A Wife Examines the Hidden Motives Behind Her Desire for Children

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Today’s post is a guest post from a dear sister in Christ in response to “I Want a Baby, but My Husband Doesn’t Want One Right Now – What Do I Do?” Thank you for allowing me to share your story! It is entirely possible to have pure motive and to want babies/children for godly reasons. But something that we just don’t talk about much in the church is the fact that there can also be some impure motives in our hearts for our desires at times. We often don’t even realize we have anything but good motives – our true motives can be quite buried and hidden. (Interestingly, our husbands may sometimes see those motives that we keep from ourselves. Maybe some of the gentlemen would like to talk about that.)

Until we see our hearts the way God does, and comb through our deepest motives and theology, we remain blind to some of our sin and we may not see that we have put other things above God (idolatry). I pray that God might expose our motives to us – even though it may be painful at first – that He might refine our faith until our only motives are to love, honor, and obey God and to love and bless others. Much love, my precious sisters!

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FROM A READER:

I feel hesitant but lead to share at length :

The post about pornography and hormone rushes really got me to thinking about how my own choices have been influenced by hormone rushes and inner aches. The more I searched online the more I saw how women can be greatly affected by the surges in oxytocin (typically understood as the “bonding hormone”) and how even ruminating on particular (love) ideas might increase it. When I think back about starting a family so early with my spouse, my behavior shocks me.

WHAT WAS BEHIND MY MOTIVES?

On the surface, I pushed for children because

  • ‘we should be open to life’
  • ‘why not’ since there’s never a perfect time for a baby.

However, I really wanted:

  • little faces that looked like his in the event that he died (fear of abandonment due to my own father dying when I was a baby)
  • to ensure he was going nowhere even though at the time he gave me no reason to think he’d ever be unfaithful (again, fear of abandonment).

I didn’t personally have the adult tools to go into deeper intimacy like embracing the time to know another person and being known. The closest I could get at the time was through having children. I wanted to be close to someone, to bond with them intimately. This was the way I knew how to do that and of course all the planning, the ruminating, and the showers gave me full blast rushes of feeling loved while my poor husband faded to the background.

He did not want children right away but his feelings on the matter were simply irrelevant to me. Looking back, I went after having children like a drug addict.

Surely he’d change his mind once he saw that sweet little face looking up at him and he’d love me all the more – I reasoned to myself.

Now that we have words for our feelings, wants, needs and it’s safer to express our fears and dreams – we have opportunity for real intimacy. I now see sex, affection, and romance as icing on this cake. But without the cake, it’s empty, distracting activity to fill in gaps for skills I don’t have. I entrapped my husband and as the years went on I found other, subtle ways to share my devaluing ‘love’ with my husband. If they weren’t subtle, I had a good Christian cover for it. No wonder he’d have an ongoing sense of being smothered or that I didn’t care about him. Yesterday I asked myself, have I really loved my husband or was he simply filling a spot so I felt loved? Granted, he also came into our marriage with difficulties, but I am sharing my part of our mess.

If I had known then what I know now my husband also might’ve had a much more enriching experience with the births and early days of our children because they could’ve come out of the mutual respect and intimate love of our union. My rushing ahead for my own reasons absolutely took that away. Their births would not have been pursued to appease my own hunger for security and love. I simply had aches I didn’t know how else to fill and I legitimatized my actions. Now I also have the work of undoing some truly unhealthy coping behaviors that I’ve passed on to my children.

  • Praise God I’m learning all this now while they are still young!
  • Praise God I now know to turn to my Father for all my needs and am learning to walk in healing not brokenness!

My husband deserves a wife who really loves and respects him.

He has not shared much on this topic. He doesn’t have to and I haven’t pushed him. It had never occurred to me to ask myself why I wanted my babies and what was motivating that desire. Or even if something good is done for wrong reasons, how that does not make the end result good even if God can turn things around for our good. Funny what one can see when scales fall off the eyes. Thank you for allowing me to share.

SHARE:

Has God ever shown you hidden motives about something? What did He show you and how? What was the outcome?

Are you struggling to decipher your motives?

What godly wisdom do you have to share with other women who may be battling wrong motives for desiring children or anything else?

Husbands, any masculine insights that you might like to share?

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Bitterness

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