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In my mother’s journal from 1951, she wrote of her overwhelming gratitude when, pregnant with her fourth child, her neighbors gave her a baby shower: “
I had never had a baby shower and felt a little uneasy about it—having people bring me gifts. I never had a birthday party when I was a kid, either. We were quite poor and my parents just didn’t think it was right to have parties and have people bring gifts—especially since Dad was a teacher in the community. I understood their thinking. Anyway, I didn’t have anything to say about the baby shower. The party had been planned and a lot of friends had been invited. It was so fun and I got several beautiful little baby dresses. Everyone thought since I’d had three boys I was sure to get a girl this time. I so appreciated their thoughtfulness.
”

Her journal entry in late August that year speaks of her pure joy over boy number four.

“
Our dear little son, Melvin Wayne, was born at the hospital in Ogden, Utah. I was so thrilled that he was strong and I could hold him in my arms.”

And even though she wouldn’t be able to use the baby dresses for eight more years, I was amused to read about how obviously excited she was to have a baby that didn’t look exactly like my dad.

“He weighed 7 lbs and 3 oz and had a different look than the other three boys—and I was delighted—because he looked more like me! My childhood pictures surely proved that
.”

My mother gave birth to all nine of her babies over the years in various hospitals, and not once did she know ahead of time what gender her baby would be or if the infant would be healthy or have any clue what each of us would look like.

Not so anymore.

Near the end of my second pregnancy, my parents were both serving on a church mission in London. I was feeling tired and experiencing some cramping, and so I was lying on the couch when my mother called me in Utah. She asked how I was feeling, and I told her I was fine, just tired, because the baby was due in the next two weeks. I also told her how much my ankles and legs had been swelling in my last trimester. We chatted for a while, and I told her I would call her in a week or so. Well, about four hours later, I went into an unexpected early labor. Before I left for the hospital, I called my parents and my father picked up the phone. I had barely spoken before he told me, “Your mother left for the airport three hours ago. She’s on her way there to be with you.” Somehow, my mother’s maternal intuition told her I would be needing her by the end of that day. Was she ever right.

Once I got to the hospital, they began to monitor the baby
and realized the heart rate was elevated quite a bit with every contraction. Around the time my mother arrived, they decided to do a sonogram to see exactly what was going on. I was naturally anxious to have the doctor look at the image and tell me that everything was in perfect order. My mother had absolute faith that this baby would be a
perfect
blessing from God, no matter what the sonogram revealed. She believed that every single child is perfect, no matter how science would weigh in on the matter, and having my mom there to remind me of that was a great blessing to me.

My mother poised herself on the edge of her chair, notebook and pen in hand, as the technician described how the high-pitched sound waves in a sonogram bounce back an image onto the screen of what is going on in the mother’s womb. I had to smile as my mother took voracious shorthand notes of every detail of the process. At one point, the technician laughed and said, “Don’t worry, Mrs. Osmond. You’re not going to be tested on this information.” As the daughter of a schoolteacher, my mother never passed on the chance to learn something new. It didn’t seem to matter if it pertained directly to her life or not. She loved to have new information and enjoyed passing it along to others; I know she passed her endless curiosity and limitless love of learning on to me.

We were both speechless when we saw the image of the next Osmond grandchild on the screen. The doctor pointed out that I had an excess of amniotic fluid and that my little daughter was literally swimming laps in my belly. They felt it was important to take the baby out because she was already almost nine
pounds and there was more danger to deliver her naturally as the umbilical cord had wrapped around her leg, stressing her heart with every contraction. All in all, she was healthy and strong. There were no words, even in shorthand, to fully describe the miracle before our eyes. She almost seemed to be smiling at us as if to say, “I was just passing time until Grandma got here.”

