Promised Land

I sat in Planned Parenthood awaiting a pregnancy test I knew would be negative.  I couldn’t have children.  Endometriosis.  A gnawing disorder that scars a woman’s insides, making conception impossible for some; for me.  I can’t say I was heartbroken.  It was a get-out-of-jail-free card for my reckless lifestyle. 

The nurse came back to the tiny cubicle to emotionlessly deliver the news that I was, in fact, pregnant.  Staring at the long, tawdry curtains, I sank quietly and deeply into shock.  The room felt like a coffin when I realized just how pregnant I had to be.  Sixteen weeks?  The air around me was dream-like hazy. My future unfolding before me like origami and I didn’t know how to contort myself into the shape of a mother. 

“There are options you know.  You don’t exactly seem prepared” the young nurse snapped as she toyed with the bell of her stethoscope.  Underprepared was an understatement.  It felt like time travel to be incapable of conceiving and then moments later to be 4 months pregnant. Time is what I needed to digest the flood of information that was untethering me.

I was confident in my ability to meet the physical needs of a baby: holding and rocking, feeding, and bathing - that was the easy part.  What did I know of an emotionally evolving creature looking to me for its everything?   Questions and doubts surfaced like vomit in my throat.  I knew I needed to get far from this nurse who was trying to steal the seed within me.

The busyness of a University hospital had a wait time of weeks for an initial appointment with an obstetrician. I didn’t know whether my baby was healthy and surely drowned myself in guilt for lack of prenatal care.  But how could I have known? There was no mark of time that my body hadn’t robbed.  Endometriosis stole my cycle from time to time. It was my normal, this free-float in space and time. I was like a child in the womb myself. Unaware of the world around me while I hid myself in the dark just trying to survive.

I waited weeks to find out if my baby was whole and how far along I truly was.  Through the magic of that sonogram wand, those sound waves located a perfectly formed 20-week-old child. I had to move back to Ohio, to the family I knew could stand with me as a single mother. It was that move that saved my child’s life. The renowned Michigan hospital missed the dilation I was informed of a week later when my new doctor received my medical files.  I received an urgent call telling me to head to the specialty unit with my bags packed. At 21 weeks, my ever-growing child was channeling my restlessness and trying to emerge too soon.  Four centimeters dilated and one surgery later, I was confined to bed rest.  Legs up 45 degrees, no steps or lifting, and should only get up to use the bathroom.  All the years I busied myself trying to avoid this very bed of isolation, betrayed me. 

This baby was lying on my aorta bursting my heart alive into fits of beating I thought for sure would explode me.  Minerals bottomed out and they added one more pill to swallow.  My body was keeping this baby alive at the cost of my own.  I lay from cell cluster to the amazing universe and physiology of X and Y, DNA, organs, blood and breath, he was boy.  I cried out for a god to meet me.  As eye spots emerged, fingernails formed, and 10 tiny toes came forth, my identity was changing, too.  I softened.  I listened to those quiet invitations to vulnerability and unraveled the cobwebbed lies.  This parched and captive land I had been wandering was nearing someplace beautiful, I could feel it.

I prayed for God to name him.  To reveal this unknown universe of a man.  In a dream I found my son, he was called Israel – “my people.”  I had never belonged anywhere before, and suddenly God himself was extending his promises to me and my fatherless son.  I was a daughter, suckling on my many-breasted God.  His love healed all my parched and dying lands, and I was guaranteed a promise of my own.  As I flowed with milk and honey, I held my miracle boy in sweat-soaked arms and let love’s sweet fire refine me from broken to re-born.   

Like everything holy, it was everything but easy. I stayed with family until my body was strong enough to find work. I cleaned houses so that I could always have my son near and soon enough we found an apartment in the woods. Israel and I had everything we needed. We had long walks along our pond, catching kaydids in glass jars, and the backbone of a faith that took my inadequacies and gave me internal worth. I had purpose and intention, and an endless well of love that would never again run dry -  because of Israel, my Promised Land.