Journal Excerpt

I took this picture of E today, while she was lying in her crib staring up at the animal mobile rotating above. She has this look of total wonder and amazement on her face. I find the whole thing rather amusing, because it was probably about the hundredth time she’s seen the same five animals, and because they are actually quite ugly. Garishly bright colors, old and used, and one day I turned them up and discovered their faces are painted with clownishly artificial smiles. Yikes!

I’m getting a sense now that E’s tastes and mine definitely do not align. She does not care for tasteful pastels or artistic realism. She is visually addicted to anything with stripes. And the brighter, the better. Her total delight in the things she loves to see is a joy to behold. When she sees a Tiffany lamp, she laughs out loud to herself for minutes on end. My mom made her a poster covered with wrapping paper scraps and she cannot tear her eyes from it. It’s like visual heroin.

But I love this about her. I love that I’m seeing the world a little differently through her wonder.

Journal Excerpt

She often wrings her hands now, as if in mute distress or eternal petition. It’s amazing to watch her acquire a sense of self-consciousness, one body part at a time. She still hasn’t gotten over the fact that she has hands, with ten fingers attached. She gnaws on each one in careful succession to reassure herself of this fact. She opposes them and grabs things. I tell her this makes her practically a different person. Merely a month ago she could only stare intensely at objects; now she flings her hands out and wraps her fingers around whatever she can find.

Sometimes when she manages to grab ahold of my hand she’ll bring it to her mouth to suck and drool over it in great exuberance. Her tongue feels soft, like wet velvet.

Journal Excerpt

She has sprouted a new tooth, a faint white bud in the gummy ridges of her mouth. She hides it like her own little Christmas secret. I only saw it today when she stopped sucking her fist long enough to smile, and it flashed like a beacon heralding bright new days. Solid foods! Weaning! Mommy gets her life back! Tooth brushing! New tooth! New tooth!

Immediately about six family members were crowded around all trying to pry open her lower lip while she looked at us as if we had all lost our minds. Ahh, the holidays.

Things That We Lose

I have made the slightly startling discovery that my love for E is not something I can take for granted. Just like my love for God, or my husband, it is something I can choose to nurture, or choose to turn off. For some reason I thought a mother’s love was immune to this, that somehow it transcended the usual rules. I thought mothers never got tired or critical of their babies, never felt distant from them or apathetic about them. Or that if they did, it lasted only a moment before they were again overcome by effusive maternal feelings.

In a way she is easier to love than the other things I have committed to loving in my life. She is naturally adorable; she looks to me for security and identity. But in other ways she is more difficult to love. She can’t reciprocate, can’t understand what I say or always tell me how she feels. She can be incredibly moody and often unreasonable. Sometimes she is heart-breakingly cute, but other times she doesn’t look all that attractive.

One thing I have found since returning to work is that if I choose not to focus on her, not to intentionally love her, it is easy simply not to. It is easy when investing long hours and mental energy at work for my relationship with her to become functional. On the surface things seem okay—I manage to rush feeding her before heading to the OR, manage to get home in time to feed her before bedtime—but something changes in how I am towards her, how I see her. Something is lost in my delight in her.

This is the same way it is with God, and with marriage. There are things in our lives that are incredibly important but rarely demanding, and if we aren’t careful they slip away. The kind of intimacy with God that informs and guides our day. Delight in and deep respect for our spouse. An overflowing heart towards our children; awareness of the privilege it is to be a mother.

These are things I’m asking God to restore to me. I don’t know quite what it means yet to balance work and motherhood or marriage, but at least I know what I can’t afford to lose. And I’m asking for the insight and courage to see the choices I have, and make the right ones when I can.

Journal Excerpt

E has her first baby cold. It comes complete with a baby cough and baby phlegm. When she coughs she sounds like Madam Mim in The Sword in the Stone. When she breathes she rattles like a little Darth Vader. Apparently blowing one’s nose is an acquired skill. I feel like prescribing her chest physical therapy, like we do for old ladies with pneumonia in the hospital.

Christmas Babies

What child is this who laid to rest on Mary’s lap is sleeping?

This time of year, I tell E, we think of Jesus as someone like you. Someone with chubby folds of thigh fat, who pooped everywhere, who drooled and sucked on his fists.

It’s strange to think of Christ as a baby this year. In some way I’ve anticipated E’s coming most of my life, sat a year ago knowing she was in my body. And now she’s here, and so much more her own being than I could have thought. She has the full force of her own personhood, yet is utterly helpless. She can’t blow her nose when it’s stuffy, can’t itch a rash, can’t verbalize her thoughts.

What must it have been like, to be like Simeon, and hold with tears in your eyes the baby you had anticipated your whole life, knowing this child would change your life and that of all humanity? To know that God in his full being could be in something so powerless?

That is what strikes me about it all this year. That Jesus did not appear a man, descend a hero. That he came through a woman’s body like the rest of us, screaming, cold, and helpless.

Journal Excerpt

News just in: she doesn’t just love her bath. She goes crazy over her bath. She is a little bathing maniac. Kneeling next to her bathtub is like sitting in the splash zone at Sea World. The way she slaps the water with her arms, kicks her little legs, arches her back and wriggles her butt is practically diabolical. She laughs, real laughs, which I’ve decided is my favorite sound in the world. It was possibly worth going through labor to hear that sound.

I think part of her happiness in the tub has to do with how she loves being naked. Put her down on the changing table, unwrap her diaper, and she goes absolutely bonkers. Huge grin, legs kicking like a soft and chubby baby frog. She absolutely hates getting dressed, which makes cold weather difficult. She must get this from D, who would wear shorts and flip-flops every day if he could. I’m more for cozy sweaters and long jeans. Nope, E is a summer baby. She would probably stay naked in the tub all day if she could.

Trials of Many Kinds

“Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance.” –James 1

This is what happens. I’m sitting in my clinic room, hooked up to a breast pump, desperately trying to calm down and relax so the milk will come, trying not to imagine some patient or technician barging through the door without reading the DO NOT DISTURB sign I had hung up. Maybe I should have added UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, I’m thinking. Or, BECAUSE I AM HALF NAKED.

Meanwhile there are about six patients waiting to see me outside. My only surgical case for tomorrow just cancelled because she failed to show up for her pre-op physical despite my calling her twice yesterday. I realize I forgot to eat lunch. I wonder if that relates to why I can’t seem to pump enough milk these days, and try not to think about what happens when the freezer stash runs out. I stare at the pile of charts piled up on the counter. I talk like an auctioneer while dictating but still can’t manage getting through all thirty from the day without a few piling up.

Pumping is the one thing I haven’t been able to figure out how to multi-task while doing. The rest of the day feels like ten things at once. Bundling her up for daycare while packing my bags. Dictating while checking the pager, examining while getting the history. Filling out consent forms while waiting for patients to dilate. Studying at night while breastfeeding. Calling D while running to pick E up. He and I are like a two-person special operations team. The last time we were this strategically intense, we were at Disney World figuring out how to ride Space Mountain during their busiest week of the year.

But those moments, when I pump locked in my clinic room, I have nothing to do but sit caught by the weirdness of my life. By the fragility of my sense of self. By the weird duality of my existence. I feel rusty at work, uncertain about daycare. I wonder whether I am doing too many things to do any one thing well. I take D’s advice and try to use those times to pray, and mostly, I am praying, God, help me stay true. Help me, at the end of the day, to have pumped enough milk for her, to not have worsened anyone’s vision, to not have neglected D. Help me to experience joy as I can. Help me to have persevered.

Journal Excerpt

I think she has recently discovered that I am attached to my breasts. She will stop in the middle of a perfectly good feed, pop off, arch her head back and gaze at me in wonder as my milk keeps leaking everywhere. If I smile at her she grins back and starts to try to talk, modulated coos that sound like a baby whale. Maybe a baby whale in pain. Eeeeeiiiii… ahhhhhh…. I continue my Operation Brainwash E’s First Word, repeating to her slowly, maaa-maaa…

I try to get her latched back on, but her hunger is forgotten in the wonderment of realizing I’m actually there every time she feeds. She cannot tear her gaze from my face. Sometimes she starts to loll things around with her tongue lazily. Quit playing with your food and eat, I tell her.

Motherhood and Work

I went back to work full-time last week, to the hardest and most surgical rotation of the year. And E started daycare at Hopkins. She refused to eat or sleep the first day, so there I was: at daycare, getting paged while struggling to breastfeed through her fussiness. At clinic, getting calls about her, trying to remember to pump and find a place to do it, trying to finish in time to pick her up. In between everything washing my hands like a madwoman.

I have been everywhere along the work vs. motherhood debate: raised with Focus-on-the-Family values, by a stay-at-home mom who later worked; absorbed in an unforgiving career, having stayed at home with the baby the last three months. All I can say is, none of it is easy. Staying at home with her is more exhausting than a day at work. Working in a non-family-friendly, driven culture is difficult and lonely. I used to see the issue as pretty black and white, but now I’m all sorts of gray.

I can’t work the way I used to work before I had E. I can’t be a mother the way I used to before I worked. And the adjustment is tough. There are the logistics of getting her there and back, and dealing with all the bottles, ice packs, and pump parts involved in maintaining her on breast milk, which is a full-time job in itself.

But even harder is the emotional subtext. There’s all kinds of guilt, and fear—of leaving her, of putting limits on my work. I have to go here on faith. I have to believe God is sovereign, that he ordained her to be brought into my life at a time when I don’t have much choice about things. I have to believe that He loves her more than I do and has some purpose for my finishing this training, and to be faithful to both simultaneously is not an impossible thing. I’m starting with the fundamentals. Trying not to be paralyzed by worry, trying to be open. I’ll probably be writing more about this later, but for now, I’m just taking it one long day at a time.