As the top of her head crowned, they put wire electrodes on her scalp to monitor her heart as she came through the birthing canal, which stunned my mom. When the doctor saw it was becoming too much for the baby to handle, he used a suctioning device to pull her out quickly. It was like a giant plunger that left her flexible skull a little bit pointed for a short while. My mom, who could find humor in any situation, lightened any stress in the room by saying, “She looks like a conehead child.” The attending doctor and nurses all burst into laughter, never expecting a comment like that from an adoring grandmother.

Years later, when I went for my sonogram during my final pregnancy, my oldest son, Stephen, who was then sixteen, went with me. About six months before I became pregnant, I had mentioned to the older children that I had a deep inner feeling that our family was supposed to have one more boy. Stephen, who already had five younger siblings to deal with, two of them under age three, probably felt that, when it came to my feelings on having more children, I should maybe tell my inner voice to zip it. When, against the odds, I ended up pregnant at age thirty-nine, Stephen just shook his head in amazement.

I was amazed that he wanted to go with me to my twenty-week ultrasound, but I thought it was really sweet of him: the oldest who couldn’t wait to welcome the youngest. I didn’t realize his true motivation.

During the appointment, we were both in silent awe as we watched the image appear on the screen. Stephen sat silently as the medical assistant moved the wand across my stomach, displaying the baby’s head and arms. Then he piped up, “Let’s get to the important part here. This better be a boy, or knowing my mom, we are going to have one more kid in the family besides this one.”

Little did he know then how true his prediction would be!

To me, a baby is proof that all of creation is in God’s hands and that we should always hold hope for the future, even though we won’t ever know what the future might hold.

Human beings may have the intellectual skill to invent an ultrasound device that can view a fetus in the womb and detect the flicker of a heartbeat before a woman even knows she is pregnant, but no one has ever determined how a human being gets created in a very distinct order. Any scientist can explain how the zygote comes to be from the egg and the sperm and can even give a detailed account of how cells divide and multiply. Yet no scientist has the explanation for how one cell becomes the baby’s cornea and another cell becomes the spleen, while another forms the heart as another becomes the spinal cord.

The process of growing a baby remains untouchable in its perfect order. There has never been a “new and improved”
version of becoming a human being. Nothing that comes in a Tiffany blue box or on a canvas in the Metropolitan Museum of Art or is engineered by Mercedes-Benz perfection can equal the beauty, design, and miraculous order of creating a human life.

My mother felt the same way and noted on a journal page after one of my brothers’ births: “
There is no thrill in this world that can equal that of having a child
.”

I believe that it is the way the Creator delineated the genders from the beginning of time: To the male was given the seed and the potential to create; to the female He gave the ability to nurture that potential into a reality. The women in my long family line have believed for centuries that there is no greater calling than being a mother, nothing more important to the continuation of life. I include every female who carries a pregnancy to full term, even if she knows it’s not her child to bring up.

I write these words as a grateful adoptive mother. I can understand that, even though a woman has the potential to create a new life, she may not be ready to raise a child, or even feel that the fetus she carries is connected to her in a mother-child relationship. Yet in her pregnancy and through adoption, her ability to bring the joy of motherhood to another woman is infinite.

For my mother, a woman’s “choice” was whether she wanted to have sexual relations with a man, but if she did conceive, my mother felt it was no longer just the woman’s choice because now there was another life involved. My mother was
adamant that abortion was only to be considered in a case of rape or incest, but even then it should be a decision handled with much prayer and fasting. She wrote in one of her journals from the early eighties: “
Abortion should never be used as a form of contraception. That’s rationalization and justification on the part of a woman’s thinking.
” She didn’t surrender her opinion even when it became more controversial. She based her belief on what she learned from reading and pondering the Scriptures, which she also noted in her writings:
“As thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child, even so thou knowest not the works of God who maketh all”(Ecclesiastes 11:5).
Her love of all people and her willingness to defend the precious gift of life is one of her “thoughts to move us forward.”

