sacred & mysterious

Before I was married, before Ewan ever existed, I always wondered what it would be like -- feel like -- to be pregnant. To be something and someone for someone else that no one else could ever be: a mother. Sustaining life in its earliest and most delicate and precarious days.

30 weeks pregnant belly
by kirsten michelle (2010)

Much of it was what I had expected but had never experienced directly: the fatigue in the early days, the getting sick. I knew to expect a growing belly, but I wondered what I would look like. Would I get big all over, or would I be what I often heard termed "all baby" -- with the womb just stretching out in front? I wondered at what it would feel like to have another human life inside -- nudging, rolling, kicking, stretching. Living. Another person: another soul with skin and bones and blood.

I don't know how to describe it. As someone who thrives on the stringing together of the right words, I find myself at a loss. I can only say that it is one of the most intimate and mysterious things I have ever experienced. Even the best comparisons I can come up with fall too short. It feels so sacred that I almost fear trying to put words to any of it.

It baffles me that all these days of my life, Ewan didn't exist. He simply was not. And now he is. And he is in me; he can be in no one else.

That boggles me completely. The word "miracle" comes to mind, and in a way that makes me want to whisper it because it is something so incredible and beautiful and mysterious that it seems too little and not potent enough for what this is.

And so I embrace this mystery, pushing away anything that would dare to make it seem less.