My husband and I had been married many years, but we had had no children. While I took great joy in spending time with my nieces, the goal of having children of our own seemed unreachable.
When a friend innocently commented that she felt only a mother could truly appreciate the depth of Mary Baker Eddy's poem "Mother's Evening Prayer" (see Poems, pp. 4—5), I felt deprived. Along with this feeling of limitation, the belief that my "biological clock" was "winding down" had to be cast out.
Before our marriage, I had had Christian Science class instruction, and this enabled me to take the uplifted spiritual stand that would bless our marriage. In the following years, I gratefully studied the weekly Bible Lessons, reading from the Bible and from Science and Health the citations outlined in the Christian Science Quarterly. I also gained a deeper appreciation for Mary Baker Eddy's other writings. The wrong concept of myself as limited gave place to the truer sense of being God's child, having the rich inheritance of His infinite goodness. My husband, having embraced Christian Science as his own, held a gentle and calm, constant view that we could never be deprived of the good and right unfoldment of a fuller sense of family.