Marriage in Heaven

“In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife of the seven will she be? For they all had married her.” But Jesus answered and said to them, “You are mistaken, not understanding the Scriptures nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.” - Matthew 22:28-30

I had prettied myself up so often during interview season that I shunned heels and embraced hooded sweatshirts for a month after. Tonight I lingered again before the mirror in honor of a night out with D. Kohl running along eyelids; hair pressed straight and glossy, the steam wafting up in tribute to some unseen goddess of vanity. My apartment-mate clicked up the stairs, purse crooked in elbow: she who’d been in a long relationship, now out for a single girls’ night out; I who’d been single all my life, preening for a guy. Strange ironies.

We spend so much of our life dwelling on romantic relationships: defining, recovering from, dreaming of, maintaining, cultivating. Or maybe it’s just being in the February of our twenties, having forsaken tacky elementary-school valentines and benign college fellowship festivities. In the last week I’ve talked with girls figuring out which guys to give a chance, girls trying to pace relationships, heal from broken engagements, find their legs in a new marriage.

I used to really cherish the idea that in heaven, we’re not married. That feeling came back to me when I read that verse, a feeling as surprisingly freeing as it was alien. To think that one day, for all days, there will be no other. No being taken, no being given, just being. Me, God, here, now: it doesn’t get any more Real than this. That’s what it means. To think otherwise—to place our primary energy, hopes, and attention upon another person (or the absence thereof)—is to forget the Scriptures, which paint the greatest love story since the dawn of time, and promise the greatest consummated reunion that ever inspired a happily-ever-after. It is to forget the power of God, which both allures and commands the sort of worship that will define being and satisfy all other desires out of existence.

Alien, but freeing. Good reminder that the only constant in this life will go on being the only thing that matters for the eternity to which this life is merely the introduction.

Written February 11, 2006

Journal Excerpt

She is becoming like a real person now. She recently noticed her hands, and has gone a bit nutty in the discovery. My hands! My hands! She sucks and slobbers on them with a sort of fierce joy that makes me look at my own in a new light.

And her hands have discovered each other. They clasp together desperately like long-lost lovers. I think to myself, big day in neural development here. There’s something about crossing the midline that seems like a landmark. The two halves of her brain have discovered each other. Next she’ll be doing higher order math.

She actually sees me now. It’s still a bit startling, the moment her roving eyes fix on mine. She gazes at me like I’m Jesus Christ. I smile, and she breaks out into this huge grin. Works every time—in the bath, in a crowded room, in the dark at night after a feed.

Speaking of baths, she’s finally admitted that she likes them. It’s as if one day she decided to give up the pretense, stopped quietly gripping her bath cloth in surly concentration, and just let all loose. She slaps the water, kicks her feet, actually chuckles, real chuckles that shake her shoulders. Whenever it looks like I might be getting ready to get her out she wriggles and splashes some more.

Motherhood

“Our children don’t make us who we are; they reveal who we are.”

It’s been a while since I’ve written. Since then, E has continued to grow in chubby wonder. She gnaws on her fists like a lion with a bone. She punches out her belly, tucks in her chin, and grins from ear to ear when we smile at her. She drools like a madwoman, bubbles and rivers of spit joyfully streaming down her chin (and all over my shirt).

She looks at us and makes strange coo-ey sounds while gesticulating wildly, like someone trying desperately hard to say something. She stares with intense concentration at the same dangling toy every day, as if she hadn’t just seen it three seconds ago. Wow! There it is AGAIN!

Being constantly with her at home is wonderful but also incredibly difficult. The world would probably be more impressed by medicine than motherhood—wow, you cut into people? Memorized all that stuff? Took all that call? But I just want to say—this is so much more difficult. How strange we have it all backwards. I don’t think I would have understood it myself were I not here.

She is so demanding. There is no stopping, no half-way. I look at pictures of her and miss her even while she’s sleeping, but then when she’s awake I can’t wait until the next nap. I feel suffocated at times being with her all the time, but dread sending her to daycare. There are moments when I feel like my head will split apart with the ache if I have to hear her cry one more time, or worry about her crying when we go out. When I just want to be able to take a break when I feel like it.

In all this I suppose I learn that there is no such thing as natural unconditional love. I love her for who she is, for who she can’t help being. But I also sometimes resent her, get tired of her, get angry at her. Parenting is too unending, too demanding, for me to keep up any type of act or pretense.

In some ways it’s similar to marriage, the sort of in-your-face relationship that makes you confront the uglier parts of yourself. But she’s not consciously giving me anything back. She’s perhaps less forgiving, certainly less flexible. She’s not telling me anything. It’s me figuring it out myself, walking into the aimless, empty place that’s left after I’ve given all I can will myself to do.

I guess in the end, motherhood is not really about me. It’s not there to make me happy, fulfilled; she’s not some cute accessory, not there to define my worth or fulfill my dreams. She’s here because for some wacky reason God has figured me the best person to carry out this ministry, to serve her in a way that will hopefully change the kingdom and leave some legacy. I don’t do it for her, or myself, or my husband; I have to do it for Him, or I will never see it for the privilege it is. This is what I tell myself, and when I can really believe it, it is terribly freeing.

Journal Excerpt

One of my favorite moments with E happens after she’s fed. We’re sitting in the rocking chair, baby comforter at my back, feet up on the rocking stool. She latches off, mouth agape and head full of silky hair rolling back on my arm, limp and happy, the soft folds of her neck exposed, her eyes closed. Her eyelashes are wondrously long, so long they curl at the ends, so long pieces of lint get stuck on the ends, like a dusting of snow. I’ll be watching her, not making a sound, listening as her breathing gets heavier, and then suddenly she’ll smile in her sleep. It lasts just a moment, a big goofy drunken-old-man smile, and then she relaxes back into sleep again.

I don’t know how she truly feels about life most of the time. It must be hard adjusting to the world after the safety of being inside. I think a lot of how she is these first few months may be her reconciling herself to living here, on her own, in the world. But her private smiles make me think she must be happy, even content, and I catch them like secret little gifts in the night.

Mental Energy

“Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things… And the God of peace will be with you.” – Philippians 4:8-9

I’ve realized that since staying at home with the baby all day, I have a lot of undissipated mental energy. I’m like a periodic quadraplegic. I spend much of my day nursing, or carrying her around because she won’t be calm any other way, without any real freedom of movement. Depending on which side I’m feeding her on, I can’t even reach over to get a tissue from the shelf near the rocking chair where I nurse; she’s been finicky during feeds lately and will latch off if I move too much. I’ve figured out this way to maneuver the remote control for the heater with my toes. Soon I’ll learn to paint holding a brush in my teeth like Joni Eareckson.

So I just sit around, or pace around, all day while my mind runs along ahead. It took me awhile to realize that my mind needs to occupy itself; that in a vacuum it will start to fill itself with all sorts of things. I stew. I get down about myself, or what my life is coming to. I worry about my next rotation, which I never used to do—I was one of those people who never knew if they were on call until the night before. Now I dread returning on a whole new level. When I’m feeling yucky at six a.m. after a bad night, I now think that in a month I’ll be getting dressed for work at this time, instead of just wondering when she’ll go back down so I can get in a morning nap.

I start to escape into imaginings, sometimes scary things, sometimes scenes from novels I replay over and over (I believe I have memorized entire passages of dialogue from certain books). I sit there feeding and rocking and enacting whole epics in my head. I made a promise, Mr. Frodo. A promise!!

In all this stewing, it’s surprising how often I forget that there is any higher power in life. I have to kick myself into remembering. D says it’s because I live such a unidimensional life, and it’s true. Your mind becomes what you feed it, and when you don’t feed it anything, it runs around like a naked banshee on a deserted island. You lose touch with reality, particularly spiritual reality, pretty quickly.

I feel often like I’m searching for the holy grail of the balanced life. I’m either always working or now always with the baby, never normal. I keep waiting for life to get normal. It’s not normal to always be in scrubs, just as it’s not normal to always be in pajamas. D says you have to make your balance. As best you can anyway. This means I need to feed my mind something true, something good. I need to get dressed, to get out, to reach out to the friends who for some unknown reason still stick with me. I should think upon God for some time each day, even if it’s only praying for E as she feeds and wondering how God made her with such tiny fingernails. I think I can start there.

Observing

”I’ve decided the reason Sam’s so gorgeous is that God knew that I wouldn’t have been able to fall in love with this shitting and colicky little bundle if he looked like one of those E.T./Don Rickles babies.” –Lamott

I like to stroke her hair softly while she nurses. Maybe it’s because people tell me it’s supposed to all fall out at some point—I keep expecting to wake up one day finding her bald with soft black strands strewn about her like fallen snow. Her hair is possibly even softer than her skin, certainly silkier, and spirals out in geometric perfection from a point at the back of her head. I think to myself, one day this hair will be gone, and she’ll grow back new hair, but it won’t be this hair, the hair that was wet in my body, the hair that crowned for an hour before the rest of her followed into the world.

I like to feel for her fontanelles, the soft spots on her head where her skull bones have not yet fused, markers of her vulnerability. One day the little triangular windows will close, but for now it’s frightening and exhilarating to think I can feel her brain. If I had an ultrasound probe I could cast in sound and look around.

