You are standing near the bottom of a mountain. It is cold and your breath fogs in the air. You look up into a wall of crystalline beauty. Snow and ice line every crevice along the mountain face.
The sun is bright. The snow makes small sounds as it begins to melt. Drops fall like rain. The snow and ice lies suspended above you.
There is a huge blast of sound as the ice above gives way and comes sliding down toward your upturned face. You reach up with cupped hands and try to catch the avalanche but it buries you anyway.
This is what the longing for a baby is like. Utterly intractable. Utterly without any way of stopping the fallout. No way to keep from being buried and towed under by a force bigger than yourself.
It is a dynamic and unrelenting force of nature. It is more than hormones or some ticking biological clock. That simplifies something that is so tied to every aspect of a woman's soul- spirit, mind, body. It is a complicated trickle down of emotions and drive to be MORE than just a woman. To be a mother.
And it doesn't matter if you already have a child. It still happens. It is still as powerful, or more so, because you know exactly what it is you want. It is a reaching beyond yourself for something beyond heaven, something that is to be created and cherished. And there is NO reasoning with it. It simply is with an ebb and flow until it is fulfilled. It does not fade, it does not die. It IS.
It is about so much more than a baby. It is about family. It is about God, and a fulfillment of a promise we make just by being born female- that we can carry life. That we can know instinctively how to care for life, how to nurture. That we can carry, feed, and love our children, because we are women.
So to those I love that are buried in it right now, who are mired in snow and ice and waiting for the miracle to come, I understand.
I may be just a bit buried myself.
