Waiting

I have been hiding from everyone lately. There is too much world in me right now for me to face the rest of the world "out there."

The end of pregnancy always is a difficult time: the intense discomfort, the insane emotions, the impatient anticipation.
My first was nine days late when we lived in Texas. That summer had, at the time, a record-breaking streak of 100+ degree days. It was not fun. For the last two weeks or so, I was angry and miserable and cried a lot, until one day I holed up in my house (which also included my best friend's apartment directly below) and refused to talk to anyone but her and my husband. Baby was born the next morning.
With my second, we had moved less than three months earlier. I was very alone, and very anxious that the baby would not come before everyone else arrived. He was just one day late, born on the Feast of St Joseph, who has been my aid in some of the darkest hours of my life. Greeting this son, whose pregnancy had come with such an intense mixture of emotions, changed my life forever. God and nature know best, right?
But I never knew it could be this hard. I have never experienced anything THIS hard. Such a constant, insistent reminder that we are bodily creatures and, try as we might, we can never control our bodies without artificial and often harsh, cruel interventions.
When we agree to co-operate with nature, we will, more often than not, find ourselves at her mercy, and she is not always a gentle mistress.
It is here, then, that those who profess or desire to be of the faith must wrestle, minute to minute, with the fact that we live in a creation that is broken by sin.
That even if we do everything "right", things still can go wrong and be hard and ugly.
That nature is impersonal.
That, to make the choice to live for others is irrevocable--unless one causes even more violence.
I cannot leave my family, this family that is a direct result of my choices and co-operation, without incalculable injury to the other members of it. I am not my own.
I cannot undecide to have this baby now without taking a life or doing unnatural things to my body.
I am responsible for the happiness, health, and well-being of others.
I chose to live a life that is not about me, and that choice is the guiding principle of every other decision in my life. It is my measuring rod.
It is not easy. It is hard, and receives so very little understanding or support from anywhere else in the world.
It is not meant to. I did not make this choice to be featured on a cover story or be named woman of the year. Seems these days, anyway, the woman of the year is any female who most belittles womanhood.
Sometimes it seems to myself, even, that I am a prisoner of my body, this heavy unwieldy nigh-unbearable body. But we all are . . . those who rebel against theirs no less than those who embrace theirs. We cannot escape being composite creatures.
So I offer up my body, continue in this daily struggle against succumbing to self, because this I do know: that those who choose themselves, ultimately end up with nothing but . . . themselves. and one is a lonely number.