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By Diane Zaerr Breneman
timbrel, September-October 2006
Jesus and I share something in common -- God’s call became clear at about the same age. I was about 33 when I fully owned the call to pastor. As a pastor, I loved my people, the preaching, and the public life but a vague restlessness poked around the edges of my private life. God did not seem to notice the one thing that I thought I was called to: being a mother.
Although I knew balancing family and the church had its challenges, I am not one for a sedate lifestyle. So I sent my laments to God: “How could you call me into pastoral ministry while ignoring my draw toward an additional calling: a family.”
On January 1, 2000, I traveled to Iowa to watch the new century come in with friends. Unbeknownst to me, these friends were working behind the scenes. They knew a widower in the area with two small children. His wife died suddenly of a brain aneurysm two years earlier. With mutual consent, the friends set up a group pizza party. The children, then 3 and 7, attended but were unaware of the real purpose. But Doug and I got a chance to discretely “look each other over.” And a long-distance dating relationship ensued.
We both had questions. The one that gave me most pause was the effect this “answer” to prayer would have on my calling to minister. Since Doug farmed, there was no negotiating where we’d live. By committing myself to this family I was permanently tying myself to one geographic area. I was 40 years old, living a single, “portable” life. I had lived in five states and moved countless times. Adjusting at this age to marriage with two children and a job change topped the stress scale. If this was my mid-life crisis, just buying a hot red sports car seemed to have fewer lifelong implications!
But I was irreversibly drawn to this little family. Without knowing about me, Maureen said to Doug, “Dad, you’ve got to find us a new mommy. We need one real bad.” We married March 10, 2001. The children were part of the proposal. And at the wedding. Maureen called me “mom” as soon as we left the church. Brent’s tender heart took about six weeks: He’d bring me a stuffed animal and pretend to cry, “Oooo! Hooo! The bunny has lost his mother.”
A wise children’s counselor suggested that Brent was grieving and coming to grips with loyalty. She encouraged me not to solve his problem for him, but instead say things like, “Oh, how sad. I’m sure glad the bunny found you because you know what it’s like to lose a mother.” After a few weeks of this, one day he said to me, “The bunny can’t find his mother. Will YOU be the bunny’s new mommy?” With tears in my eyes, I hugged them both my yes.
Now six years later, I find great thrills and frustration in raising children – just as I had imagined! I love to walk beside our daughter, now 13, and hear her narrate her humorous life and watch her make choices, inserting guiding questions along the way. And I rarely tire of 10-year-old Brent’s way of turning a phrase.
When I taught him to drive tractor and pointed out all the things that could go wrong, he looked up at me and said, “Mom, you have a lot of concerns.”
And I miss the focus of my single life. I cannot concentrate on my ministry calling in the same way I did before meals, laundry, fevers and farm work. For the first six months I couldn’t string an intelligible sentence together! But now I enjoy the diversity of part-time ministry and part-time farming.
Grief has been our companion and will always be there. Grief began accompanying me in 1994 with the sudden death of a 35-year-old brother with a small young family, and then continued with my 64 year-old father’s death five years later. There is grief in this new family, too. No matter how good a mother I am, it remains sad that the children’s mother died and could not raise them. |
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Being a second mother requires a healthy sense of self. The children need to know their first mother and I welcome others’ memories be shared with them. I also interpret her love to them because they were very young when she died. I recommend the book Lifetimes. It explains death as “sometimes a body can’t stay alive anymore.” The children’s grief has actually been easier to accompany than Doug’s. On my good days, I can remember that one can love the departed and find new love on this side, all in the same life. And that I cannot share in something that grieves him deeply.
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Congregations can help (as ours does) by acknowledging there are many ways to make a family. It is helpful when folks ask, “How do the children refer to you?” if they are unsure. It is also a blessing to be accepted as the wife and mother of this family while at the same time acknowledging there was a first wife and mother.
Did God answer my prayers and pleas? Yes, indeed. In just the way I had imagined? No. I also really wanted to give birth to an additional child, but Doug was terrified of losing another wife and raising even more children alone. (He let this be known on our first date). Now, instead of congregational ministry, God provided oversight ministry where, except for occasional travel, I can work out of a home office. I’m grateful for God’s two calls on my life and I want God to walk with us in the sure challenges that are still to come. After all, we now parent a teenager. |
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