Most everyone in my life knows by now that my husband and I are currently in the earliest stages of parenthood. So far, pregnancy has done little to change my appearance or even my food cravings, but it definitely has changed my perspective on a lot of things.
Pain. Adulthood. Healing, growth.
There is so much joy in the blessing of new life. At times I can’t wrap my mind around the realness of it, but then it hits me out of nowhere and I want to laugh and cry for the life my child will live, and is living already.
I don’t know all the details yet, but I know this baby has changed everything about our lives already, simply by existing. More and more, as we get closer to holding our child outside the womb, I am feeling desperate for renewal, for hope and peace, for reconciliation with God. Life’s challenges have not changed, but our approach to them must certainly change as we grow into the parents God wants us to be. That perspective is daunting, and energizing. It’s humbling.
I wrote this poem as an expression of feelings I can’t really understand, and as I wrote I realized it was partly inspired by my experience of motherhood so far. There is so much we don’t know about the future, possibly even more so now that a child is a part of the equation–but uncertainty moves us to prayer and surrender.
Birth of a Prayer
A prayer begins gestation
a bit like a poem,
as a coalescing of thoughts, of tears
held back for some reason,
the warmth they bring to your cheeks
almost like a hug
but just a little more desperate.
Desperation feeds prayer like it does poetry;
it struggles for release
into the open air of a still room
to break the silence of a breaking heart
to scream in a rejection of futility
to say
I am un-whole and
somehow the truth of that is necessary.
Help finds me here–
how, I do not know,
but there is power in the not-knowing,
power in the rawness of tears and gasping breaths,
a nose pressed into the carpet
in the naked hours of the night.
You can’t write these things on paper.
They are more fragile, more eternal
than ink. They bleed
into the walls,
they pursue the light of the moon,
and something brighter.
Prayers are poems without tethers;
unencumbered by interpretation
or preparation,
they are pure thought
needing no direction but outward.
Thoughtmoot 