Newspaper Interview, Part 3

I'm posting the answers I gave to a woman who interviewed me about mine and Darin's Quiverfull lifestyle for a newspaper in the Middle East called The National.  It will take a few days of posting to get it all up. 

3. Had you always planned to have a large family or was there an awakening for you?
Darin and I never even discussed children before we were married.  We met as theater majors in college, and our only goal at that point was for him to be an actor and for me to be a director.  Kids did not factor into that.  After plugging away for a few years, we realized that we would never see each other if we continued in the theater.  It was hard to find jobs at the same theater.  We decided to “retire.”  I got a job at a publishing company (I was also an English major) as a proofreader and he got a job as an assistant manager of a fish store (he was also a music minor. haha).  We never planned for our first baby.  I just turned up pregnant one day.  J  That’s when life started to change for us.  All during the pregnancy, I just assumed that my mother-in-law would watch the baby while I went back to work.  But once he was born, I knew I couldn’t do it.  I was able to stall work for his first four months before finally resigning from my position.  We did the numbers, and figured we could make it if I got a part-time job somewhere.  I worked at a bookstore in the evenings, when Darin was home to stay with our son.  My mother-in-law did keep our son at times, but for the most part, we tried to keep it so I was at work when Darin was at home.

By the time we had our 3^rd, we were beginning homeschooling.  I started a new homeschool support group at our church, and by the time our 3^rd was 2, I was stressed out with the support group, homeschooling my own kids, and other church responsibilities Darin and I had.  I couldn’t imagine having another baby and talked Darin into getting a vasectomy.  Before he had the vasectomy, we started questioning if it was the right choice.  We talked to a pastor at our church who told us we would be crazy to have more kids – how could we have time to care for them all?  But we were reading some things that were really speaking to us.  Before we knew it, Darin’s appointment for his vasectomy was upon us, and even though we weren’t sure, he went ahead and had it done.  When he got home from it, we both cried.  We knew we had made a bad choice.

From there, it was difficult.  I’m the kind of person who makes a decision and wants to act immediately.  Darin is not.  To me, it seemed logical to get a reversal.  Darin thought we should just stick with what we had done – he considered it too late to turn back.  Who could blame him?  I wouldn’t want to have to go through a reversal either.  So we went back and forth over that for another two years before I finally gave up harassing him about it, and asked my prayer partners to pray with me about it.  I didn’t say another word about it.  A few months later, Darin told me he was ready to have the reversal.   That was in the fall of 2004.  He had the reversal in the spring of 2005, and we were pregnant by June.  Henry, our 4^th, was born in March of 2006, and then Sophia in December of 2007.

Can you talk about the reasons why your faith teaches you that a big family is the wish of God?
One of the things that is important for Darin and me is to have God find us being faithful.   Psalm 33:18 says, “Behold, the eye of the LORD is on those who fear Him, on those who hope in His mercy.”  We believe that God says children are a blessing.  We believe that God says we should “be fruitful and multiply.”  Because we believe that God says these things, who are we to tell him that we won’t obey His word?  We want to be hardcore.  God doesn’t always ask for the easy things so if we truly want to be counted as His children, we have no choice but to obey His teaching.