The other day we put her down on the ground on her belly, naked. She could do brief little push-ups and lift her head in a bobbing sort of way, but even though it looked like she should just crawl right off the sheet, it was clear she couldn’t, and then it struck me what a small, helpless thing she really was. Sometimes the force of her personality—her alertness, stubborn cries, zany smiles—is so strong that I think I honestly forget that.

I think about the things she teaches me. Like how to be vulnerable and utterly helpless. How to exude a beauty and joy that comes of a complete lack of self-consciousness. How to relish eating and splashing in the bath. How to sleep with great abandon, head flopped back, mouth open, body slumped into mine, breathing like a little Darth Vader. She does all these things simply by being, and there is a purity and clarity in it that I’m trying to memorize before it disappears. On one hand I can’t wait for her to start speaking; on the other, she speaks more purely now than any other human being I’ve known.

Journal Excerpt

I wonder if she is capable of loving me. I wonder if I really only love and understand God in the same baby sort of way.

She is starting to make more sounds now, like someone who has taken up the oboe and is trying to blow a few notes. She mostly squeaks, like a slightly deflated rubber toy.

Journal Excerpt

Last night I had just finished feeding her and putting her down to sleep at 3:30 A.M., just finished getting settled back in my warm blankets next to D when she started crying again, around 4 A.M. I thought all sorts of grumpy, loathsome thoughts during the walk over to the nursery. The little booger. I turned on the light and saw that she was awake. As soon as I leaned over the crib, she waved her arms wildly and broke out into the biggest grin I have ever seen; I think if she could have laughed she would have. I thought, okay, fine. I’ll pick you up.

She has definitely begun to smile real smiles, not just gas-smiles. For some weeks now she also liked to smile while her mouth is full of nipple, but that didn’t seem to count either. Now she sees us and smiles, or smiles when we smile and laugh at her, real smiles that go to her eyes. It’s quite amazing.


She has little elvish sideburns, long and soft and pointy. She is like a baby Arwen.

Journal Excerpt

I don’t think E and the cats are aware of each other’s existence yet. It’s quite comical, really. E wails herself into a round red beet and Chloe just lies there lazily licking her paws or dozing on her back with her privates displayed. I think Winnie sees her as an obstacle to her never-ending goal of lying on my lap whenever physically possible. She sort of walks up to me and gazes at E’s bum, as if trying to think of a way to wedge herself around it. I thought this would all be over once you stopped being pregnant, she’s probably thinking. She usually settles for plunking her front end on my lower lap and letting her back end dangle off.

E, from her end, seems to be unaware that she lives amongst these huge, moving furry white-and-black creatures. I tell her sometimes it is like she is in a zoo, look at the animals! To her they must look like bovine-colored mammoths. But she seems to sort of stare past them. They are mysteriously beyond her range of vision.

Today while we were nursing, Chloe was overcome with her desire for physical contact (that seems to be her only waking state, actually) and jumped onto the corner of the rocking chair we were sitting in. After turning her big self around a few times, she plunked down in the corner with her butt towards us, huge tail swishing back and forth right across the side of E’s head like a big black boa. The baby squirmed a few times and I laughed before kicking the cat off.

I keep thinking about the day she will suddenly notice they live with her. My mom says she will grow up thinking she looks like a cat.

Exhaustion

“We had another bad night. We finally slept for two hours at 7:00 A.M. What a joke. I felt like thin glass, like I might crack.” –Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions

I read the phrase “savage exhaustion” and liked it. I now say it over and over to make myself feel better.

There are a few levels of tiredness. There’s the kind you get after pulling an all-nighter, which produces a sort of euphoria. You feel great about how you pulled off that paper, or that you’re bonded to these campers for life or that the boy across the campfire might really like you. You feel like you could probably write ten more papers or work up the nerve to go talk to the boy.

Then there’s the kind that happens after you finish a few thirty-six hour call shifts, that leaves you feeling worn down and suddenly aware that you have dirt under your fingernails and oil in your hair. You realize your life is wacko because you haven’t worn anything but scrubs for the last week and you keep hearing your pager going off in your head. You feel slightly snappish and grubby, but then you go home, turn off your phone and sleep for twelve hours and awake feeling better (and starving).

Then there’s the sort that happens after you haven’t really slept for six weeks. You pass into this new level of nirvana, a world in which you’re so chronically tired you stop realizing you’re tired and just become weird instead. You’re sometimes too exhausted to sleep. Things start to lose proportion. You become highly irrational and unpredictably emotional. You decide the long hair must go because tying it back every time you get up at night is somehow intolerably irritating. In fact, you should just shave it all off to avoid the hassle of blow-drying. You resent all people who sleep through the night, primarily your husband. On the outside you might look normal, but really you’re just trying very hard.

This is where I am glad for my pit-crew, cheerleading team. The folks who drop off meals, wash my dishes and take out my trash, hold the baby for awhile so D and I can go out and pretend life is normal for a few hours. My husband who forgives my moods and reminds me the world will not end if the baby cries a few more minutes so I can finish brushing my teeth. We’re just about reaching six weeks, the time when people say things get easier. Woo hoo.

Sometimes

“People kept trying to prepare me for how soft and mushy my stomach would be after I gave birth, but I secretly thought, Not this old buckerina. I think most people undergoing chemo secretly believe they won’t lose their hair.
“Oh, but my stomach, she is like a waterbed covered with flannel now. When I lie on my side in bed, my stomach lies politely beside me, like a puppy.”
- Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions

Sometimes I read something that makes me laugh and laugh and then I stop laughing and think wow, that hits the spot.

Laughter

One of the most unexpected things about the baby is how much she makes us laugh. Sure, she is so perfectly cute it should be illegal, but when I think about her I mainly want to laugh. Before a feed when she roots so earnestly over her shoulder I worry her neck will sprain, usually to the wrong side. Over here! Other side, other side! When her hands clasp tightly together over her chest, eyes closed as she sucks—Lord, take not this breast from me (sorry to a particular reader; I can’t avoid the b-word). And then when she’s done feeding, one hand pushing me away while frowning with bottom lip stuck out as if to say, get that NASTY thing away from me, you NASTY woman. And her drugged-out post-feed highs, head lolling back with eyes closed and mouth slightly agape, arms hanging limply at her sides. I can pretty much do whatever I want with her then. Like pick out her nose boogers and the bits of milk collected in her neck folds.

All that entertainment, and only during feeds, though I have to say that accounts for the majority of her waking existence. Also pretty hilarious is watching her poop, a task which any parent of a newborn will tell you is a big deal. Good poops, happy baby; no poop, gassy and fussy baby. She approaches this venture with the appropriate degree of solemn concentration: brows furrowed, lips pursed, chin down, fists clenched, arms and legs straight. And hold. As her face gets redder and redder. Cracks me up to no end.

She can even be funny when she cries, her whole face frowning as the most pitiful how-could-you-do-this-to-me sound emerges. Or when she wails and holds her breath so long her face looks like a crumpled red tomato and I think the world must be ending. Far be it from her to do anything half-heartedly.

The fact that I am making up conversations in my head with a preverbal infant probably means I don’t get out enough and/or will one day wake up having forgotten the layers of the cornea, but oh well. It’s worth it. And a lot more fun.

Belaboring Birth

“The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self—all your wishes and precautions—to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call “ourselves,” to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be “good.” We are all trying to let our mind and heart go their own way… and hoping, in spite of this, to behave honestly and chastely and humbly. And that is exactly what Christ warned us you could not do.” -“Is Christianity Hard or Easy?”, Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis

Birth is an unexpectedly messy, notoriously unpredictable, unimaginably painful process. With each rock-hard contraction, the baby asphyxiates as the walls of its heretofore insulated, filtered world come crushing in. The mother focuses on not hyperventilating, grabbing walls or rails or hands, contorting and sometimes screaming or crying. One woman told me it felt like she was being run over by a truck; another that her bottom half was being amputated. And the whole thing, contractions every 2-5 min, can last the entire day, taking so long the baby’s head gets squeezed into a cone shape in the birth canal.

After the placenta is delivered, I put my hand into its warm, bloody sac and think: what a harsh world it must seem at first. So glaringly bright, desert dry, arctic cold. No cushion against the steady pull of gravity. Instead of the steady pulsation of mom’s heartbeat, the harsh cacophony of voices, scissors, suctions. I think about how hard it is for me to live in the new life God offers me every day—how easy it is to stay on the old track, to lapse into self-reliance and nurse old habits.

What does staying in the old world mean for you? For me, it’s the myth of believing I can succumb in little ways—to habits, indulgences, thoughts—without consequence. It’s figuring I can do things on my own. It’s always thinking I’ll be better tomorrow without changing the present. It’s not accounting for the things I feed my mind, spirit, and body. It’s coming to take things for granted.

Inevitably it’s a losing battle. The walls start to close in, and somehow the freedom and truth and betterness of new life is pushed into view. If I only listen, God is speaking it to me all the time, in His word, and through people who love me into beauty and speak to me in truth. And to take that new life—it is a marvelous and somehow effortless thing. Marvelous, effortless. Just like the slippery baby that slides out in a gush of fluid and blood, and in moments opens its crinkly eyes and fills the air with its cries.

Written February 4, 2005 during ob-gyn rotation

Small Joys

God’s joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box,
from cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flowerbed.
As roses, up from ground.
Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish,
now a cliff covered with vines,
now a horse being saddled.
It hides within these,
Till one day it cracks them open.
- Rumi

Tonight E fell asleep on my chest. She had just finished feeding, and I had propped her on her side between my breasts to burp her a bit. She curled both hands up near her chin, tucked her face down into the shadows next to a fold in my shirt, and closed her eyes. I felt the weight of her warm, milk-tinged softness slowly relax. The two cats were dozing next to each other on the bed, one pressed against my legs with her head on outstretched paws, the other curled into a black ball of fur facing the opposite direction. It was one of those moments I wanted to freeze in time.

