Pondering in my Heart

Twenty weeks into my third pregnancy, I found myself crying hysterically as the ultrasound technician glided a magic wand over my swollen belly. She had just told me I was having a boy.

I crumbled.

What in the world would I do with a boy?!? I had girl clothes. Girl toys. I knew how to raise girls, at least up to the second grade. A boy would be new. Challenging. Grubby. Stinky. Terrifyingly, undeniably, different.

You see, I have little problem with change. Ask my mother and she’ll happily tell you about the time I locked myself in the Cadillac to prevent it from being traded in. I was a three year old dictator, straddling the center console like a magnificent empress, keys clutched resolutely in my chubby fists. No one – no one – was giving away my car.

Over thirty years later, in that vulnerable, you have no control over the life growing in your belly moment, it was made very clear to me that I had not moved past the fear of something other than what I already knew.

I wouldn’t possibly be able to raise a boy. I would be hopelessly lost in snips, snails and puppy dogs’ tails. My husband kindly reminded me that he had done quite well raising our two girls and, surely, I would do fine when the tables turned. But still, I sank into a deep depression that lasted several weeks. I couldn’t talk about having a boy. I couldn’t think about names. I couldn’t look at other little boys without cringing in fear and self doubt, and I couldn’t look at friends who were expecting girls with anything less than envy. I railed at God: “How dare you give me a gift that I don’t want to open?!?”.

If there is one thing I have learned in my fledgling prayer life, it’s that God answers our questions in a time frame that he knows is better than our initial understanding. My son was born in late October, about a month before the start of the Advent season. I see God’s wisdom in that now as clearly as the first time I saw my newborn son’s face. As we prepared for our first Christmas as a family of five, the meaning of Christ’s incarnation became fully incarnate in my heart.

Mary had a son. I had a son. She nursed him, held him, slept with him on her chest. She traced the lines of his face, counted fingers and toes. She did all that I was doing – changing diapers, singing lullabies – with a boy. A fully human boy, a fully divine man who would sacrifice his life for the eternal salvation of the human race. And yet I, who would never know the magnitude of suffering and joy in her blessed heart, had been afraid.

My son is 15 months now. His second Christmas has come and gone, and we are about one week into his second holy season of Lent. The baby boy I was so afraid of has filled my heart with more joy, laughter and contentment than I could have imagined. With each milestone I find myself reflecting on Mary and her little boy: the hesitant joy when Jesus started crawling (hooray for Nazarean baby proofing!); the constant retrieval of rocks and dirt from that holy little mouth; the wound to a mother’s heart with each skinned chubby knee. How many seemingly endless games of peekaboo? How many sleepless nights? How many garbled toddler words?

We know so very little about Jesus as a child, but we can surmise that, since he was both fully human and fully divine, the Holy Family must have had the same experiences as every other human family. And while I inherently understood that Jesus would have gone through all of these stages, God knew I would not have appreciated the reality of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross if I had not had my own baby boy. His presence in my life has made real the true presence, the true meaning of God made man. And as my little man’s babyhood slips faster and faster into the hands of time, I thank God for the gift he knew I needed so much more than I ever did.

Like Mary, I treasure all these things, and ponder them in my heart.