It's not winter where I am

Thoughts from Advent in the Southern Hemisphere (while great with child)

It wasn’t until I moved to the Southern Hemisphere that I noticed how Norte-centric the Christmas season is. It should have been obvious. But there is a particular dissonance one experiences seeing a Santa Claus sleigh and fake snow being installed on a store roof in 35-degree heat. Or reading Advent reflections about days of growing darkness as we wait for the light…while golden-ing mangoes bask in the midday sun. I haven’t done my research, but its led me to assume that the date of Christmas, and the church calendar in general, was decided by Europeans with a penchant for the poetic. Into the cold dark of Advent the Christ child comes and with spring’s signs of new life so too Christ rises. I hold onto this question: what might it look like, an incarnation that is for the whole world?

This particular year, though, I don’t need to rely on my outside environment to signal the season to me. As of tomorrow, I will be 39 weeks pregnant. I am no stranger to waiting and anticipating; I’m living my own Advent these days. My perspective has shifted on the familiar story in the gospels… I picture Mary in early labour during the journey to Bethlehem, and I wonder who her midwife might have been.

I want to capture something of this time, which is at once universal and singular. Pregnancy changes my perspective on being human. More than once I have found myself looking out over a crowd of people or watching passersby from the bus and thinking, “Wow — they were all in a womb once,” and, as a form of consolation in my anxiety about childbirth, “…and they all found their way out!”

Strangers and friends ask me “Cuando viene el bebé?” (When’s the baby coming?). I shrug my shoulders and insert some variation of “Who knows?” Last week my colleagues were placing bets on the date and hour the baby would be born. For me, though, time is now more fluid than ever, the stuff of moons and tides but definitely not certainty.

I have heard it said that pregnant women are at once deeply connected to this world and detached from it, living on another plane. I feel that especially in these final days (or weeks). I cry more easily, not knowing exactly why, and I welcome the tears. (Meanwhile, my two-year-old daughter tells me “No llores,” (don’t cry) and I wonder who taught her that — definitely not her mother!) I think that this sentiment of here-and-elsewhere must be most true in the experience of childbirth itself where, as the intensity heightens, the birth-giver goes off into ‘labour land,’ sometimes returning to the room between contractions, sometimes not. At once vacant and fully embodied, far-off and completely present.

At this stage of the game, I sense that ‘birth prep’ (whatever that is!) must give way to trust. A little bit reminiscent of the days when I would cram with increasing fervour for a university exam but eventually need to put down the textbooks and the notes, throw my hands in the air, and know what I knew, nothing more and nothing less. Of course, birthing new life is nothing like this. There is some degree of knowledge that helps; I’ve done my fair share of soaking up information from books and friends and (begrudgingly) Instagram. But, for me, the ‘preparation’ is more about a slow, slow process of reconciling myself to the unknown as the event approaches. It’s anxiety yielding to trust. It’s opening to the vast array of possible outcomes. It’s becoming reacquainted with the realities of life itself.

I am not in control.

I am vulnerable.

I cannot avoid pain.

Joy will also find me.

My body is wise.

This will change me.

I do not know what the future holds.

Life is fragile.

Life is beautiful.

All things are held in Love.

And I finish there for now. See you on the other side…