Openness to Life

The young couple from Orissa, who travelled with me from Chennai in the train, looked happy and cheerful; they seemed to care for each other, and listened to songs from one mobile phone. They had too much of luggage, two cardboard cartons, and three other big bags, and was wondering what they were carrying. On the top of the cartons, it read sweets, pastries, but I was not sure if there were something inside. The man should be about thirty, and the lady in her late twenties. It was quite late that I overheard the lady sharing with another senior lady about one thing which had been a matter of concern for her and her husband: two years since their marriage, they were childless.

With expert look and demeanor, the senior lady seemed to have understood the gravity of their problem, and soon jumped in to help them. As I listened to their conversation in Hindi quietly, I came to realize the pathos that was bothering the young couple. While the young man seemed quite indifferent to the topic with the senior lady, his wife was quite enthusiastic to get the help of this senior lady, who hailed from Bihar. The ladies found something common that they went on chirping for quite some time, and at the end of their conversation, the senior lady was kind enough to give the young lady her contact number, and from where they could get medicine to “purify her blood”.

It is hard to tell if the senior lady was really trying to help the young couple, or just trying to show off that she was smarter than the young lady. Something in the appearance of the senior lady looked a little suspicious to me, and I would not trust each of her words as Gospel truth. But for persons who are frantically looking for solutions to the problems which are haunting them night and day, any person who gives them hope of a remedy is a God-sent, and they would believe them blindly, and be prepared to do whatever they may ask, even spending thousands of rupees, just for nothing. The problem is more severe in the case of educated couple, who would do anything possible within their capacity to get the malady reverted.

In the recent past, I had come across another young couple, who also had the same problem, and were meeting every doctor someone said is good. They tried alopathy, ayurvedic, homeopathy, herbal medicine, and yet were not satisfied with the remedies. The problem was with the man, it was found out, low sperm count, and therefore the doctors had to give him medicine to increase the count. Luckily the lady is expecting, and the doctors had informed them that their child would be born sometime in early August. But then they are too careful not to do anything which will deprive them of the child God had given to them.

Every child is a gift of God, and a popular adage says that every time a child is born, it is a proof that God still loves the world. If there are young people who are not able to be open to receive this great gift of God, the problem is not with God, but with our times, which is making us closed to receive children in life. The kind of life style we lead in the present days, does not allow conducive atmosphere physically, mentally and psychologically to receive this gift. We should have a proper disposition to receive any gift, otherwise it would be tantamount to insulting the giver of the gifts. Unfortunately the modern generation has to learn this bitter truth through the hard way.

Unique Gift of Life

Maybe I will never be able to realize what D&R have gone through in life, and if only I know how each of their days pass by, I might be more empathetic towards them. Now what is this D&R? Dinesh and Reshma or Dravid and Rani, or David and Reena! Maybe these are some of the commonplace names, but behind these names are individuals who are "made for each other", but are left to grope in darkness with no child they can call their own. The number of childless couples is growing, and medical science is helpless to make them not only rear, but also bear a child! Pro-creation has always been one of the primary goals of Christian marriage, as we hear it from our catechism classes!

When the couple finds out that one of them is incapable of cooperating in the bearing of a child a few years after their marriage, all troubles start. The husband may blame the wife and the wife the husband; and the couple may blame the parents, and every other person they can think of! Unfortunately their problem of bearing a child does not end there. They try to undergo any kind of medical treatment, even the witches and the ojhas, with the hope that one day they would be the proud parents of a child. What happens when all of these costly attempts fail is what I dare not imagine.

I have seen so many couples who belong to this category; how nice it would be if the angel Gabriel visits all the houses of these couples and announce the birth of a child through unusual means, through divine intervention. Even angel Gabriel does not seem to like visiting our planet. But when their attempts fail, the bond of union that had kept them together all these days, begin to be brittle; men may indulge (if they are still young enough) in extra-marital affairs, alcoholism, smoking, bad company, and anything which can make them forget the harsh fact that he has no child of his own!

If men are able to give vent to their feelings and frustrations externally, women may do just the opposite. They may keep everything within their hearts, and may one day explode. Often such feelings may find expression in obesity, all sorts of diseases, gossipping, backbiting, suspicion and finding fault with the husband, jealous of their friends having cute little babes. The unhappiness of men and women often find some concrete expression, and it may be dangerous if these people are not able to find some sort of outlet for their emotions. Ideally the husband and wife should be able to find an outlet in their spouses, but when it fails, they should find adequate means.

We live in a world, where moneyed men and women are discovering newer formulae to manage life; some years ago, I have come across people who felt having a child was a nuisance, and so would love to be by themselves. The care of a third person, for whom they may have to give up all their comforts and pleasures, might appear too much for these kind of couples, and many of them decide not to have any children, even if they are physically fit to bear and rear a child. The gift of a child is a great gift; nothing on earth can equal this gift; but if someone is deliberately refusing to have this gift, then we can only assume that these persons do not know the value and worth of the gifts. Maybe they would realize what it means to have a child, when they feel old age fast catching up with them!