During certain season I felt like I swept and vacuumed up hair every second I was home. The floor would finally be clean of his short bristly black and brown hair, then Bruno would proudly trot past me and leave behind a new trail of hair. He did it like he was doing me a favor.
Bruno had his first seizure when he was six years old. Our vet removed a tumor from his head which he believed caused the seizure. It grew back, and a few months later we lost him. We came home the day he died and cleaned up his hair off the floor, all his toys, all the chores we did every day to take care of our dog. The next day, I came home from work, reflexively walked into the laundry room to get my broom, came into the kitchen, and broke down crying. There was nothing to clean, nothing to pick up, no weird dog with PTSD to take care of anymore. The house was immaculate, quiet, and predictable. I never had to ask friends to take care of Bruno when we left town again (only certain friends because Bruno only tolerated certain people when we weren’t around). We were free of everything that came from having a little life dependent on our attention and provision, and we were miserable.
The tendency to equate the responsibility, sacrifice, and messiness of parenting with burden misses the bigger picture. People love to entertain the illusion of control over their lives without valuing the out of control and wildly unpredictable miracle that is a loving family. I once stayed up all night cleaning where one of my kids ran down the hall to the bathroom throwing up the entire way. Kids were injured, heartbroken, and developed incurable diseases. We had children take ambulance rides to the hospital, get stitches, and undergo surgeries. We were once relatively poor and barely scraping by, taking our kids to Sam’s Club as a fancy night out, looking at books and all the things we couldn’t buy, and feasting on samples before we bought a Sam’s pizza and split three drinks between the five of us. Through it all, we loved each other deeply. One of my kids told me this week those evening at Sam’s Cub are some of the happiest memories of their life, especially when we threw financial caution to the wind and told them to buy a book (back when Sam’s Club had a great book section). I would not trade more disposable income, more conventional vocational success, or a fancier house for the privilege I enjoyed of loving my family. Our life in ministry has been financially modest, but abundant in the true riches five produced by people growing up, growing older, and loving each other through it all.
The single mother, or family facing an unplanned pregnancy, understandably feels fear about the future. I only ask that we also consider this, we never know what tomorrow brings. We often mourn the loss of something unreal, a life we believed we were going to lead, success we thought was promised to us, a future we believed we could earn. Those things may be real, they may be unrealized, but the new life created in an unplanned pregnancy is real and here. She will change our plans, but she doesn’t necessarily steal our dreams. Many successful people accomplished incredible goals as a mother. But if we get this right, if we love our children and teach them to love God and their neighbor, we just may be about to meet a messy, weird, and stubborn new person who is going to make our lives more beautiful and meaningful than we ever imagined possible. We will learn to love the mess and one day mourn its loss.