Life at home is outwardly uneventful. Today I did not perform an operation, write a prescription, attend a meeting. I barely even held a two-way conversation. Today I marveled at small things. A cat’s eyes squinted shut in sleep. The turn of phrase in a book, savored deliciously in my mind. The fresh water and folded laundry left by D near the bed. The baby’s hilarious looks of concentration while pooping; the smile she gives in mid-feed, mouth still full. Like her, I see at close range. It’s a world of microcosmic wonder.

These are the small, private joys. Not the kind that makes you go dance in the street, but the kind that burrows quietly inside, that is slowly and unexpectedly unwrapped. Each heart knows its own bitterness, and no one else can share its joy (Proverbs 14). These are joys in the things I see and feel, though not much is said. It’s the same sense I have in nature, a sense of deep happiness and wonder that cannot be taken away, that seems a sign of the Spirit within and a promise of the eternity to come. This is what I’m delighting in most about her, this sense of wonder and promise she brings into my life.

Medicine

“Now, in my fiftieth year, I venerate the sight of the abdomen or chest laid open. I’m ashamed of our human capacity to hurt and maim one another, to desecrate the body. Yet it allows me to see the cabalistic harmony of the heart peeking out behind the lung, of liver and spleen consulting each other under the dome of the diaphragm—these things leave me speechless. My fingers ‘run the bowel’ looking for holes that a blade or bullet might have created, coil after glistening coil, twenty-three feet of it compacted into such a small space. The gut that has slithered past my fingers like this in the African night would by now reach the Cape of Good Hope, and I have yet to see the serpent’s head. But I do see the ordinary miracles under skin and rib and muscle, visions concealed from their owner. Is there a greater privilege on earth?” - prologue, Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese

D and I entertain ourselves by talking about getting venous access, mostly because it’s the procedure we can both relate to the most. The other things he does as a medicine resident—lumbar punctures, tapping the lungs or abdomen—are only things I’ve done overseas, without anesthesia and with the barest of instruments; I wouldn’t even know how to set up for those things here. The other procedures I did as a surgical intern he obviously doesn’t have to bother with, to his relief. He proverbially rolls his eyes when I recall the glory days of chest tubes and emergency appendectomies.

And so we discuss lines. I talk about the time I practiced by putting an intravenous line in every patient that walked into the MGH emergency room. He talks about the central line he threaded blindly into the neck of a bleeding and hysterical young girl. We talk about quadruple jugular lines and femoral lines. I talk about a procedure more familiar to surgeons than internists—the saphenous vein cut-down—which he scoffs at. Do people really do those? So I had to smile when I read about it in Verghese’s novel. Ha ha! They did in the 1900’s on cargo ships going to Africa!

It feels good to read good writing. And it feels good to read about medicine. It’s a way to return to myself, to remember part of who I was before I turned into a milk-making machine governed by feeding cycles. D has gone back to work now, thankfully at a relatively normal schedule, and I see that it makes him a better parent. He has greater perspective, more love and patience to lavish upon the baby at the end of the day.

This is the longest I have been away from clinical medicine for three years. Seeing medicine through its absence in my life and influence upon D’s tempers the exhausted and increasingly cynical view that came from its taking so much of my earlier life. It’s good to remember again, why I do this, what it can mean for a balanced life and future ministry.

The Real Thing

I feel a bit guilty confessing this, but sometimes it is difficult to love the real E, not the baby I thought she would be. Nine months of unconscious projection is a hard thing to reinvent at one go. I realize now that my idea of what a baby would be like was a hopeful amalgam of various impressions. I wanted her to be the soft thing couched in an orange cloth carrier on the chest of the woman next to me on the airplane, soundless during the entire trip. I wanted her to be the smiling infant in the strollers we passed during our walks. I wanted her to be the type of baby that makes other people want to have babies.

But that’s not always who she is right now. She cries going to sleep and cries waking up; she cries a bunch in between. She doesn’t conform easily to any type of schedule. She can be stubborn and gets fussy. She can’t be willed into being a certain way, which is oddly difficult after a pregnancy and labor that seemed almost too easily conformed to what I had hoped it would be.

I can be exhaustingly efficient, endlessly patient, unmovingly firm, and she will still be at times difficult, unpredictable, demanding. Sometimes that is difficult to accept, and the endlessness of it all, and the degree to which it has so suddenly changed our lives, can be overwhelming. In this way, being with her is unlike any other endeavor I’ve undertaken. It is unlike going into medicine, unlike getting married. It demands instant, blind unconditionality.

But I guess that’s the challenge, the calling. It’s not judging her, according to my own selfish standards or society’s standards. It’s not caring too much how other people see her. It’s literally laying aside my training, my old body, my sleep, to meet her needs. Motherhood in that sense does not come naturally. It is not something I can will myself into; I need God’s help as much as with anything else. Sometimes that is relieving to admit.

Uncertainty

The most stressful thing about parenting is the uncertainty. All it takes is one book or piece of advice to make us question ourselves all over again—and it seems like no two of them agree. You should never let your baby cry alone in her crib. Crying is good for the lungs; crying is not good for the lungs. You should breastfeed both sides equally; better to drain one breast first. Never hesitate to wake her from sleep; let her sleep when she can. Keep to a schedule; follow her cues and demands. Always put her to sleep on her back; sleeping on the stomach is better. And all of these dictums come with judgments: you are good parents or bad parents; you are causing this or that effect upon your child.

The reality of it is that nothing tells you what to do in that moment when she’s crying again in her crib and you have to decide whether to go in and what to do. You make some type of decision based on your personality as parents, your knowledge of her personality, the context, and other general principles. You keep track of her habits, you learn her cues, you try to set a few rules, you find things that work and things that don’t. The reality is, it all still feels like a huge step in the dark. You hold your breath and mutter prayers.

The glorious thing about having my mom here for now is how it gives D and I the ability to go out occasionally. Yesterday we went to a favorite park, green meadows and blue coastline. It’s good to get out, get some perspective. I think about all the babies around the world who are raised in different situations and cultures. I think about the single moms and dads who have far less resources than we do. I think about E, the person we are getting to know, not some object in a book, and how far we have come.

I think about the times my parents apologized to me in the past—I don’t even remember what for, just my surprise then at their vulnerability—and I understand a little better. We are bound to make mistakes, and that is okay. It goes without saying we will do our best, read and talk and listen and pray, but in all this too is a letting go, a rediscovery of faith. We are stewards; God is no less sovereign. That is good to remember.

Suffering and Joy

Life is completely different. People ask how I still have time to write, but I think it’s something I do to feel normal for a few moments. Everything else is haywire.

For the record, caring for a newborn is harder than taking call, because it never ends. Sleeping feels like that moment at two A.M. when you’ve finished your to-do list and wonder if it’s worth trying to get some shut-eye before being paged with the next admission or question from the needy night nurse. D and I lie in bed wondering, will she stay asleep this time? Will she cry in ten minutes, and if so, should we let her cry to sleep or check again to see if she needs to be burped, diapered, or fed?

My day passes in a sleep-deprived litany of breastfeeding. It feels like that’s all I do with my life, though I console myself with the fact that I’m essentially running five miles a day. Then again, working out doesn’t leave you with breasts so hard and engorged you can’t sleep (sorry for those I just grossed out). My mom once said you just can’t imagine the kind of changes your body goes through after birth, and she’s pretty much right.

But then there’s the totally amazing experience of being with E. Coming to realize I love her has been less a moment of ecstasy and more a sure, gradual feeling. Holding her just after giving birth simply felt surreal, foreign. No tearful, emotional climax. But every day since then I’ve marveled more, laughed more, just felt more. Part of it is the product of constantly serving her, part of it is coming to know her more. Touching, smelling, watching her face contort when she poops or swallows or sits in her post-feed high, limp and happy.

Suffering and joy. Both deeper than I might have thought or been prepared for, but I suppose God gives the strength to receive both, each never-ending cycle of feeding and sleeping. There are the little breaks, the moments of grace, like D holding my hand at night, the green trees outside the nursery window and the cooling breeze, my mom’s carefully prepared meals, and the moments I get a little more sleep and am able to feel more lucidly myself. Things will be okay.

The Labor Story

So it started with deciding to try to labor naturally, without any drugs. Not that I have anything against an epidural and wouldn’t have judged myself or anyone else for getting one, but I think going through the process of deciding to do it that way was good. It made me think about trusting both in God’s purpose for pain and in His not giving me more than I could bear, of trusting my body’s ability, and of trusting in the support of community. I listened to a lot of birth stories, asked for a lot of prayer, and tried to leave the rest to God.

I think pregnancy is designed on purpose so that by the end you want the pain to start so you can stop being pregnant. That was my first thought when I woke up one morning two days after the due date, with the gut feeling that labor would start that day: relief and excitement. Throughout the day I had crampier versions of the practice contractions I’d had all week, and D and I enjoyed our last day of childlessness doing our favorite things: worshipped in church, ate out, got candy and fruit at Wegman’s, hiked around a lake and park, watched a movie at home.

