I discovered I was pregnant with my first child under the cool, direct gaze of winter. In the dark hours of a January evening, I ran back and forth upstairs from bathroom to bedroom and back again, until I had used every pregnancy test in the kit I purchased at the drug store. Michael, unaware, lay on the sofa downstairs and listened to the patter of my feet on the ceiling above him.
When a faint plus sign appeared on each test, I didn’t trust the answer, the promise of a child, already growing silently inside me. My body remained unchanged in the early stages, and for weeks I wondered when I would begin to feel like a mother.
When the inevitable waves of nausea, widening waistline, and insatiable, irrational physical hunger arrived, I felt like a stranger to myself. I didn’t know my body with the same intimacy anymore. She surprised me daily with her tenderness, her mystery, and her rebellion against food, sleep, and the skin’s boundaries.
During the Advent season, I often think of Mary and wonder at her relationship to her interior self and her changing body. I know she too felt strange to herself, even more so, because of the divine nature of her pregnancy, the unbidden, unplanned presence of a god-child.
I know she too felt the ravenous hunger of body and spirit, the discomfort of stretching both in flesh and in soul. I suspect that she too waited to feel the sudden knowing of what it means to be a mother, when in reality, the knowing unfolds in slow motion, petal by petal, like a flower.
I am certain she felt joy, just as I did. And fear, as I did too, at the newness, the strangeness of one’s self when growing a child in our formerly singular body. It helps me to identify with her in this way, in her expansion, her discomfort, her labor and groaning.
A mother’s response is not unlike how I imagine the Earth responds to the coming of Jesus. It’s initial unfolding as he participated in creation, its starlit joy at his first arrival as a human, it’s continued groaning and anticipation as all of Creation waits for his return, the coming joy.
In this second week of Advent, I’m thinking especially of Mary and all the women before and after her who embrace an uncomfortable stretching, who wrestle with change or fear or mystery, but who hold fast to the belief that regardless, joy will be birthed out of our waiting and groaning.
