Mother of Sorrows (Part 1): Asking for It

For more than a decade, I have desired and believed motherhood to be my vocation. I felt very strongly called to it my final year in undergraduate, and since then, have collected books, toys, educational items, and even clothing for the children I wanted so badly. I jotted down homeschooling ideas, researched homebirth, and read books on conception, fertility, and baby and child care all before I was ever pregnant with my first child.

I was married for five years before having Lizzy, and for much of that time, I believed I was infertile because month after month, I perpetually did not conceive. When Lizzy was conceived, I had nearly given up on being able to get pregnant naturally. In every way, she was a miracle child. She came to be with me at a time when I needed and wanted her most, and her conception was a complete surprise.

Lizzy’s birth was not easy. I had six days of prodromal labor, followed by 24 hours of early and active labor. Even though it was an unmedicated homebirth, I needed IVs because I could not keep down any food or water, and I was exhausted and physically depleted. I pushed her out all at once and hemorrhaged immediately.

Several weeks after Lizzy was born, I remember waking up from a very vivid nightmare about my death. It was one of those dreams in which the emotion you feel is so real that it stays with you once you wake up. It was so real that I can still feel the fear from that dream today. But when I first dreamed it, I turned to my husband, and crying, told him about the dream and the fear. His response was that, in giving birth, I had personally come closer to experiencing death than at any other time in my life, even though, in previous years, I had watched two people close to me die from cancer and my beloved grandfather die. In other words, it made sense to my husband that I would now fear death in a way that I hadn’t before. Birth had brought me closer to death.

Nothing, however, could prepare me for Lizzy’s death.

In the span of a month, I buried one daughter and gave birth to another. For weeks, I have felt my heart and my mind pulled in desperately opposite directions, in mourning one deeply beloved daughter and nurturing the fragile life of a second daughter. And in this time, I have feared, doubted, and questioned my vocation as mother.

For although I still deeply crave motherhood more than any other vocation and although I still want more children (as many as God is willing to give me at my age), I am now asking if I was truly meant to be a mother, if being a better mother could have kept Lizzy alive, and if I can surrender Cecilia to this world, as full of terror, darkness, and uncertainty as it is. Can I bring more children into a world that can take them from me in a matter of seconds or hours?

I am not sure now that I can surrender to this terror. But I am sure that being a mother requires me to live on a knife’s edge between life and death. With Cecilia, motherhood is no longer a choice that lies before me, but a reality. With future children, it is still a choice.

As mothers, we live inside that fine line between life and death. The process of life, and sometimes death, takes place within our very bodies. Our bodies and our lives are the gateway through which human life is perpetuated. Our blood is the means by which life deeply roots itself and grows–or alternately, by which it fails to grow, as in a miscarriage or stillbirth. Pregnancy, miscarriage, stillbirth–these things take place inside our bodies, by using our blood. We contain this red door to life and death within ourselves.

My first midwife told me that becoming a mother is learning to walk around with your heart forever outside of you. I had little knowledge at the time of how true that would become, how deeply my heart, soul, and body would answer to the rhythms of Lizzy’s breath, her laughter, her movements. And deeper–how involuntary this is. I have no more control over how much I love Lizzy than I have control over my own unconscious breathing.

So not only do we live closer to life and death as mothers, but an unconditional and irresistible surrender of everything that makes us human is required once we give birth. We simply love and give more deeply because motherhood requires every aspect of our bodies, minds, and souls. It requires nothing less than everything that we have to give. And for most of us, the desire to give it is as helpless as the desperate love for a being that was within us and is now perpetually other than us–but still ours indelibly.

So, isn’t the logical conclusion here that in choosing motherhood as my vocation, I am by extension choosing a life that naturally lives closer to life and death? Am I risking a greater level of love and intimacy, and therefore a greater level of potential suffering? In other words, in choosing to be a mother, am I just asking for it?