X wasn’t alone inside her own body. It was a slow and deliberate process, beset by fertility challenges, hormonal balancing, so much cycle tracking, tears, and then finally a comically clear ‘pregnant’ reading on a digital pregnancy test.
She was surprised now at how normal it all felt, how completely simple and easy it unfolded once the whole thing was set into motion. Her body and cells just…did. No amount of input from her, no amount of mental strain, would produce any sort of variable response. This was between her biology and the baby’s; together they consorted to generate new life. She was a mere…conduit.
There was something incredibly liberating in the degree to which she had to surrender to the process. The miracle that was taking place inside her could not be controlled by her, aside from taking certain safety precautions. But whether or not she spent countless hours strewing over if he would have his father’s ruminating mind or inherit her sensitivity was ultimately a moot point; he would be who he was.
She felt very much that he did not belong to her; that he was her child yes, but that the two were co-conspirators more than anything else; that their souls were in agreement with one another to share this incarnation with each other as mother and son. There was a part of the whole thing effected and determined by past lives and cosmic scheming that she was only privy to in her deepest phases of meditation, and even still it was but a faint outline. Her spirituality was deeply rooted in the idea that the soul chooses; it chooses its experience on earth, chooses its name, height, and personality; chooses what lessons its set to learn; pushes itself back through the birth canal to begin again. Knowing this, she had a reverence for this future baby – respected it as the intentional cosmic being that it was.
In The Prophet, Khalil Gibran posits:
“Your children are not your children.
They are sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you.
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the make upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness.
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He also loves the bow that is stable.”
She settled this quote within her notion of truth as soon as she read it, years before considering the endeavor for herself. We are all the product of ‘life’s longing for itself,’ what an irresistible idea. For years, spiritual readers of all sorts had told her: “You have a son, it’s the same son you have in every lifetime. He’s above you now but he’s not ready to come down.” So she had spent quite some time getting used to the idea of this someone floating in the ether of infinite forever around her.
Growing up she had always imagined she would have a daughter, mostly because she was the only child of a single mother. Mother-daughter relationships were really all she intimately knew. It took some adjusting to come round to the idea that she could mother a son, that she would, in fact, make a wonderful mother to a son.
Over the years she would talk to this future soul-son. She would tell him about earth, about life, about what a wonderful mess it was to be alive; not to be afraid of the pain that is inherent in being human, because it’s the pain that makes us human, it’s the pain that means we’re alive and that we care about things. She taught him about patience and love and about the people who would be a part of his family once he chose to come down. She told him all the things she would be for him and all the ways she would inevitably disappoint him, because our parents are the first karma we inherit and represent the force we must push against in order to establish our own identities. She told him that she would love and support him no matter what, but would he please try not to be a Republican?
By the time he was actually a ball of cells amassing form and function inside her she felt a part of her intimately knew him. The baby that came out would be a stranger, the soul inside him would be an old friend. She had immense trust in him, trust in herself to expand into this new identity of mother. She was excited to make it her own, to unravel and fall to pieces inside it and then fold herself together into something new and somewhat foreign; to have the past suddenly take on an unrecognizable hue as her life before motherhood blurred into an impossibility from this new vantage point.
Besides, where else was there to go? This was what was next for her. Not because society deemed it appropriate, necessarily, but because she was curious to twist open the next level of the nesting doll; to see who else she really was.
Making a child was damn other worldly. She loved being pregnant. She loved taking up more space, to be both passenger and captain of destiny. She loved placing her full faith in basic biology. She loved playing host to the wildest of all acts of nature; loved that no amount of science, medicine, or advances in technology held a candle to what her body was accomplishing. All of societies tools, all of its gadgets, gizmos, institutions, Ivy Leagues, closed door secret meetings, hierarchies, wars, legions, borders, laws, honors, awards, privileges; its history, languages, laboratories, degrees, op-eds, and elections – they figured no real way around basic biology. All of human life has its origins inside the body of a woman, and no amount of invention or innovation on the part of man could match that power.
No wonder he feared her so; no wonder all the chaos.