From Jemila Monroe
December 04, 2004
Jemila Monroe, author of “Why I Apologized to Planned Parenthood” (Christianity Today, October 2004), submitted the following essay to The Japery following my commentary on her article.Why I Won’t Apologize for Unplanned Nika: Munchkin and Me from Conception to Almost Three
A greyhound bus was hauling me home from Boston when I realized I was pregnant. The trip took place just weeks after 9/11 in October, 2001; I had felt led to take this journey and was blessed with many opportunities to share about Jesus’ love and pray for people I met on the road. New England leaves were beginning to change into orange and red hues and changes were taking place within me in secret. I’d spent the weekend with my high school friend, Anna and was heading back to Pennsylvania. A junior at Messiah College, I was also the new wife of a man too hurtful for words – a man whom I married in direct disobedience to God, for a slew of dysfunctional reasons. I knew I had made my bed and I tried to lie in it as best I could. I lived in an environment where my heart was ransacked by betrayal and I feared for my life.
As the Greyhound sputtered its exhaust around New York City I pondered my period, which had been MIA for over a week. Anna had noticed that I wolfed down a huge chicken sandwich like it was nothing. Instinctively I put my hand gentle on my belly and began speaking silently to the little one I intuitively knew was inside me. We’re going to be okay. I’m going to take care of you. I love you. I said patting my stomach protectively. Even as I said those things, I gulped. I felt like a child inside myself. I didn’t know how to take care of myself, and I didn’t know how to protect either myself or my child from Ron, but I knew I had to find a way with God’s help.
Everyday, in between homework assignments, puking, praying and surviving, I fixated eyes in wonder at books and internet photos of tiny humans growing into new complexity and discovering exquisite abilities with each day, week and month of development. Nika and I went to class everyday together. Well, I should say Josh and I went to class together, because that is what I called my baby in those early days, being convinced that the lit’l one was a boy until my thirty-week ultrasound decisively proved otherwise. On our walks (and eventually waddles) to school from my off-campus apartment, I sang to my baby, “Your Mommy loves you so much; you have a father in heaven who loves you even more… and though someday you’re sure to stray, remember, Jesus lived and died to say, “I love you, I love you, please come to Me I pray.”
When I began to feel her move and dance inside me, somersaulting like a professional gymnast (or an unsynchronized swimmer), I’d joke with my friends about which professors got her excited and which ones lulled her into snoozeland. Before bedtime I read to Nika from the bible and also from books about bunnies and kitties and cows jumping over the moon. Somehow those stories seemed to rev her up, like a motorcycle ready to climb a mountain. My Munchkin was a little night owl in my womb. Oh and how she loved to dance! She could have been the first pre-born member of STOMP. As time wore on, she seemed increasingly gleeful about using my bladder as a trampoline. Now, as a toddler she jumps on the bed instead of my bladder… most of the time.
Since my bundle of baby loved bouncing on my bladder so much, she never did turn herself upside down, which meant a C-section delivery. Nika was not initially pleased about leaving the warm, albeit cramped quarters of my uterus. She hated all the bright lights and strangers in the OR. I ached to hold her, to meet face to face the person with whom I’d been sharing my stomach for nine months. The nurse kept telling me she wasn’t maintaining her body temperature quite well enough yet and the told me I’d see her in the recovery room after they stitched me up. Finally I was handed the cutest, reddest swaddled up sweetie, and to my delight, she immediately she began nursing hungrily.
Nika and I’ve been through a lot of changes in the last three years, and I think we’re doing pretty swell, though the two of us are far from perfect. We have our own version of Row, Row Your Boat: “Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, we make a great team! Yay!” And then we giggle and I hug my delicious daughter until she scampers away, onto her next adventure.
This is From Jemila Monroe in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Further tNP CE Activity | Next: Brende on the Radio | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)
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