mama monday: guts

If you haven't acquainted yourself with the phenomenal site I Heart Guts take a moment or two to check out a few profiled organs.  I love any initiative that takes regular objects and animates them.  Like Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.



In keeping with the mama theme of Mondays, and the patience/hope required along the way to pregnancy, I've been thinking a fair bit about guts.  All those internal bits of us that (usually) feel nothing and (seemingly) do nothing.  They're just...inside.  Like the guts of a computer or a car.  Few understand how they operate and even fewer know how to fix them if something is amiss.

When I had a kidney infection, and because I had never before experienced the particular surprise associated with a kidney infection, I couldn't figure out what was wrong.  I'm not hungry...I guess I have a stomachache?...sort of a side cramp...but in my back...OK, now I need to assume the fetal position to keep the pain at bay...and now we're at the hospital and they're administering morphine and antibiotics and it's all over.  That was weird.

A scrap or cut or bruise is obvious, and the pain is acute.  Internally, things tend to work out on their own or send you muted, cryptic messages until a specialist is able to translate for you.  Guts are obscure, vague, enigmatic.

In African culture, I'm told, what we in the Western world refer to "heart" is not located in the chest but in the belly.  In Hebrew tradition (including translations of the Old Testament), heart and soul are intermixed with liver, stomach, and guts.  There was no separation for them: body, soul and spirit was one and the same. 

I know this to be true because when I'm sad I feel it in my stomach, and when I'm happy I feel it in my chest, and when I'm frightened I feel it shooting through my veins. 

Somewhere in my guts, I believe, God is sorting out the mystery of conception.  Somewhere in my guts, I believe, I harbour the hope that we'll meet the babies of our future.  Somewhere in my guts, I believe, I'll find the strength to bridge between the two seasons: waiting and welcoming.

---

"And the knowing in her guts

Something's still gonna grow

She ain't leaving 'till it does"

(Brooke Fraser, Crows & Locusts)

"By the God of your father, Who will help you,
and by the Almighty,
Who will bless you with blessings of the heavens above,
blessings lying in the deep beneath,
blessings of the breasts and of the womb."

(Genesis 49:25, Amplified)

mama monday: hope

One of the hardest commodities to hold on to while trying to conceive is hope.  I guess the same is true of any situation where the outcome is just out of reach - whether hoping to be hired, or hoping to be accepted, or hoping for healing, or hoping to find someone to spend the rest of your life with.

I once felt hope was cyclical.  It germinated, sprouted, bloomed, and then seemed to curl up and die before it was reborn again.  Over the past year, I've realized that it isn't cyclical at all.  The hope I have today of becoming pregnant is not the hope I had last year, or even last month.  It's stronger, deeper, and truer.  The growth/dormant stages I felt were actually spurts of progress and less obvious progress.  But it was always progress.

On a bad day, I still need my friends around me and I'll sometimes send out an email to ask for prayer (community is so helpful in times of extended hope-a-thons).  On a good day, I feel like my friend Naomi did when she so elegantly quoted these words in response to a piece of music called "Radio Protector" by 65daysofstatic.

I've included it here and recommend listening to it while you read.  The video is an unofficial one, but nonetheless enchanting:



While listening to the crescendo of the song, Naomi mused:

It feels like something's alive inside
Like I have motivation to fix whatever I want to
I have all the hope in the world

...I'm learning what it is to be content
That not everybody needs to know everything
There is beauty in the mystery
There is beauty in things not unveiled

It's not easy to hope.  It takes time and energy and a lot of guts.  But as my wise husband says, "It takes the same effort to worry as it does to have faith."  Worry tears and corrupts and demoralizes and although hope might sometimes feel like an uphill battle, its only goal is to mend and clarify and hearten.  As long as time and energy and guts are required I'd rather be hoping.

And when I'm tempted to give up, I like to remember the words of C.S. Lewis: "There seems no plan because it is all plan".

---

 

Yahweh, Yahweh

Always pain before a child is born

Yahweh, Yahweh

Still I'm waiting for the dawn

- U2 (Yaweh)

“There is nothing that wastes the body like worry,
and one who has any faith in God should be ashamed
to worry about anything whatsoever.”
- Mahatma Ghandi