By eight that night the cramps were regular and uncomfortable enough that I had to get up and walk each off, and started coming every ten to twenty minutes. I think that’s when it hit us both that this was for real. By eleven they were every six to seven minutes and felt like a hyperbolic wave of painful pressure. D labored with me for the next four hours at home. As each contraction came, we breathed and walked together as he told me I could do it, I was doing great. I focused on relaxing through each as much as I could. In between we rested, I drank. D kept a string of our favorite music going and timed each contraction.

Sometime towards the end of those four hours we called the hospital and were told it was up to us to come in, or wait until the frequency increased to three to five minutes. At that point D asked me how I felt about an epidural, and I remember saying, I think I can do this. I much would rather be at home with him than lying in a hospital bed with nothing to think about but the pain, so we opted to stay home a little longer.

D worried I was getting tired, and suggested a bath, which was wonderful. The hot water was relaxing. I listened to All the Way My Saviour Leads Me on repeat on my headphones, holding D’s hand and counting through each contraction. They were becoming more intense, but it was bearable because I knew by the time I counted to twenty they would start to ease up.

They sped up quickly—within the hour, contractions were intense, coming every few minutes, not letting up completely in between. I remember with shock feeling like I wanted to push, at which point D was already rushing to get the car. The next four contractions were a blur; when they hit I’d curl up on the ground wherever I was—sidewalk by the car, backseat of the car, hall of the hospital waiting for the elevator—and focus on not pushing and counting through it. After the fourth I had arrived in the hospital; I counted through two more while lying in bed, amid a flurry of activity. The doctors were paged stat to the room, they said I was fully dilated, the sterile field was being set up, and by the next contraction I started to push. I remember gripping D and a nurse’s hand on either side, surrounded by a ring of nurses and doctors, everyone cheering me on with each push. You can do this! I can see the head! Keep going!

An hour and fifteen minutes later, she was born. I could feel her coming out, burning then something slippery. Someone asked how it felt, and I kept saying, weird. I looked over and there she was, small and pink with two big open eyes.

Good memories: D walking and breathing with me, holding my hand in the tub. The songs I listened to. The circle of people cheering me on with each push. D’s look of excitement when he told me he could see the head. His look of relief afterwards when he said, “we did it!” Most of all, knowing that something elevated as such a negative, painful experience can be in part positive, redemptive; that the prayer, positive thinking, and preparation made a difference. And now she’s here!

Nine Months Is A Long Time

Sometimes I feel like I will be pregnant forever. I will go on wearing the same three maternity shirts, waking up a three A.M. feeling hot and needing to pee, feeling uncomfortable twinges that I now recognize as someone bumping into my bladder or kicking my ribs. I look back at photos and my old body seems unreal, like a dream I used to have. The last few weeks of pregnancy stretch out in some strange warped twilight zone of protracted existence.

I’m trying to bond with the baby, to think about her squished up tight there in the dark listening to my heartbeat and voice, to think about welcoming her into the world. It’s weird and somewhat difficult attempting to love someone you can’t see. Most of the time I’m either so focused on work, or so tired recovering afterwards, that I’m not thinking much of her at all. When I’m knitting, or soaking in the bath, or when D gets affectionate to the belly—those are the times I think about her more.

Sometimes I think about how my body has grown something from a cell to a complete little human, how it has unbelievably stretched itself with surprisingly little ill effect, how it will push life into the world. How as of a particular second in time there will exist an entirely new being on the planet, with her own personality.

Most of the time it seems totally surreal, like trying to imagine heaven. Occasionally a feeling or belief will wash over me and I’ll realize, this is what eternity might be like, this is what it’s all about, and it will change how I see everything. But most of the time I live in the daily muck and have to remind myself to think about God if at all. That’s how it is with the baby—most of the time I’m going about, being my laid-back self, living life in the usual sphere, and occasionally it will strike me that life is about to change. Forever. Any day now.

Week Thirty-Seven

Body Image

“There could never be a more beautiful you.. You were made to fill a purpose that only you could do / So there could never be a more beautiful you” -Jonny Diaz

There’s nothing quite like pregnancy to make you confront any body image issues you may have had. You become heavier, and even though you know it’s supposed to happen, it can feel ugh-gy all the same. It would be lovely if I could stay slim and simply sport a cute little watermelony bump, but instead I’ve spent most of the past seven months diffusely and vaguely heavier. It wasn’t until last week that I started to get questions from patients about when I’m due. “Oh, in seven weeks,” and then I brace myself for the incredulous “but you’re so small!” I really have gained twenty pounds! I want to say. My face isn’t usually this round! My hips and thighs aren’t usually this wide!

There was a time earlier in life when I was heavier than I have been recently, and struggled with liking my body. Around the fourth and fifth month it felt like that old body was returning in some ways, and learning to love it was an odd way of redeeming the ways I had thought about my body in the past. I think about the health that I have. I think about the purpose my body is serving. I think about how my husband’s affection is unchanged.

I think about what I would hope to teach my daughter about body image. It’s strange how much of a child’s self-esteem from the very start is built on how they look; it drives the way the world responds to them. Sometimes in my superficial moments I catch myself hoping the baby is naturally cute (would anyone tell me if she were actually pretty ugly-looking? probably not). I think about how much she will be affected by how I feel about my own body. I guess the most powerful and genuine sort of parenting in the end comes from within, from how I am and live myself, not from play-acting principles.

So this is as good a time to learn as any—now and in four months when I wonder why my old pants still don’t fit . . .

Week Thirty-Two

Unknowns

The mornings are the times when my body shocks me the most. During the day things equilibrate; I become used to how I move and look with fondness upon the bump. But in those first still morning moments I am a stranger to myself. The mornings are when my belly is most its native self, not yet shaped by food or clothing. It used to be a familiar, soft hollow between poking hipbones, smooth and flat. Now it rises high, immune to gravity, having long ago swallowed any trace of a hipbone. It’s surprisingly hard, my skin stretched impossibly tight over a firmness that is frightening.

At those times it feels like an alien is taking over my body. I wonder if things will ever be the same again; I liked my old body a lot more than I admitted. I miss feeling lithe, cinching my scrubs in tight, feeling the looseness of my jeans.

Parenting and the becoming of it is a scary thing. Through everything D and I do runs an undercurrent of awareness that things will never be the same again. We take our time going to bed together; we take naps when we want. We go on dates together nearly every free night; dates to the grocery store, to the park, to the library. We eat out at a whim. Sometimes we just sit quietly for hours in the house.

I like to fantasize that having a baby around will not be all that different, that it will be business as usual with the exception of something adorable strapped to my chest. I will be efficient, calm, capable. But I know in reality it is all one big unknown, a step of faith not unlike others I’ve taken in my life. Going into medicine. Getting married. Giving up a habit. Going through a trial.

And in the end that is what is oddly reassuring. Parenting is not something I am meant to do of my own cognition or ability any more than those other things. This person will be who he or she is, someone God has placed in my life for this ministry I can offer. For what my body is offering it now. They are not here for my convenience, or solely for my satisfaction, or to suit my needs. This is the first big ministry D and I will do together in our lives, and all the way God will lead us, and that is okay.

Week Twenty-Nine

Ramblings

I’ve realized that pregnancy is a philosophical endeavor, sort of like treating ocular hypertension. Yesterday I had a patient come for a second opinion about whether she should be on eyedrops for her mildly elevated eye pressures. I explained the whole situation and basically told her each doctor has their own philosophy of approach, and she’d probably get a different answer from every person she asked.

That’s how pregnancy is; everyone seems to have their own constructs on what should and shouldn’t be done. I know one person who drinks occasional alcohol, another who has sworn off artificial sweeteners. I used to want to know what all the other pregnant women were doing, but now I sort of don’t—it’s like being around your classmates while studying for exams; a little interaction can be helpful but too much is stressful.

I’ve pretty much been naturally laid-back about the whole thing. Short of avoiding proven toxins and popping a prenatal vitamin every morning, life hasn’t changed all that much. I read occasionally from pregnancy books but not obsessively; I chew sugar-free gum without guilt and still go for light jogs.

The only thing that’s been remotely unusual about this pregnancy has been how little I’ve been showing, and this I hear about endlessly. That’s how I looked at two months.. you’re due August of this year?.. do you do lots of ab exercises? (ha, ha). Up until this past week or two I wasn’t comment-ably pregnant, much less obviously in my third trimester.

But the baby is moving all the time, as if she’s telling me there’s really something in there, and this is all okay. There will be plenty of lumbering around with sore backs and heavy ankles later. It’s nice to be pleasantly round but not encumbered. I feel grateful for the simplicity of this all. Is it just my personality? Have I changed? Who knows, but simple is good.

Week Twenty-Nine

Home

There are many things about home that make me happy. I like the exact shade of pale green on our living room walls. I like lying in bed with one cat curled up against either side. I like the confused look Winnie gets when she has to clamber over my bump to sit on my chest. The way Chloe head-butts my hand and meows in my face as soon as the alarm goes off in the morning. I like reading on our plushy cream couch; lying there with D’s hand on my belly.

There’s been a subtle shift in what I look forward to the most in the future: it centers around home, not work. I think sometimes that medicine has consumed enough of my life: I want to be an excellent surgeon, clinician, and teacher, but I don’t feel the drive to run pell-mell to the next best training program. I want to make a happy, safe, and healthy home, with lots of children. I want D to feel free to pursue his career wherever it takes him.

I’m not sure how this change happened, but I see it for what it is: a desire for greater balance in my life, and the willingness to make the choices that would lead me there. I’m grateful for the sense that this is okay, for all the people and experiences that have laid the groundwork. I feel the baby kicking and I think, I am the only one in this world who can be her mother. I look at D and think, I am the only one who can be his wife. There are other doctors, and students, and daughters.

