"Advent"
by Kathleen Norris

They are fruit and transport: ripening melons, prairie schooners journeying  under full sail. Susan worries that her water will break on the subway. New York is full of grandmothers; someone will take care of her. Kate has been ordered to bed. A Wyoming wind like wild horses brushes snow against her window. Charlotte feels like a ripe papaya. "The body's such a humble thing," she says, afloat in her kitchen in Honolulu, unable to see her feet.

Pregnant women stand like sentinels, they protect me while I sleep. They part the sea and pass down the bloody length of it until we are strangers ready to be born, strangers who will suffer and die. They are home and exile, beginning and end, end and means. I am more ordinary. Still, I listen as the holy wind breathes through them. I make a little song in praise of bringing forth.

When I was 15 years old, I announced to my mother that I wanted to have a dozen children and a wealthy husband to support all of us. She was a little surprised. She suggested that I have one at a time and see how it went. She also suggested that I wait a few years to get started on this project. I’m sure my declaration contributed to the growing population of gray hairs at my mother’s temples. But the older I got, the more I learned about over-population, living expenses, and rich men. What I see in that youthful ambition was my desire to contribute to the world, to leave something (or some people) behind that would always remember me. Even today, when I think about pregnancy, I think about legacy. Pregnant women represent for me all that is holy and powerful about creation.

Though I long at times to be a mother, I am overwhelmed at the responsibility such honor brings with it. How can I be entrusted with another human life? And yet, women who never thought of themselves as responsible, dependable, trustworthy, or maternal give birth. They raise children as if this were the most ordinary thing in the world.

But how can new life be ordinary? Every time we are injured or sick, our bodies demonstrate the enormous power that life has, flowing through our bodies, sometimes contained in blood vessels, sometimes swelling and breaking forth in hemorrhages and bruises. This life force in all of us cannot be withheld or kept at bay except by opposing life forces. The tenacity of a virus infecting every available cell space demonstrates this more vividly than any other example: here is a form of life that perpetuates itself only to kill off the form of life on which it depends.

In the end, just like viruses, we live to die. But in the meantime, we work to create something that will live on after we die. Every invention—from the Salk vaccine to pasteurized milk—points to the human need to be remembered, to leave a part of ourselves behind. Medical technology represents our effort to elude even physical death. Mortality is the enemy doctors fight daily in ERs and clinics.

As a society, we’ve found so many ways to ward off aging and death: open-heart surgery, organ transplants, chemotherapy, insulin shots, penicillin, cold cream, hair coloring. Another way of defying mortality becomes obvious when we look at the number of offspring we as a species produce. According to the UN, the population of the world will reach 6 billion people later this year. For those of us who have trouble imagining a billion of anything, this means that in the US alone, 210,639 babies are born every day. That’s 8,776 each hour and 146 each minute. Humans will go to great lengths to leave their own children behind. Because almost anyone can have children (they are not a commodity limited by class or race), we use technology to have children in spite of Nature’s indication that we cannot bear them the traditional way. All in an effort to reach toward immortality.
 
 

In 1997, I celebrated the fourth Sunday of Advent in the usual way: by attending 8:30 worship at Augustana Lutheran Church of Hyde Park. What was unusual about this Sunday was the art on the bulletin cover. Instead of the usual liturgical scene, the words of "Advent" by Kathleen Norris met my inquisitive stare. I read the poem over and over, knowing it was appropriate at this time of year but feeling somehow exposed. All through Advent, our expectations grow for the coming of Christ, the Light of the World. But very rarely are we reminded of Mary, the young woman whose body grew larger and larger in the months preceding Christ’s birth. Very rarely are we asked to consider her role in bringing forth the savior of the world, the Messiah. Mary shares the creative power of pregnancy and birth with billions of women through history. But in Mary, we see two of the most awe-full forces known to man coming together: divine creative power and female procreative power. As Norris’s poem suggests, women share power with the Divine Creator when they incubate a child in the womb.

The biological drive in women to bring forth their own children is very strong. When a woman discovers that she cannot carry a child in her own womb, she is devastated. She hears the death knell tolling for her already: infertility is a terminal disease. If she cannot procreate, then she cannot live on through her children. Mortality has won. She loses the chance to leave her genetic offspring behind. In a way, she loses the chance to be remembered.

When the gloom of this realization passes—if it passes—a woman might look for alternatives: in vitro fertilization, surrogate mothers, fertility drugs, and—soon—cloning. Tracy attempted in vitro fertilization three times; each attempt cost her $10,000. She now has two adopted children, neither of which looks anything like her. Jessica chose a surrogate mother out of a notebook full of profiles. She paid the woman’s medical expenses plus $15,000. So acute was her need to engage in the ritual of pregnancy that she wore a prosthetic abdomen while her child grew in another woman’s womb. Jessica was present at the birth of her child, but she did not feel the contractions. Her pain was of a different sort.

Maria took Perganol, the fertility drug prescribed by her OB/GYN, to fulfill God’s commandment "to be fruitful and multiply." But when five embryos embedded themselves into her uterine wall, she would not hear of "selective reduction" to improve the chances of survival for even one. She declared that God’s will was for life, never for death. Four months later, she miscarried three of the five in a bloody mess that sent her to the ER and threatened the two lives remaining in her womb.

In ten years, Amy will choose to clone herself. Amy’s medical career will be well-established, her student loans paid off. She never found time to trouble with dating, let alone marriage. But she responds to an impulse deep within her that needs to carry on, to be remembered in a way that her thousands and thousands of hours spent caring for patients will not be. She decides to enlist in a study being conducted by a nearby medical school. Her baby will be studied nearly every day of its concealed life, but to a doctor, what better way to appreciate the mystery and awe of development in the womb? As a general practitioner, she sees the clues to life daily, and now this indication of her own life—her own ongoing life—is all the more miraculous.

Women cherish this time when they have the most in common with the Divine Creator. At what other time in our lives can we feel equally powerful and vulnerable? We seek this paradox because of two influences: Nature and Nurture. Our society ingratiates in our minds that a successful woman is, first, a mother. And our bodies cycle each month, cued by fluctuations in estrogen and progesterone levels, in preparation—in hope—that this will be the month to begin traveling the road to immortality.

Only once have I begun that journey. It ended quickly, almost quietly, in the same way that I know I’ve missed the chance every month, but with a reminder of the life that courses through my veins: blood. Another paradox, blood carries life-giving oxygen to every cell in my body, but when it spills out of me, it portends death.

I will likely choose to begin that journey again, despite the abrupt ending of an unintentional first attempt, despite my fear, despite the paradox of power and vulnerability I will likely encounter. This possibility haunts me: to have a child of my own, to grow over nine months into some contortion of my former self. But what a beautiful distortion it would be. How magnificent to experience such power within me, and then to watch the fruit of my womb grow over her lifetime into her own person! No wonder parenting is one of life’s greatest joys, but also one of its greatest challenges: no one is worthy, yet most women are called. No wonder my mother looked shocked. Could I withstand a dozen times the power she had experienced while bringing forth both my brother and me? My song cannot yet do justice to glory of bringing forth. First, I must answer the call and begin the journey.

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