A Pregnant Season
On the beauty and pain of waiting for a promised arrival
Last December, I spent every day anticipating the birth of my son. It was my mother who pointed out how beautiful it is to be due in December, paralleling Mary’s pregnancy with the Christ-child. This year, the readings and hymns of Advent have led me to reflect on that parallel.
Advent is a season of anticipation, of course. It is a build up to the Christmas feast. It is a season of preparation before the joy of Christ’s birth. This is a natural parallel to birth—the final trimester of pregnancy involves a lot of preparation, from writing a birth plan to packing a hospital bag to learning to install a car seat. Furthermore, there is a sense of solemnity that accompanies the third trimester: by the time a mother reaches it, she is dutifully thinking through every detail she can before the baby’s arrival, and she has expanded and adapted her body to its farthest extents to meet the needs of her baby.
My pregnancy was not a calm and luxurious one, however. I spent the majority of my second trimester in my bed, injecting syringes of medication into the IV imbedded into my arm. My body rejected food and water more often than it accepted it. I endured the longest and most intense fast I have ever observed during a time when no woman should ever fast. I had no birth plan, no hospital bag, not even a list of what I should bring with me (all of these things I hastily scribbled on our way out the door).
Yet Advent was the right season to comfort me. My waiting was penitential. The account of the Holy Family did not resonate with me so much as the accounts of Christ’s second coming. “Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour.” This is as true of pregnancy as it is of Judgement Day. As much as we try to predict our children’s arrivals, they arrive only when God wills it. Even when I was induced, the expectation was that Klaus would be born the following day on Epiphany, only to meet him finally a day later still.
“Alas for women who are pregnant and for those who are nursing infants in those days,” the Apostle Matthew writes, yet when women discuss their children’s births, they tend to speak proudly and almost fondly of their experience. I felt the weight of our sinful world for the nine months I carried Klaus in my womb, and when he was born I did not feel proud. In fact, the only all consuming thought I had for weeks afterward was of how humbling the experience had been. How easy it would be to be embarrassed and humiliated by it all. I relied on medical assistance for nourishment during my pregnancy, needed John and an entire team of nurses’ help to give birth—I made it through those nine months only by the grace of God.
In the months afterward, I thought often of these words of Jesus: “A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world.” The pain of my pregnancy was put aside the moment Klaus was born. That pain focused my prayers on a promised arrival; not only of my son, but of Christ. We do not need to know the day or the hour, for when it comes, we will forget our pain in the sheer joy of the arrival of Jesus.