Waiting for a Baby

The other day our garage door broke, and the maintenance man came over to fix it. He's a very kind man named Hector, who wears a long grey pony tail under his working cap, speaks with an accent, and carries his being with a sense of confidence and lightness. He likes people and he likes his job. You can just tell, and that makes you like him back.

Just before leaving, he smiles and says, "I hear you are waiting for a baby." I think he meant to say "expecting" a baby, but instead used the more literal translation from his native Spanish word for expecting, esperando.  I knew what he meant right away, in any case, and received his enthusiasm happily, chatting a little bit about my May due date.

This got me thinking about language and about the way language is so intimately and inextricably linked with our attitudes about life.

In English, we expect babies. There is a sense of waiting in the phrase. The preparations made, the nursery painted, the baby shower planned, the gifts organized and placed just so, the names imagined and considered, the doulas hired, and the doctors appointments attended.  We expect to have a baby at a certain time, in a certain way, and although we can't quite be sure, we're doing what we can to follow the program. We expect to have a new son or daughter, this new human being to join our family and the world. However, for whatever reason, although we are indeed waiting, the emphasis is perhaps on the doing. We do all these things because the baby is coming. We expect the baby, and so there are things to check off the list in the meantime.

In Spanish, the key word is esperar - to hope, to wait, to hang on. The word has deep roots in such spheres as faith and religion. Esperanza is a type of hope we have in God, and it is an all-encompassing belief that God will come through for us. We don't expect God the same way we have esperanza in God. The latter has a weight and depth that simply is not present in our neutral, activity-filled expectations. Esperanza is the very nature of waiting for what we feel confident of - the total surrender to other factors that come together to make our hope real. In esperanza, perhaps we acknowledge that  we can do little to move the thing forward. In esperanza, we sit and do nothing. We allow the thing to happen, and we don't worry.

And in a way, waiting for a baby, as much as we Americans feel compelled and driven to move the baby's development forward, really is out of our hands, isn't it? We can't do much to make it go faster or slower. Much of the baby's progress is decided at conception. As women, we nourish our pregnant bodies, protect it from harm, and ready our minds so as not to impede the fetal development. We may have a sense of control when we go to birth classes and get the crib put together, but in the end there is little we can do to move the pregnancy forward. We are at the mercy of this long and at times, unpredictable, process of birth. If we are really honest with ourselves, we are not doing much - we are sitting and waiting, present in the moment, unable to tear ourselves away from what is happening in our bodies. We are vulnerable to it, while simultaneously understanding that the only way this baby is going to be born is through our capable bodies and minds, and that is empowering.

And, sometimes terrible, unexpected things happen along the way, do they not? We hope, we pray, and we wait to see if everything turns out fine. Perhaps every pregnant woman knowingly or not, reaches out a hand to the creator for a secure connection to the source of life, and asks for protection. Sometimes things don't turn out fine, and we have a new truth to process. We lose babies, we must release our desires. Perhaps, after all the grieving is done, we try again, risking again that we will have hopes unfulfilled. Nothing is guaranteed.

And so, this journey of birth is not just about expecting an outcome. It is also about what happens in between. Whole hours and weeks stretch between conception and the first gust of air filling our child's tiny lungs. In those pearl-strings of moments there is only one thing to do. Expect, yes, and prepare the nest. But there's more than that. As for me, I am happy to not just expect my child, but to wait, and pray, and hope until I see her tiny sweet face emerge.