Nurturing What Hope We Have
I was not hoping for a girl or for a boy. How does one in this scenario have room to hope for anything beyond a still viable womb, a still strong-beating, thumbnail-sized heart? I am not certain it’s wrong to hope for any or all of these. Hope is just a sort of holy grasping after all.
If by hope we mean expectation, perhaps it would have behooved me to have even an ounce of it walking into our appointment that day. Perhaps it would have saved me the grief of surprise emotion when the woman smearing me with jelly said as she’s said a thousand times before that congratulations, she’s yours.
She? In hindsight, had I wished for her, well then, sound the trumpets! And perhaps had I wished for him, I’d have been able to lose the idea of him properly before moving on. I could tuck his name away someplace behind my eyes and reimagine our life anew. But having really made no case for either, there was not time for trumpeting nor was there reason for the tucking. There was just me with my pants pulled down and a hurricane of tears I had not budgeted for.
That’s the real grief, isn’t it? Being startled by a feeling, a memory or some other untouchable thing you couldn’t have known was there. It’s not the feeling itself that leaves you violated as much as it is the unforeseen ambush. The guts it has to sneak up and spook you and rummage through your drawers. As someone quite considerate, attentive, to the contents of my home, meaning the sentiments inside me, I can think of nothing more unnerving than this. You think the foreigner might respect the house rules and at least leave its shoes by the door, but it doesn’t. it traipses in with muddy feet and scares the children.
We anticipate that we could feel fear, being first time parents. We anticipate feeling ill-equipped, being as we are only kids ourselves. What we don’t anticipate is the rejection of the word girl as it leaves the nurses happy mouth, and not because of sadness or disappointment or unmet expectation, but precisely because when you go in your head to picture your grown daughter, you’re disillusioned in horror that she turned out to be like you. That is the grief you and I can’t plan for.
She’s being stitched together this very minute, and I regret any of my badness that’s being sewed in. I just couldn’t have known that in all my pure joy there’d be with it a troublesome guest gone completely unaccounted for. Hand in hand with my husband and every answered prayer, crying out in a panicky desperation for someone more tender, more patient, more contented than her sorry mother.
And maybe this is where our work begins even now, hope as our discipline. May our capacity for it grow tall, deep, and wide. Grasping through faith that she’d not eat the bread of idleness. That she would bring good and not harm and have a laugh that saves her. That her arms would be strong for her tasks and her tongue spilling with faithful instruction. My greatest hope of them being that even though she’s mine, she’s not – that even though I’m penniless, she’s worth more than all the rubies in this world.