I used to be afraid of whether I’d be able to make the choices when the time came. I still struggle with the pressures at work a bit, but somehow it seems like relatively little to give up, when I think about the things that truly bring me joy in life. I know difficult moments are still ahead, but that’s mostly why I’m writing this down now. For the future.

Week Twenty-Seven

Labor

“I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; in pain you shall bring forth children.” – Genesis 3:16

The only thing about having something growing inside you is that you know at some point it will have to come out. I used to think about the potential space that is the cervical canal and vagina, the nine-pound babies I’d hold in the NICU, and wonder how one exactly gets from point A to B. When I was a med student on the labor and delivery floor, I’d ask women in labor what it felt like, with little success. One woman in between contractions managed to tell me it felt like a train was running her over, which has scared me ever since.

It’s interesting that labor is one of the few divine mandates of suffering. I think about that phrase “greatly multiply”—what would labor have been like before the fall? Not comfortable, but maybe more manageable. Imagine that.

Somehow labor is tied up in the fall, a fundamental part of the female experience that, while being about good, reflects our separation from God. I think about how we are meant to experience it. How life can only come about through great pain.

I occasionally think about whether I’d have the resolve to try giving birth without an epidural. There are the physical benefits, and I think part of me wants to push against the modern medical tendency to medicate away suffering. At the same time, I’ve spoken with enough women to know that labor is painful no matter whether you get an epidural or not, and there seems to be a point reached where the pain becomes almost impossible to rationally tolerate.

Regardless, by proof of the fact that women have multiple children, the price is worth the pain. In that way labor is in a sense a condensed, physical enactment of the spiritual life, a foreshadowing of what Christ came to do, a reflection of the chronic struggles we walk through day-by-day. Great joy as a result of great pain, perhaps pain we would not have chosen had we known what it was. Pregnancy is a nine-month anticipation of and inner preparation for that process. Here we go.

Week Twenty-Seven

Creating

“I rummage around in my flat file, find some persimmon-tanned paper that looks like cowhide, grab a few pastels.. I begin to rough in Alba’s head.. my hand is moving across the paper like the needle of a seismograph, recording Alba’s form as I absorb it with my eyes. ..I begin to lay in pastel. I start by sketching in highlights in white.. then I rough in the shadows, in dark green and ultramarine.. I use two pink pastels, a light pink the hue of the inside of a shell and a dark pink that reminds me of raw tuna. With rapid strokes I make Alba’s skin. It is as though Alba’s skin was hidden in the paper, and I am removing some invisible substance that concealed it. .. Over this pastel skin I use a cool violet to make Alba’s ears and nose and mouth..

“The drawing is finished. It will serve as a record—I loved you, I made you, and I made this for you—long after I am gone, and Henry is gone, and even Alba is gone. It will say, we made you, and here you are, here and now.”
–page 407-409, The Time Traveler’s Wife

We are on vacation, the three of us. D is taking a nap in the room he picked because the quilt in it was green, his favorite color. His hands are curled in the way they always do when he’s unconscious, and I wonder if the baby will curl her hands the same way. I am sitting in a chair by the screen door enjoying the Kauai breeze, the prickly aftertaste of pineapple still at the edges of my tongue. The baby is kicking inside. She has been kicking a lot lately, hard kicks that punch out my skin and jump up against D’s hand.

I was reading this novel and missing drawing. I wish time could stand still so I could take a few refresher courses on pastels and oils, could teach myself to quilt, could learn the mechanics of photography. I would like to draw our cats, take photographs of the baby, paint a tree across the yellow walls of our nursery.

I think sometimes about the time and energy that was invested into all these things growing up that I don’t even do anymore now—painting, piano, drawing. I haven’t seriously played in a decade, and my sorry collection of paints has solidified somewhere in a back closet. I wonder if it was all a waste, but then at times like these when my narrowed life has fallen away and I can think beyond work and call, I feel glad to feel the urge, the conviction that I could pick those things up again.

I have had more time to think about the baby coming, and one of the things I’m looking forward to the most is having an excuse to be creative and let my imagination run amuck. I hope I get to make up lots of stories, finger painting and collect picture books. Maybe I’ve changed, but that seems more important than driving in because someone showed up in the emergency room with flashes and floaters. Ah well.

Week Twenty-Six

Love Through Time

“I hear the screen door slam and I peer above the grass. A child is running, pell mell, and as it comes down the path through the waving grass my heart twists and Clare bursts into the clearing.” -page 35, The Time Traveler’s Wife, Niffenegger

When I remember this time in my marriage, one of the moments I hope will come to mind is walking with D in our favorite park an hour before dusk last Saturday. The park was green, green fields and trees, the air crisp, the sky overcast but everything lit like we were in another world. We jogged our usual route (stopping when I got the now-familiar irrational urge to pee), walked the rest, explored a skipping stone beach, threw a Frisbee. We underwent a mission to find my lost bandanna and actually discovered it at the spot where D joked about being too tired to run but then took off and I had to dash to catch up.

In preparation for our vacation next week I indulged in buying a book for the plane and beach, as usual one I’d read before and liked enough to add to the collection. I like the creative scope of the story. It made me imagine what it would be like to go back in time and meet D as a child or a teenager. I think about the hurts and adventures and proclivities I would discover. I’m sure he would have liked the outdoors just as much, probably thrown a Frisbee or ball the same way. He would probably still really like noodles and smart girls. It would be interesting to see the changes over time.

Much of the purpose of marriage seems to be about that: focusing on the other in a way unrelated to what they can do for you. Thinking instead about who they are, what made them who they are, what they are becoming, what they can become. Ephesians talks about how marriage is to sanctify and present the other blameless: for the eternity in which he will not be my husband, but just himself, his full self. And part of that self will be a result of what I’ve been able to see, understand, and create in him, because of the power and covenant of the relationship we had here on earth.

If I could time travel, I suppose that would be the neatest thing of all to see. I would love to see the five-year-old D lumber across a field, but how inspiring would it be to see his glory-self that exists for all eternity? I wonder how, being beyond all time, God loves us. There must be a depth to that love I cannot understand. As a child I couldn’t think past a few days; now I can hardly grasp a few decades, much less the scope of my life for eternity. Yet that is the way in which God knows of and loves me, in all the past and all the never-ending future. Food for thought.

Week Twenty-Four

Names

“A good name is more desirable than great riches.” –Proverbs 22:1

In reading through Genesis, a major emerging theme has been the importance of names. I guess one could say from the beginning God named things into existence: light, night, firmament. The author bothers to tell us the names of each river out of Eden. God bothers to bring all the living creatures to Adam so they can each be named. Later we are told the particular names of people and places, names that reflect sorrow, joy, promise, worship. Noah for rest, Ishmael for God hears, Esau for hairy, Beer Lahai Roi for well of the One who lives and sees me. Some names made me laugh (Nimrod, Genesis 10:8).

Since finding out the gender, this naming business has become more real. During the first few weeks of pregnancy, I went through a host of names, becoming successively seized with and then tired of each. I had fun with odd names, trendy names, names of spices or countries. I toyed with foreign names, literary names, names of objects in nature. This was for the most part an entirely solo experience. Per D, “sounds too much like this-remotely-phonetically-similar word.” “Sounds weird.” “I knew a girl in third grade by that name who picked her nose.” End of discussion.

In the end, what’s become important is a name with meaning, a strong name. Reading Genesis makes me think of that. Something that speaks something over her life. I feel like maybe it’ll be like knowing about D: I might be up and down awhile at the start, but when it settles in and I know it, I’ll know it. At least I’m praying that will be the case.

Week Twenty-Four

Spring

There are many things I love about our apartment, but one of them is the huge old cherry tree we have in our cozy backyard. For awhile now there have been pink buds, but today it happened: they burst into heavy white bloom. The bulbs my mom buried in our ceramic pots are sprouting tulips; our onions are ready for harvesting.

I’ve looked forward this year to spring more than any year I can remember. In college I was a fall person: Virginia falls are glorious. Brilliant leaves, crisp air for weeks on end. In med school I was a winter person: unforgettable New England snows and festive lights.

But this year it’s the spring. Winters here are dreary: cold, wet, sludgy. I’m ready for sun, for outdoor walks and mild breezes. I’m ready to wear skirts and dresses rather than the pants I can’t fit into anymore. For the first time we own plants to watch wake up; we have a place to feed birds for our cats’ entertainment.

And perhaps spring seems more real because of all the changes going on inside. In the mornings I wake up and feel my belly, and think something strange is happening. There’s a taut sloping that’s entirely foreign. I’m fascinated by how my bellybutton is slowly becoming shallower, as if some invisible force is pushing against it from the other side. I imagine my tummy bursting into bloom one day: skin cracking, muscle fibers parting.

Spring is new life and mysterious changes, the promise of fullness. It’s the birds flocking to our tree, D’s hand in mine as we walk in parks, my blooming belly. Time for savoring.

Week Twenty

Taking Call

“In his heart a man plans his course, but the Lord determines his steps.” –Proverbs 16:9

All of my call this year is home call, taken weeks at a time. Most of the time it’s fine, but one page could mean the difference between a restful evening and a late night in the hospital. I think I meet the diagnostic criteria for pager-PTSD: I get jumpy when anything beeps, like the microwave at Starbucks after they’ve heated up a pretzel, or our shower cleanser before it sprays. I sometimes hear the pager going off in mind. I try to avoid it unconsciously by leaving it at home while running errands or taking longer showers. It sometimes decreases my ability to enjoy normal things. I definitely get annoyed: once D teased me by humming the pager beep tune, which got me almost hilariously upset.

