25
Growing Something New

I read all the books about how to be a good pregnant woman when I got pregnant with Annie. What to Expect When You’re Expecting. What to Expect the First Year. Reflections on Motherhood. All kinds of books. I signed up for the online calendar and paid special attention to the size of fruit the baby was in my womb each week. I’d take an avocado, an orange, or a mango in my hand and I would study it. My baby is a little tiny ball of avocado this week. She is a furry mango.

Then I would eat her.

It weirded me out the way that communion weirds me out. You take that little wafer and rub it between your fingers thinking of all the things Jesus did for you and then you eat Him. And that’s what I did each week with Annie.

I studied a mango and then I ate it. An avocado and I ate it. A banana. A melon. A pineapple. And each time I took a bite of fruit, I felt a twinge of guilt.

Why would they tell me my baby is a fruit that I would later crave and want to eat?

During those nights my thoughts ran rampant. My dreams were nightmarish roller coasters of the best- and worst-case scenarios for my labor and my little girl. Growing something new was impossibly, emotionally complicated. And by the end of it all I was worried that I was going to be a cannibal and eat my newborn—or at the very least, not have enough courage to birth her into the world and just make her stay inside of me.

Being pregnant was as close to being insane as I’ve ever been.

Giving up hot baths was the hardest part of pregnancy. No, giving up wine was. No, giving up sleeping on my belly. It’s all a toss-up.

Being pregnant is a constant journey of giving up, and giving up, and throwing up, and then giving up some more. The entire process is all about making you less selfish. Showing you how to uncurl your tightly held grip on the rights to your own life.

Becoming something new always requires the burying of one’s selfishness.

The giving up of scalding hot baths, wine, sleeping on your belly, sleeping at all for that matter? Welcome to the most revealing season of your life: the season of letting go. You literally get to stare your own selfishness in the face every single day.

Becoming a parent is the most humbling, selfless experiment in the world. There is something in us that fiercely loves and protects our babies in a way no one else ever will. And yet while we are fighting for those babies with all we have, to give them everything we have, we are also fighting our own selfishness. Sometimes I look at my daughter and sense myself beginning to begrudge the fact that I am sacrificing so much in order to love her in the way that I am compelled to love her. It is a strange battle within me. Parenthood, for me, is a perpetual journey in relinquishing my own rights in order that someone else might grow and flourish. Parenthood is sacrifice, compromise, and letting go. It is the process of becoming unselfish, even if you never had a clue you were selfish in the first place.

And pregnancy gives you the first small glimpse of what parenting is all about. It’s the wake-up call. You feel the flutter and kick of that sweet baby in your womb. You will sing to her or read to him or dream out loud or pray over your belly and you will be deliriously in love with this little thing inside you that swims around like a tadpole.

Then, in the very next breath you will curse the child and decide that you WILL drink a glass of wine and you will have coffee and you will take a hot bath and you will eat deli meat because it’s your life and you want it all back now.

For me, to be a mother is to be as near to the heart of Paul in Romans 7 as humanly possible: I do what I do not want to do and I find it hard to do that which my spirit says I should do. We battle ourselves. I battle myself. When it comes to being free, I am my own worst enemy. I wrestle with Christ and come up selfish and bitter and unable to do what my innate nature longs to do. But then, with His very breath breathed into me, I am capable. I am beautifully awakened to selflessness; I possess a depth of love like I have never known. It’s what being a parent is all about. Dying to self. Letting go of hot baths to create a little person made in the image of Christ Himself. One day the hot baths will come back and the person who gets into that bathtub will no longer be a selfish girl but a woman who knows the pain and sacrifice of letting something grow and become.

That’s the thing with waiting. The whole growing-something-new business requires pain and sacrifice. The becoming happens as we learn to let go, and let go, and let go.

Waiting is a season marked by the unknown. Curiosity abounds. Excitement fights to shine through. Fear and self-doubt dominate—the kind of self-doubt that hits you over the head at the beginning of puberty, leaving you rattled and insecure, lost and overwhelmed. The possibility of giving birth to a new person is both terrifying and exhilarating. And you realize waiting is not just an exercise for the sake of learning patience; waiting is for the sake of letting something grow. Learning patience along the way is simply a bonus. We wait because new life requires time to grow. We wait because there is a bigger issue at hand than just What will I do next? but rather, Who will I be when I finally get there? Or, as author Frederick Schmidt says, “Who am I before God and what am I becoming?”1

During the season of waiting it became clear to me that I was just an incubator for something growing inside of me. Maybe we’re all little incubators. I spent months seeing so many things pregnant with life that it became a type of scavenger hunt to see what I might find next. I could nearly always tell if a woman was pregnant, whether she had told anyone or not. My intuition for spotting the growth of new life was uncanny. Outside our apartment window a bird made a nest and laid four eggs. This only became humorous after I had the lightbulb moment that I myself was nesting something in my soul. Annie and I went searching for other birds’ nests because I found it rather strange that a bird would camp out by my bedroom window to have babies. We didn’t find a single nest in our whole apartment complex. And night after night I would dream about being pregnant and wake up hoping the darn birds had hatched already—as if their hatching would be the gateway to mine.

My husband was really worried the birds would hatch and then be eaten by a dog or thrown around by a neighbor kid. He would always say, “Jen, you know a lot of birds don’t make it after they’re born. I just want you to be prepared for that. If these birds die, that doesn’t mean you are going to give birth to something that dies too. It just means, well, you know, birds die.”

My world became inundated with writings, people, Scripture, movies, even critters who were pregnant with the new but not yet laboring. It was as if God were out to prove some master lesson that all things must endure being nine months pregnant before laboring and giving birth to something new.

My soul was nine months pregnant. My life was nine months pregnant. My future was nine months pregnant. Waiting for labor to begin, and becoming a little less selfish along the way. Anticipating. Waiting to give life to something new.