December 25 fell on a Sunday that year
Our new church closed the nursery
So the whole family might celebrate together
In one room
I held my daughter
Born five months earlier
In the cool wee hours of a hot Midland summer
Missing 8/8/88 by less than a week
Rainbow arcing across her first afternoon
Heavy in my nineteen-year-old arms
As we sang songs of birth
Sucking on my little finger
Offered for comfort and quiet
Though that morning no one minded
Cries of need or excitement
From young throats
Invited for once to participate in worship
Wide eyes dazzled by jewel-toned sunlight
Or scrunched in loud distress
At the overwhelmingness of life
For the first time, as never before
I knew how it felt
To carry a stranger in my belly
Unplanned and alone
Expectations for a predictable life overturned
To be at once one and two
Mammalian and miraculous
A new self unseen but obvious
Twisting and tumbling within my rounded flesh
Loved with yearning blindness
And ferocious passion
To be squeezed by surging waves
Crushed and drowning
Thrashing in useless resistance
Until I learned how to surrender
And let the pain accomplish its purpose
To gape in shocked amazement
At thick long eyelashes fringing midnight irises
Looking back in equal astonishment
Blinking in wonder
At the strangeness of the world
To hold my child
Arms awkward and unskilled
Learning each moment
(Day, week, month, year)
How to do this task entrusted to me
Receiving abundant support and acceptance
Unlooked-for and desperately welcome
Once resolved to face the cold alone
Now wrapped in warmth
I held my firstborn
In the Sanctuary
On Christmas morning
And considered with new and vivid empathy
How Mary felt
Pregnant with the divineThe universe revolving around her womb
