CHAPTER ONE

Blessed With Little Souls

GOD GIVES MOTHERS AN AMAZING gift when he blesses them with a unique and unrepeatable new life. Nothing can compare to the exhilaration in a hopeful new mother’s heart at the sight of a positive pregnancy test when she has been praying and waiting for that moment. Or to the excitement of a mother who has been eagerly awaiting a new life in her arms through adoption when she receives the news of approval! Mothers all over the world share this common bond of joy about life.

Mothers may consider a pregnancy as a nine-month series of events—a bit (or a lot!) of morning sickness, fatigue, a protruding abdomen, flutters and movements within, and little feet jabbing them in the rib cage. And then, just a little while later, come the sweet baby coos, peach-fuzz hair, and chubby, dimpled arms and legs that fill the new mother’s world.

Bl. John Paul II has said, “In the newborn child is realized the common good of the family.” And Bishop Amphilochius, whom Bl. John Paul II quotes inEvangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), considered the great sacrament of holy matrimony, in which all of what I just described occurs, as “chosen and elevated above all other earthly gifts” and as “the begetter of humanity, the creator of images of God.”1

We may not think of our babies as “images of God” while we are feeding them, changing their diapers, and totally immersed in their care, but they, in fact, are! Bl. John Paul II reminds us: “Thus, a man and woman joined in matrimony become partners in a divine undertaking: through the act of procreation, God’s gift is accepted