If you looked at this photograph without knowing our story, you would probably see two excited parents waiting for their little boy. You would see smiles, a growing belly and two people standing together, counting down the weeks until we finally get to meet our son.
What you would not see is everything behind those smiles.
You would not see the fear, uncertainty, prayers, blood tests, painful words, misunderstandings or the moments when our marriage was stretched further than we expected. You would not see two people trying to understand what becoming parents meant while still learning how to understand each other.
This isn't a story about blame. It isn't about deciding who was right or wrong. It is simply part of our story—and perhaps sharing it might remind someone to be a little slower to judge and a little quicker to ask:
What might this person be carrying that I cannot see?
We had recently been travelling, and somewhere during that trip I began wondering whether I could possibly be pregnant. I hadn't taken a test yet. In truth, I was afraid to.
Long before that moment, I had prayed something very specific to God: if I ever became pregnant without knowing it yet, I asked Him to protect our child from anything I might unknowingly do.
One evening we went out for dinner and I ordered a cocktail. Earlier that evening, I had taken my passport and identification out of my handbag because I didn't think I would need them.
When the waiter asked for identification, everyone around me tried to convince him that surely it was fine. But something completely different was happening inside me.
What if I am pregnant?
Suddenly, I didn't want that drink anymore.
Overwhelmed, with a tear running down my cheek, I eventually said, “Stop. It's okay. I'll have something else.”
Nobody around me understood why such a small moment affected me so deeply. At the time, I barely understood it myself.
Looking back now, I see God's grace in something that seemed so insignificant.
At around two o'clock in the morning on Valentine's Day, alone in my apartment at Nambiti, I finally took a pregnancy test.
Positive.
I remember staring at it and feeling almost everything at once—happiness, fear, sadness and disbelief.
And somewhere underneath all of it was a quiet thought:
I knew it.
Followed almost immediately by:
Thank You, God, for protecting our child.
Leslie was hours away, but there was never really a question in my mind about telling him over the phone. Something that important deserved to be shared face-to-face.
So, for a little while, I carried our enormous secret by myself.
When I eventually arrived in Standerton, I called Leslie to our apartment.
There was no carefully planned announcement, no little baby shoes and no camera waiting to capture the perfect reaction.
I simply took the pregnancy test out of my bag and showed him.
I was shaking.
He looked at it and asked, “Really? Are you sure?”
I told him we had an appointment with my gynaecologist the following day.
And then we hugged.
We were both frightened.
But our fear looked very different.
For me, fear quickly became an intense need to protect our baby. For Leslie, becoming a father suddenly felt enormous. There were responsibilities, changes and uncertainties he didn't yet feel ready for.
Neither of us handled everything perfectly.
There were moments when I desperately needed reassurance that he didn't know how to give yet. There were moments when his fear hurt me, and moments when my own fear made me emotional, defensive or desperate to control things that simply could not be controlled.
We were both learning.
The following day, we went to the doctor expecting answers.
Instead, we received uncertainty.
The gestational sac could be seen, but the doctor struggled to see an embryo. Blood tests followed. Then came more waiting, some bleeding and the frightening possibility that we could be facing a miscarriage.
Suddenly, I went from being frightened that I was pregnant to being terrified that I might no longer be.
My mind went through everything.
What did I eat? What did I drink? Did I do something wrong? Had I somehow harmed our baby before I even knew he existed?
Meanwhile, Leslie was experiencing the same situation from a completely different emotional place.
Fatherhood had overwhelmed him. The possibility of our lives not changing brought some relief from the fear he was carrying.
That was incredibly painful for me while I was desperately praying for our baby to survive.
But with time, I began to understand something I couldn't fully understand then: his response came from fear.
Fear affects people differently.
Sometimes one person holds tighter while another pulls away.
Neither of us walked through those weeks perfectly. We were simply two frightened people trying to work out how to walk through something neither of us had prepared for.
For a while, we kept the pregnancy private.
Not because we wanted to exclude anyone, but because we hadn't even processed it ourselves.
We were dealing with the possibility of losing our baby, our very different emotions and what this enormous change meant for our marriage.
We couldn't explain something to everybody else that we barely understood ourselves.
When we eventually began telling the people close to us, not every response was what we had hoped for. There were opinions, assumptions and reactions during a time when both of us were still emotionally vulnerable.
It taught us something I hope we never forget:
Silence does not always mean secrecy. Distance does not always mean rejection. And someone not responding in the way we expect does not automatically mean they do not care.
Sometimes people are simply trying to survive something privately before they're ready to share it publicly.
There were also times when outside opinions and questions found their way into our marriage.
This became one of our hardest lessons.
People who love us may give advice from a place of genuine concern. But even well-intended words can become heavy when two people are already carrying something nobody else fully understands.
Eventually, Leslie and I had to become quieter about the voices around us and louder about listening to each other.
We had to ask one another the questions instead of allowing assumptions to answer them for us. We had to trust what we knew about the person we had married.
And we both had to take responsibility for our own mistakes.
I don't want to tell this story as though I handled everything beautifully, because I didn't. Hurt sometimes made me defensive. Fear made me want control. There were times when I expected Leslie to understand emotions I hadn't properly explained, just as there were times when I struggled to understand his.
We both had growing to do.
Somewhere in the middle of all of it, we learned to turn towards each other instead of away.
Our marriage became stronger, not because we stopped making mistakes, but because we started learning from them.
As the weeks passed, our baby remained.
He grew.
Appointments that had once been filled with fear slowly became appointments where we could watch our little boy move, hear his heartbeat and see the tiny person who had already changed so much in us.
And somewhere along the way, fear began making room for faith.
God provided for us in ways we could not have planned. Doors opened. Needs were met. Things we had worried about began falling into place, sometimes in ways we never expected.
I began learning that worrying about every possible outcome would never give me control over it.
Leslie began learning to surrender his fears about becoming a father, providing for our family and carrying the responsibility that comes with it.
We still worry sometimes.
We wonder whether we will make the right decisions. Whether we will know what our son needs. Whether we will be good parents. Whether we will have enough wisdom for everything ahead.
But those questions no longer have to be answered by fear.
Leslie is excited to meet our son.
And I am so excited to watch him become his father.
We are stepping into parenthood differently from how we first discovered it—not because we suddenly have everything figured out, but because we are learning to trust the One who does.