Everyone is having babies right now. Everyone gets to have a healthy living baby to take home with them. Everytime I hear about another one, it hits me like a knockout punch that takes my breath away. And then, despite the pain, I keep on thinking about it. Like a swirling dragon of pain that stays with me, just beneath the surface of things, all day long. Imagining all the beautiful little families in their warm, cozy houses, laughing, smiling, oohing and aahing over their new babies. How all of those mothers must feel so content, like the most blessed women in the world.
I just feel cursed.
I wonder what it would be like to just get pregnant, because you just decided all of a sudden to have a baby, to carry a growing and healthy baby inside of you all the way for 9/10 months - to your due date or even past it - and then to just have the baby normally without complications, without chaos, fear, disappointment, or any accompanying loss of innocence. To do all of that and end up on the other side feeling joy, peace with the world, confidence in your life, your future, your God. I wonder what that would feel like. I have never felt it with either of my babies. In hindsight, I should have felt it with M, but without having Cora's experience to put it into perspective, I didn't realize how much I really had to be thankful for. Life is cruel that way.
I find myself asking God for things in very specific, qualified terms, as though He's a genie who might give me something quite different simply because I omitted a particular term of my request. It's the difference between praying simply for another baby, and praying for a healthy, living baby who is formed properly, free of any genetic or chromosomal defects, who survives not only the pregnancy but labor and delivery as well, and who doesn't get sick with any of the nasty things that prey upon infants in their first months of life. And no SIDS either, definitely no SIDS.