So much of the nature of medical work is based on chance: how bad a call night is; whether or not you get called in. Medical culture is strikingly superstitious: people carrying “white clouds” or “black clouds,” avoiding the Q-word. I remember how upset someone got when I mentioned what a quiet night it was. So much of the workload does seem unfair, especially when you start comparing, and it all seems due to chance or luck.

I forget sometimes that I don’t believe in a capricious world. I believe in probability—if it snows, less patients are apt to come in—but not in luck or happenstance. I believe in a sovereign God, which imbues purpose to what happens whether I understand it or not. I believe in suffering as much as I believe in redemption, and that it is all ordered by one whose ways are higher than mine.

These are all things easier to say than to believe, when you’re the one trudging in for a night shift, hoping to catch some sleep. It’s rarely in the forefront of my mind, but at least sometimes it’s in the background, enough to give some measure of peace. I pray it now for myself, but more so for people like D who still have to take call every third night. It takes sacrifice, to lay yourself open not to chance but to whatever God brings your way. Here’s to all those who do.

Week Nineteen

It's For Real. And It's A . . .

"I suppose you are real?" said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled.
"The Boy's Uncle made me Real," he said. "That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always."
-The Velveteen Rabbit, Margery Williams

The whole concept that there is something alive in there is still very surreal. Mysterious-GI-Illness has since morphed into State-of-Constant-Fatigue, but even that is wearing off now, and I’m feeling nearly normal with the exception of feeling stouter: there’s a rounding thickness to my belly and waist that feels more like being fat than being pregnant. I miss pulling on a pair of jeans and feeling slim—the rubber-band trick doesn’t quite cut it. For some reason this seems invisible to everyone else. I get weird looks when I say I’m into my fifth month. Which D tells me to be grateful for while I can.

At any rate, that’s what made yesterday’s ultrasound all the more marvelous. Despite my not showing yet, the baby was right there! And huge! The resolution of the scan was incredible. We watched the mouth open and close, the fingers curl up next to the chin, the legs kick and bend. It’s a unique window of time: later, and the bones ossify too much for sound waves to penetrate, and the baby becomes too difficult to move for various views. Right now all I had to do was cough and it flipped over. We could see each vertebrae, the cerebellum and ventricles, the stomach and kidneys, each toe. We could see the globes and lenses (score).

The amazing thing is that the baby is there, having somehow formed all its parts, without my least regard or effort. While I’ve been going about the rest of life, it was in there being transformed from a few cells to a miniature anatomical wonder. It’s a good reminder that there is nothing about this process that I own, nothing about this life that I take credit for in the deepest sense. Somehow this being has been gifted us to steward for a time, but that is all. Something I can repeat to myself fifteen years down the road.

Oh yes, and we found out: it’s a girl.

Week Eighteen

Marriage As Ministry

“See your husband’s potential.” -Melanie Summey

One truth about marriage that has been on my mind recently is how marriage is ministry. My husband is my ministry to the world. I think we tend to think more easily about children in this way—we are more apt to unconditionally and sacrificially love them, to ponder their potential, in a way we really should be doing just as much for our spouse.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how the world will change because of D, because of his work in medicine and the church and as a father, and it’s an exciting thing. It’s exciting watching him go through a period of refining what he’s about in life, where he’s headed, in his training, his visions for the future, and his preparations for fatherhood.

I think about what an influential role I play. The oft-repeated (at least by us) adage from Tim Keller is true: everything about the world can be falling apart, but if your marriage is strong, you step out into the world in strength. Everything about the world can be going well, but if your marriage is weak, you step out into the world in weakness. I see that in us: the things I say affect him; my prayers for him are powerful. It always comes back to amaze me what a difference can be made by sheer dent of my belief and support.

There is some sort of mystery and power in this, in my influence upon the way D sees himself, thinks about what he can do. Some strange access I alone have to the construction of his personhood and being. It’s a marvelous and surprising thing to see it in action, to realize how content I would be just to see the world and kingdom changed through him.

Week Eighteen

Vision

It’s so easy to go on in life without a really clear idea of where we are heading, to lose purpose while riding the never-ending escalator of career advancement. This seems to be particularly true of medicine, because the training period is so mind-numbingly long. For the most part you’re trying to catch up on sleep, pass the next test, and well, when the time comes, apply for fellowship like everyone else.

Most of my career thus far has been on the straight-and-narrow, at first because I was obliviously self-driven, then because everyone around me seemed to be doing the same few things. Most of us go onwards without really asking ourselves: what are we here for? Where does God want me or us to be? What would my ideal life in ten years look like, and am I heading in the right direction for that?

D and I are both at that point of questioning in our lives, perhaps because he’s been disillusioned somewhat by how health care is practiced, and I’ve seen the fallacies of the high-end academic world. We both dream about a healthy home with lots of children, about integrating our medical, faith, and family lives, about traveling to places in the world that desperately need the skills we have to offer.

Rather than asking, how can we make a reasonable life out of the track we’re in? we’re asking, how can we choose our steps to best equip us for where we want to be? For the first time, I’m thinking twice before jumping through the next hoop—and I think the timing is right for that. At least it’s good to be thinking.

Week Seventeen

Guts and Glory

“[The] chief part of human happiness arises from the consciousness of being beloved.” –Adam Smith

Life is strange. Lately it’s had an odd consistency, like a rawhide toughness I knaw through one day at a time. The questions I once pondered with ease--what’s God been trying to show me recently? what’s the purpose of this time?--I now stare at in the befuddled stupor of one simply trying to survive. I wonder if I’m being initiated by sudden immersion into the drab world of work for work’s sake. I wonder if my spare time has fallen prey to brainless entertainment and consumerism. I wonder if I’ve forgotten the something that made me ask those questions--perhaps that more than anything else creates this sensation of wandering in underwater heaviness.

I wonder if surgery is changing me. I’ve whipped out one-handed knots with my eyes closed, put in chest tubes; I’ve seen enough inguinal hernias (and a variety of male genitals) to last me for life. But I’ve become accustomed to a world that’s exacting, hierarchical, that pivots on task-geared efficiency. I’ve worn to bone-deep weariness, perhaps so much that I haven’t noticed becoming habituated to a world that doesn’t acknowledge God’s existence. That doesn’t credit physical marvels to His creative power, that constantly tries to discharge patients and faces work with grumbling. That counts on luck for good call nights rather than trust in His sovereignty. That showcases humors and moods rather than the assured peacefulness of one who is beloved.

At the end of the day, that’s what I crave. I crave being given a sense of belovedness rather than having to create it myself, through reckless self-preservation, relationships, consumerism, performance. When I have it, I carry into the hospital a sense of favor that nothing can take away. When I don’t, life acquires the gristly dreariness that wears at my day and leaves me empty at night.

I have to work at creating a world that acknowledges God, that cries out with wonder at His creation and glories with Christ in suffering, that trusts there is some purpose even when I see none. That listens. That gives thanks. That doesn’t live in fear of making mistakes or never catching up on sleep. Sometimes I just have to rest in unconditional belovedness and not try at all. Tomorrow’s my last day of surgery for this rotation. Good time to rest.

Written August 20, 2006

A Bothersome Experience

I had a jarring experience at work today. I found out a procedure I had prided myself on doing well, and quickly, I had actually been doing wrong all along. My attending had left and trusted me to do it on my own, only to then come back and spend precious OR time redoing it all several times.

Later tonight I kept replaying each step of the procedure in my mind. I’m not sure why it bothered me so much, more than it really seemed to bother anyone else. Maybe because this was something I had a particular reputation in my class for being confident about doing. Maybe because my particular Hopkins-cultivated fear about acting like I know something only to be wrong came to be. Maybe because my own fear about sacrificing quality for efficiency came to be. Maybe because I put too much pride and credit in being good with my hands, have put too much stock in how easily I learn procedures. Definitely because at heart I am a performance-driven, approval-seeking being who wants to be the perfect resident.

I lay in bed later thinking about this. I hadn’t realized how far I had come in my hubris. How much I am still driven by the old cycle of performance and perfection. How much more I trust myself and my abilities--my hands, my mind, my will--than I trust God. I trust my reasonings and machinations over God’s sovereignty. I trust the biology of my body over God’s control over this new life forming. I trust my own knowledge and skills over the strength and wisdom God provides. I am constantly more affirmed in myself than I am in the work God has done in me.

In a way this has always been my fundamental problem. It leaves no room for humility, for mistakes, for anything surprising to happen that is outside of my own narrow will and mind. There is always this part in me I need to confess, to let go of. The doing so carries both the freedom and joy in the returning of the wayward younger son, but also release from the justification and perfectionism of the older son. It’s something I come back to over and again.

Week Sixteen

Fashion

“Maybe it’s the effect of the depressed economy, maybe it’s the influence of elegant Michelle Obama–but restrained, ladylike fashion is fully in style. So don your gloves, pull on a polished skirt suit, or slip into a sophisticated ball gown.” –Fall Fashion Week 2009 trend, www.omiru.com

In preparation for the day when, alas, I will no longer be able to wear scrubs every day, and in celebration of my potentially feeling up to wearing more than pajamas all weekend, I am enjoying imaginary clothes shopping. This is where I look avidly at various fashion sites, aesthetically admiring things I wouldn’t dream of wearing, and dreaming about things I would instantly buy if I wasn’t saving up for diapers (and child care).

