Letter to a Baby
In which we reflect on pregnancy and Lent and art.
20 Feb 2024
Now I am 35 weeks + 5 days pregnant with you, Salem. Your head sits right where you might expect my bladder to go (I don’t know where mine has actually gone), and your feet kick around my upper right belly. You’re due to come out in about a month. I’m ready to hold you on me and not in me and to let your daddy hold you too—also your grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, and friends. Lots of people love you, boy.
Last week your Aunt Riley came over and took some pictures of us in your nursery.1 I am not so natural or comfortable in front of a camera, perhaps because a common assumption of having your picture taken is that the point is to look beautiful, or the most beautiful you can. I don’t think I am or am not beautiful; I think I have been, am sometimes, not always. Either way, the camera presses you to try and to dwell on it—on how you are seen, how you can make yourself be seen. Beautiful or not beautiful? Right or not right? Coping or not coping? Able or unable?
But I think there are other things to do on either side of a camera that I hoped to do in having our pictures taken. See, for a long time I thought I would never carry you or anyone in my body. I didn’t think my body could do it safely, for you or for her. Even once your dad and I began to hope and plan for you, I visioned carrying you very differently. Rather, I struggled to vision it at all. I am a specific, rare kind of disabled, which won’t mean much to you for a long time, but one day you’ll understand. No one has a body like mine; I’ve never seen one live at all, much less create, carry, and birth new life. In consequence, I mostly imagined difficult and frightening and lonely things.
I have told you before, little one, that these months of growing you have been far from easy. You know about the sickness and exhaustion that’s accompanied us since about last August, with the worry and aching and stress sprinkled in. But what hasn’t come, and what has, continues to awe me by the day. I have felt pain, but not the kind that brings despair. I have experienced things alone—had singular experiences—but not actually been alone with them. I have had moments of fear and frustration and failure, but they begin and then end.
Other things I never imagined have happened: creative and wonderful things. Right after an article in an app told me you had begun to develop hearing, we sat in our old church in Tulsa while a family of saints you may never know and who mostly didn’t know about you sang songs and spoke scripture and prayed prayers around us. And until we moved away, even though I almost fell asleep during every sermon and I always carried barf bags in my purse,2 I got to take you there many Sundays to hear the songs reverberate through that big, beautiful room.
Once I stopped being repelled by the thought and sight and smell of food, I kept cooking. You and Daddy and I have made and eaten so many good things the past few months—even yesterday, hopefully today. Every time I’ve been able to give care—through brownies, through bread—I receive as a gift.
A whole troop of your dear aunties threw us a baby shower, which is a party where a big group of the women who ever had a little piece of mothering me gather and give us presents and especially give me the present of their joy and hope and belief that I’ll be a good mother for you, and they’ll be there to help. A couple of days later, your grandmothers came over together and we washed your clothes and bottles and arranged your room and felt so excited about you.
We found a new church after we moved, again. We miss our old one but have hope for this new one. We’ve gone there as a family and these saints also sing and pray around us. And one of the strangest, most wonderful, most previously unimaginable parts of pregnancy is how there are two of us sharing my body, and I know you have your own, but it only lives through mine, and every single thing I do, you do too.
We breathe, eat, sleep, feel. And I never fail to think of that when your dad brings us bread and wine that’s been broken and blessed by this new pastor, a man I don’t know very well but who speaks the word of God over the room, the elements, and us. And I know perhaps you aren’t supposed to take communion until you can profess faith, and you can’t profess a single thing. But, well, I take it, and I profess, and your life is in mine. And the saints say around us, and I say, and I wonder what it sounds like vibrating through our separate-same bodies, “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.”
Last Wednesday began Lent, and in that new room from the new man alongside the new saints, we received ashes on my forehead. It is strange to have the mark of sin and death on one’s forehead and carry an unborn life two feet below in one’s belly.
You will be a Lenten baby, arriving while the world collectively reflects on how we arrived through dust and breath and will leave again through dust and death. In the middle of each life come pain and blood and water. In the middle of humanity’s life came Christ’s death, in pain and blood and water. In the middle of our Lenten season will come your birth, in pain and blood and water. Broken flesh. Death of an old life, birth of a new life, hope for another life after another death.
None of this could I have invented or imagined. Many more things have and haven’t happened that I did and didn’t expect. It is good, and I am grateful. I will never capture it all: a little boy need not be conceived of the Holy Ghost to make his mother ponder inexpressible things in her heart.
I wanted to tell you this, and I want to have pictures of now even though neither will capture it all. Words and pictures—art—do something if not everything, something beyond showing off our best attempts at beauty. Something like bearing witness to what is surprising and good that we couldn’t have come up with on our own: a mysterious beauty that isn’t ours at all.
@rileyk.photography xoxo
Sorry, Jeremy and Jason. It wasn’t personal.
Beautiful!
I don’t even really have words to describe what you wrote. It’s just beautiful. Thank you for sharing with others. Can’t wait to observe the gift you and Garrett will be to Salem.