What we do not realize when we open our lives and bodies to the emergence of a new soul is that in opening ourselves up to life, we open ourselves up to the loss of life. What we do not see when we anticipate the birth of our own sons or daughters is that Spirit has four faces, life and death, creation and destruction. For with that spark of life that grows from embryo into fetus then child, there is the nick of death. In our dreams of becoming parents, we do not fathom how close childbirth and child rearing will bring us to death and dying. Life and death come in tandem, an inseparable pair. From great distances we can accept this heavy truth, but when we carry that fragile life in the womb, when that life becomes the hope of our innermost selves, and when our children sit on the throne of our hearts...it is a weight we feel we cannot bare, yet it is a weight we inherently must.
In my first pregnancy I was overwhelmed, at moments, by the amount of fear and guilt I felt on any given day. Like all first time mothers, I feared losing that precious life growing within. I feared I might be among the many who miscarry or worse, who experience stillbirth. My husband’s mother experienced both. Thus, the reality of either had a tangible proximity to my own set of experiences…if it happened to her, then why not us? It took discipline and faith to push those encroaching thoughts from my mind and to insist that only positive, loving thoughts reside there. Then, with each passing day that my daughter grew strong in the womb, I felt guilt. As a woman in a parallel pregnancy lost her twin babies, my fear grew into a looming contrition. Again, I questioned why her and not us? I became timid in my joy, indulging in the beautiful intimacy of pregnancy behind closed doors, behind a starched and ironed face. As friends said final goodbyes to parents, as marriages fell apart, as parents lost their beloved children, as couples could not conceive, the blessing of being with child became a thing tinged with a nagging sense of culpability.