A few things I was admiring: a yellow patterned blouse under a green belted peacoat. A chunky necklace paired with a flared skirt. A sheer-sleeved teal blouse with a tweed pencil skirt. Muted green handbags, sparkly cocktail rings. Anything flowy and chiffony. Anything sold by Anthropologie. Anything Jennifer Connelly was wearing in He’s Just Not That Into You. (A few trends I completely do not understand, no offense: ankle boots, head-to-toe animal prints, capelets. Then again, I remember seeing capris for the first time in college and thinking they were ridiculous. I now own more capris than shorts.)

I find looking at maternity wear fairly depressing. Maybe I just haven’t found the right stores, but all I can see is the huge must-be-fake, thirty-pound belly strapped onto all the models that is completely ruining what would otherwise be a mediocre outfit. My sister took me to a maternity store for fun last weekend and I left vowing to wear normal clothes as long as humanly possible.

Well, it’s fun to think about all this. It’s enjoyable the same way it is looking at a good painting, a striking photograph, a well-decorated room, hearing great music. Inspiring though at the moment existing more in fantasy than anything else. I was just as glad come Monday morning to pull on the usual green scrubs and my serviceable, scruffy clogs.

Week Sixteen (no more back-posts; all are now written real-time)

Small Victories

“Mathin made dinner after the horses were tended, but Harry lingered, brushing Sungold’s mane and tail long after anything resembling a tangle still existed. For all her weariness, she was glad to care for the horse herself, glad that there was no brown man of the horse to take that pleasure away from her.” –Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword

I was brushing Chloe tonight, as she purred loud enough to power a small engine. Grooming her is enjoyable because it’s how I always fantasized grooming a horse would be: she stands in majestic stillness as the rubber tines run through her glossy, thick black coat. She has almost equine-like coloring, black with white down her nose, not to mention a frame large enough to dwarf small dogs. I hadn’t brushed her in so long that enough fur pelted off to stuff a small pillow.

I was looking at my husband a few nights ago while he slept. It’d been a long time, months, since I’d really seen him, not out of effort but spontaneous affection. He was wearing his old “Veritas Forum” shirt from the days we’d take the M3 to the Yard to listen to apologetic speakers. He was lying on his favorite pillow and curled up hugging his favorite bear, feet tucked bare against the air and blanket swaddling his middle.

This is how it’s felt waking back up to real life, like glimpses of a more and more whole world as the fog clears. I did the chores again last weekend. I didn’t shoo Winnie away from my lap, and she lay there for over an hour like the old days, head on her paws moving up and down with my breaths. I missed D at night. I turned on music. I talked to the baby.

Maybe the best way to see where you’ve been is to describe what it’s like coming back. You’re more thankful for the people who helped you along through their service or patience, for the grace that got you through. It’s easier to see a purpose in it all. There’s some element of re-self-discovery. Perhaps there’s more acceptance of how things happened the way they did. I think about some of the more difficult things in life and hope it will be like that one day. In the meanwhile, it’s little victories, little moments of insight and quiet bits of gratitude.

Week Fourteen

Pregnancy, or Mysterious Gastrointestinal Illness

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements? Surely you know!” –Job 38:4-5

I sometimes wonder if one day I will wake up and someone will inform me that instead of being pregnant, I have actually been afflicted with a strange gastrointestinal illness. As far as I can tell so far, pregnancy is indistinguishable from a mutated form of irritable bowel disease.

I have now moved beyond constant nausea to nightly gas pains. A surgery resident once told me that you could take someone’s small bowel and slice it in two right in front of them and they would feel nothing. Blow it up instead with air, and they’d double over in pain. Ironically, gas pains do feel, well, sharp and stabbing—you know what it is, you know it will pass, but by golly does it feel like someone’s at it with a butcher knife.

Makes me think on how oddly the receptors in our body are wired to interpret certain stimuli. Despite no visible inflammation, the smallest corneal abrasion can cause severe photophobia (read: most difficult patients to examine in the emergency room). Irritated eyelids can cause a feeling of gritty sand stuck in the eyes. I saw a patient last month with Charles-Bonnet syndrome: wherever she went, she saw a small girl in a red dress standing in the corner. No visible brain or ocular disease; no treatment other than reassurance that what she sees is not real. I read about a patient who saw his mother everywhere. Now that would be spooky.

Sometimes the analyst in me tries to reason things out, but for the most part I have to say: I don’t know. It’s amazing how often I say that at work. What is causing my glaucoma? Will there ever be a treatment for optic neuropathy? Will my double vision get better? Will this laser make my retinopathy go away? Why does the uterus have to be right next to the bowels and bladder? I can guess, but I don’t know.

I suppose that in the end, I don’t need to know. I just need peace, to feel understood, to know that a purpose exists. The more I study and train, the more I encounter faith. One could say the same goes for pregnancy.

Week Thirteen

Community

I know last week I wrote about how pregnancy is an isolating process, but this week I'm thinking about how it can be an equalizing experience for women. I found out surreptitiously that someone I know pregnant as well. It was strange to think that all this time she was probably avoiding morning coffee and hiding urges to hurl as much as I was.

Because in the end, as much as our bodies change differently, they change, and perhaps in some way we all feel the same. Out of control, helpless, confused, surreal. There are nights I sit at home feeling like it's 2 AM and realize it just turned 7 PM, and wonder if it makes me a total loser to crawl into bed and stay there for the seventh straight day in a row. I wonder how my life turned into this amorphous blob of non-productive nothingness, like a radio with all the interesting stations tuned out. I look at all the spry women around me and envy them their normalness. At this point it doesn't feel real that there's anything actually inside of me. I mostly just look and feel like I do when I've had too big a meal and need to pop a pants button—bloated and fatigued. I wonder, in my low moments, whether this is all some cosmic joke.

But then I think about some other folks to gather strength. Like my friend telling me her baby just smiled at her for the first time. Or the story I heard about someone throwing up the entire nine months (I have it good, I guess). I picture my childhood friend who's now nearly due, and it always makes me happy. When I round in the NICU I look at the wrinkly little newborns in their spaceship-like incubators and think about the mothers who carried them. I think about how my fingers pucker in the bath and wonder what it's like being submerged for nine months. I flip through pictures of my mom when she was pregnant, of my mother-in-law with palm on her round belly, smiling a secret smile.

And then, seen in those faces and stories around me, it feels a little more real. Like my mom says, for each stage, a feeling: remember it, because then it passes. But then the memories. And the feeling you've shared a little bit of something universal.

Week Thirteen

Isolation and Intimacy

“But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.” –Luke 2:19

I’m currently on the consult service at Hopkins, or rather I am the consult service at Hopkins. I spend my days scurrying miles from one end of the place to another, coat pockets stuffed with drops and lenses, indirect ophthalmoscope looped around one arm. In one sense it’s refreshing to get outside the eye building, walk through the rest of the medicine world. In another it’s exhausting and sometimes frustrating.

Ophthalmology is a world most physicians know nothing about, and aren’t bothered to know anything about; we joke the usual reason for consult is “the patient has an eye and something could be wrong with it.” You’d never consider calling a cardiology consult without pulling out a stethoscope and usually ordering an EKG first, but I’ve never been presented with a useful history or attempted exam before being asked to see someone. Everyone has stories about the consult for “blurry vision” for which the treatment was “have patient put on his glasses.”

On the other hand, the eye is a valuable and mysterious thing, which most understandably approach with caution. In some ways pregnancy is like that: significant but enigmatic. Sometimes isolating and misunderstood—I imagine after we make the news public it will be less so, but I think there’s always a deeper part of it that is separating, from normalcy, from husband and peers.

I think about this when I read about Mary treasuring up and pondering. I’ve always liked the intimacy of that verse, the secret weighing and inner lingering about it. I suppose that’s the boon in these first three private months, and the following months of solitary transformation: the pondering into being of a new intimacy, with myself, God, and a new life. In the end that’s what I like best about ophthalmology: its unique understanding of an intricate and mysterious structure, and the intimacy that brings with the patients to whom it brings valuable sight. I’m changed in the knowing and touching of it, people are changed, and if I have to work a little harder to share it, all the better in the end.

Week Twelve

Sovereign Mysteries

“Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view… Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.

“The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.” –Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

One thing conception unveils is God’s sovereignty. I don’t know that the beginnings of life is really anything that anyone understands. I remember in high school editing a research proposal about enzymes released by the egg on contact with a sperm. I remember looking at electron microscopy photos of that moment of fusion in cell biology, studying the statistics of chromosomal separation in third-year genetics. I remember the first time I saw part of a fetus, in an abortion clinic as a medical student. They sifted through the suctioned bloody contents and I saw materialize a single transparent, perfectly formed miniature bent leg and foot, floating in the red haze like a piece of glass.

I remember waiting for my period, two weeks after we’d decided to stop contraception, thinking that this couldn’t possibly be it. Then seeing two lines instead of one on Christmas day.

In the end the whole thing is a fearful, wondrous mystery. Who can understand this moment of union between two traveling cells moments before their deaths? Their rooting in some dark invisible cavern in my body? And the wriggling thing with bloated belly and waving limbs on the ultrasound screen? Who can begin to comprehend the changes that will happen in our lives?

As a pathologically self-reliant person, I think about the utter lack of control we had over this bit of life coming into being, over how my body’s already changed, and I’m reminded of God’s true sovereignty in my life. How he is the giver of all things, of how in the end I have given my life and body to him. It’s a sometimes scary, often comforting, but always humbling thing.

Week Eleven