Babies are a Blessing and a Burden

Babies are a blessing and a burden. I feel like a heretic writing that sentence because I grew up in a faith tradition that overemphasized the blessing aspect. Babies completed a woman. Motherhood was God’s highest calling for a woman. There was no space to hold the weight of motherhood without adding an appendage of but what a blessing from God! And God forbid we ever call pregnancy and motherhood a burden.

When I found out I was pregnant with my fifth baby, sitting on a toilet holding a rapid test in my hand, where the line showed up faster than my emotions could accept it, I said the F word multiple times. This baby wasn’t planned, and I wasn’t ready to accept it. So I was sad and angry. For a full month.

My youngest daughter is 7, and I have been out of the diaper and napping stage for years. I love the independence my girls have now, and subsequently the freedom I’ve had to branch out more and pursue my own interests. I got divorced three years ago and didn’t know what life would bring me but mostly assumed I was done having babies. I remarried this past May, and when I began seriously dating my husband, we had a conversation about if we would have children together. It began with, “Let’s get a vasectomy because we already have a lot of kids.” (He has one, I have four.) For a month that was the plan, until one day he came to me and said, “I was thinking about it, and I don’t think I should get a vasectomy yet.” I looked at him and told him that earlier that day I had felt convicted in the same way.

So, our plan was to wait on a vasectomy, to get married, and to have the conversation a year after getting married about if we wanted to have any more children. I made a lot of plans for that year. I planned to write a book, to join a dance class, to travel, to run a half marathon, to enjoy my first year of marriage without being sick or round with pregnancy. And then the second line showed up on the pregnancy test… a honeymoon baby.

So I wasn’t happy at first. I raged against the fact that I had to carry all of the weight of pregnancy. That a woman carries all of the responsibility for bringing a child into the world. That for nine months, our bodies become a home to another, and we must grow and stretch and sacrifice and shift to accommodate. I know the miracle in all of it. I have stared at the swelling of my stomach and felt the kicks and held my newborn baby and have wondered in awe at how my body did this.

But understanding the miracle doesn’t negate the burden. It is in holding the “both-and,” in accepting the nuance and complexity, that we fully experience life.

The first four times I was pregnant, I only felt the miracle. But this time, I allowed myself to feel the burden. And it made me feel guilty. Because women haven’t been allowed to acknowledge the burden.

For millennia, carrying babies has been a burden to women. Pregnancy is risky, especially in the ancient world and still in some parts of the world today. Pregnancy often meant the death of the mother or held with it the fear of losing the child. It meant another mouth to feed when there were already so many. It meant birthing a child while war raged all around. Women carried the weight of bearing a boy and were sometimes neglected if they only brought forth girls. And while today, many of these are not so burdensome, nevertheless, the woman still carries the weight of bringing children into the world.

This time, I let myself feel the sadness and the anger. The burden. I let it fully sit and swirl in my body, in my soul, until I was ready to pass it. And around 20 weeks, I was able to lay down these feelings. Now, mostly I feel excitement and joy. But I know my situation is so much easier than many. I have a loving partner, a home, a supporting income, and a body that handles pregnancy fairly well. For some, the burden is so much heavier.

Can we learn to sit with women in all of their feelings? To allow them all? May we rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. To hold the paradox of life and know that all things hold complexity. I think it starts with our own selves. Allowing my own self to feel the full array of emotions, not just the ones that society and subcultures have deemed as acceptable.

I think about Psalm 139—verses we as Christians so regularly quote when talking about the blessing of babies: “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” These verses apply to me as well. They apply to all mothers. We are wonderfully made, to the innermost parts of ourselves. Our feelings, of joy and sadness, of excitement and anger… all were created with intention, and all are welcome. We must allow ourselves to enter fully into the darkness of our souls to be reborn into the bright and glorious light.