An annunciation, of sorts Is she or isn't she?
McGowan, Jo
JO McGOWAH AN AMtftf MeiATiOli, OF SORTS Where faith & fear collide Three times in the past two years I have been almost certain I was pregnant. Whether this says more about passion or...
...with all the practiced ease of an old married couple...
...But he couldn't really imagine what it was like, couldn't really understand how an idea can lodge in the mind and never not be there, how every waking thought can somehow be traced to the possibility of a new life poised to take over, of one's womb being occupied again...
...Before I was aware of pregnancy being a possibility, I had had several glasses of wine, taken a painkiller for a back problem, and, worst of all, had had a mammogram...
...All three times, in between the obsessive figuring and refiguring of dates, I imagined in detail just how my world would change...
...Where indeed...
...It is part of being a woman, in some ways more intensely spiritual than the actual fact of being pregnant...
...Oh, my husband was there with me, especially the first, most dramatic time when I even had a pregnancy test and we wandered around the bazaar for the two hours we had to wait for the result (no instant tests in Dehra Doon), veering sharply from the mundane ("Do we need bread...
...Detail: I could actually feel the swoops and glidings of the baby in the seventh month...
...Commonweal 7 December 21,2001...
...My husband, as usual, was full of serene composure...
...I rescheduled all my plans in the light of this stranger...
...I waited for ten days with far more than my usual anxiety...
...It is that period before certainty, when the mind keeps darting between the two possibilities—each one so full of itself, each one so absolute—that allows, or forces, so much truth-telling and clarity, such a heightened sense of what is important and what is not...
...Where's your faith...
...The idea that I could still emerge with a normal, healthy baby was just one of the options I couldn't take seriously...
...Because once it is one or the other, the rationalizations begin, the accommodating, the acceptance...
...Whether this says more about passion or carelessness, I don't want to speculate on here...
...I felt once more the sweet negligible weight of a newborn head on my shoulder, noted the almost imperceptible relaxation as he dropped into sleep like a small pebble sinking in a well, practiced again the deft art of transferring him from shoulder to cradle without disturbing his rest...
...to the eternal ("What if I am...
...The fact is, however, that faith is no protection against disability or any other kind of suffering...
...But the recognition of my anxiety has brought me up short...
...In my mind, the trip to Bombay was postponed, the furniture in the children's rooms provisionally rearranged, depending on whether we got a girl or a boy, and the independence I had looked forward to enjoying eventually postponed by another eighteen years...
...Now that I know that I am not pregnant, I can afford to be expansive and accept the truth of what my husband said...
...Look at Lucy [my youngest sister, born when my mother was forty-four...
...Which roughly translates as, "Whatever God does, he does for our benefit...
...But my husband had an answer for that, too, although it was in Hindi: "Jo Bhagwan karte hai, bhalla ke liye karte hai...
...The strange and starkly outlined world I then inhabited seemed full of chasms, deep and yawning and just waiting for me to step into them...
...He was there whenever I needed to talk, listening to my fears and doubts, reassuring, encouraging, and helping me to think it all through...
...It is a world only women can imagine...
...It's all very well to speak of faith when it isn't being tested...
...I practiced my breathing exercises and shook my head as I remembered pushing my last child out with "never again" playing over and over in my mind...
...The other was that this could be yet another false alarm...
...The work I had thought to spread out over a year would now have to be compressed into the eight months I had left...
...The fact is that at the age of forty-three, with as large a family as my husband and I "think" we can handle, I still found myself—three times in two years!—in that surreal, supercharged world of the possibly pregnant...
...Had things turned out differently, I wonder how well I would have done at accepting God's plan for me this time...
...And each time I was freshly surprised by my mixed feelings at the news...
...And I was forty-three years old...
...On all three occasions, however, it turned out I was wrong...
...The baby could be perfectly normal," he pointed out...
...But it was the most recent drama which was the most distressing...
...It is difficult, then, to trust one's perceptions, burdened as they are with the effort either of continuing life as it was or welcoming a new one...
...Once the thing has been established as a reality, one has no choice but to adjust to it...
...At the time, it didn't help much...
...Or Mary [the smartest one in our family, during whose first trimester my mother had German measles...
...Somehow, in the eye of the storm, only the most extreme outcomes seemed likely...
Vol. 128 • December 2001 • No. 22