My girlfriend Patty, who grew up with me and knew my mother most of her life, said to me after reading this quote from my mother’s journal, “Isn’t it odd that our society is so fascinated by the idea of finding life on another planet, yet we don’t even honor the life that is on our own?”

In the 1950s and early 1960s, when there was quite a stigma attached to pregnancy out of wedlock, my parents made room in their growing household a number of times to give shelter to young women who found out that they were unexpectedly pregnant. Each young woman would live with us for four or five months, helping my mother take care of her growing family and the household. At the same time, my mother would “mother” her, giving her encouragement, cooking, sewing,
and budgeting skills and subtle lessons in self-esteem and finding their life path. Most of the young women left my parents’ home feeling that they had fulfilled a grand purpose by bringing a child into the world, some who would be adopted and raised by loving couples longing to be parents and some who would remain with the young mothers, now ready to love and embrace the babies as theirs. My mother would never support the thought of the young woman making a choice about her baby under any pressure from anyone. She would always encourage them to pray, listen to their intuition, and then follow it. She believed that was the way that a young woman could find peace with her decision, even when the decision was a tough one, or despite whatever challenges she would face in the future. Making a decision from fear will only lead to regret or sorrow. Peace of mind and heart will grow and then sustain a woman’s decision through the years.

Once on the
Donny & Marie
talk show, we did a full hour on adoption, with special guests including both birth mothers who had given their babies at birth and the loving couples who had adopted their infants. (I prefer to not link the words “given up” even though that term is so generally accepted for the choice a birth mom makes. After all, this infant is such a gift to the mother waiting for him or her, and a gift is given, not “given up.”) The birth mothers on this show were in their late teens at the time of their pregnancies, and yet they seemed to have an old-soul wisdom about the best outcome of their pregnancies. Each reported feeling strongly that the baby
had real parents who were waiting for him or her, and that their part in this natural transition was to bring that child into the world for them. The obvious happiness of the adoptive parents holding their long-awaited children brought the audience to tears.

The reality that some of my children were created from the zygotes of other women and men, most of whom I never knew, only increases my awe at the miracle of creation, especially since I knew that each child was mine even before he was born, and I felt the mother-child bond from the moment that baby was put into my arms. I know I’m not alone in this. Other adoptive mothers have told me the same thing, including Valerie Harper, Donna Mills, Teri Garr, and Sheryl Crow, along with many of my personal friends.

In one of my mother’s early journals she describes the miracle of holding her firstborn in her arms for the first time: “
As they laid him in my arms, I continued to weep with joy, knowing that this dear little life was mine. I was actually his mother! How I loved him. I was the happiest person in the whole world. It was truly the most profound moment of my life
.”

When my firstborn, Stephen, was put into my arms, only minutes old, the rest of my life faded into the background. In the same way that the ultrasound passes through the mother’s skin, muscle, and tissue to focus only on the baby, I felt that everything else in my life was only a structure that held a place for my divine purpose: motherhood.

Along the way, I’ve met many women who embraced the
concept of “having it all.” Some have told me of how they plotted out their futures from the time they graduated from high school. First education, then career, then marriage while continuing a career, and then, sometime later, when they feel “in a good place financially” to have a child, they plan to be a mother. The reality is that there is no “having it all.” Our female bodies are designed to carry children not on our timelines, but on God’s. The facts of our biology tell us what God’s wisdom thinks is best for both mother and child. I can say, as a woman who had her first baby at twenty-three and became a mother to her last baby at forty-two, that it’s easier to enjoy yourself as a mother when you are younger. You just have more energy. I’m a more knowledgeable mom now to my youngest, but my older children experienced me as more playful. There will never be “the perfect time” to raise children. Children change every idea of how you think your life should go. That is a blessing. There is no job in existence that takes more time, focus, commitment, and love. And, for me, there will never be any job that gives me more joy and a feeling of accomplishment. As an older mom, now, I know better than to let anyone convince me that there is anything out there that is worth missing the opportunity to be a mother.