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waiting in womb-time

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Pregnant women inhabit time in a whole new way.

I’m 20 weeks, we declare.

As if we were the child within us. As if we were the time itself.

Our relationship to these womb-weeks is totalizing. Time means everything: how much time the baby needs, how much time we have left.

But womb time is also unique, unfolding inside chronological time, tucked into the calendars that define our lives. Any attempt to translate the calculation is imperfect: more than 9 months, less than 40 weeks. Every due date is a guess.

This time is hidden, humbling, and holy. It shows us how to wait.

What does womb time teach us about Advent, a sacred season of waiting?

Womb time is dark. We cannot peel back skin to peer inside. Even high-tech glimpses via ultrasound are shadowy and grainy. We see as through a mirror, darkly, until we see face to face.

Womb time is vulnerable. Early weeks are shrouded in anxiety, even secret. Later months bring their own tenderness: shifting symptoms, strange pains, fears for birth. Nothing is guaranteed, only hoped.

Womb time is mysterious. This is time and space for transformation, like spring seeds in rich soil. We wonder what happens below the surface. We have to trust that waiting will be enough.

Womb time is beyond our control. We cannot speed up or slow down this growing time. We cannot demand that weeks bend to our wants or whims. We can only witness its passing and live into its present.

Womb time leads to life, but ultimately to death. Kathleen Norris wrote, “One of the most astonishing and precious things about motherhood is the brave way in which women consent to give birth to creatures who will one day die.” We cannot protect ourselves or our child from this truth.

Yet life demands womb time. None of us would be here without it.

Advent is all of these things. Dark, vulnerable, mysterious. Beyond our control. Bearing life and death.

What if we inhabited this sacred season in the same way?

I’m 1 week. I’m 2 weeks. I’m 3 weeks.

What if we let this time define us, potent and pregnant with possibility? What if we surrendered to the truth that we cannot control chronos, but we can choose to inhabit kairos?

Being pregnant during Advent – many times now! – has brought me to wonder about the work of waiting. How God grew. How Mary carried eternal weight. How the divine delights in what is small and unseen.

Every Advent is an invitation to return to this time. We inhabit these weeks anew, in awe and unknowing.

What the end of this womb time will bring, we can only hope and pray. Walking through weeks together. Waiting to be surprised by joy.

Enter into the waiting, womb time beckons. Forget the chocolates tucked in the cardboard calendar, the stacks of cards to address, the last-minute presents to buy.

Let the weight of these last slow, dark weeks – rolling within us, moving below the surface – teach us how to wait.

In wonder, in mystery, in quiet awe.

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  1. Elisa Schneider says

    16 December 2019 at 10:17 am

    Stunning. Thank you, Laura, again for the words of wisdom.

    Reply

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I’m Laura Kelly Fanucci. Mother, writer, wonderer. This space is where I explore mothering through writing. It’s where I celebrate how God shows up in the chaos of raising children. It’s where I love to build community with readers like you. Read More…

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thismessygrace
If our daughters had lived, we never would have pl If our daughters had lived, we never would have planted this garden. 

There are pockets of beauty in my life today that could not have existed if they had survived.

Acknowledging this does not mean I accept their loss. Or that I wouldn’t trade it all to have them here instead.

But the grieving know this strange, stubborn, saving truth: that goodness can grow in the gaping holes left by the ones we love.

I don’t know any simple ways to make sense of the hard times in which we’re living. As a porous soul, I feel it all and it breaks my heart, even as I cling to what I know is true.

But loving and losing my girls has taught me that life is both heart-breaking and resilient, that surviving is more complicated than we suspect, that most people are walking around shattered beneath the surface.

Sometimes I can catch a glimpse of it, searing as sunlight: the grief in someone’s eyes behind their anger, the burden sagging their shoulders, the past that’s poisoning their present. Few things have transformed my life more than learning to recognize pain in others.

Grief is a long letting go of a life you thought you’d have. Most of us are carrying more of it than we realize—or remember when we’re dealing with each other (especially when we’re tearing each other down).

Go gentle today. Practicing compassion and generosity of spirit will crack open more of the world and its confounding struggles. You might lose the satisfying clarity you clung to before life broke your heart in complicated ways, but you will find more of God in the messy, maddening middle.

I have learned this much from the garden I never planned to plant, from a version of life I never dreamed.
Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated from Notre Dame. Now we’re thick in the midst of life-with-kids, celebrating middle school & preschool & everything in between. 
 
Since June is a month for graduations & celebrations, I’m delighted to help you celebrate with @grottonetwork .

Grotto Network shares stories about life, work, faith, relationships, and more. Check out their videos, podcast, and articles to help you reflect on where you are in your journey.
 
Grotto Network has generously given 2-$100 gift cards to Bloomin’ Brands Restaurants (Outback, Carrabba’s, Bonefish Grill & more) to help you celebrate this month with friends & family! It’s a huge giveaway, because we all need to savor and celebrate whatever joy we can find these days.
 
To enter the giveaway, follow @grottonetwork and @thismessygrace and leave a comment below about what you’re celebrating this month. Tag a friend for extra entries (up to 3).
 
Rules: Open to the U.S. only. Entries will be accepted until 6/11/22 at 11:59 pm CT. The 2 winners will be chosen at random and announced on 6/12/22. Per Instagram rules, this promotion is in no way sponsored, administered, or associated with Instagram, Inc. By entering, entrants confirm that they are 13+ years of age, release Instagram of responsibility, and agree to Instagram's terms of use.
“How did you do this?” I want to ask her. “H “How did you do this?” I want to ask her. “How did you let your heart break a thousand times?”

I want to call my mother and ask her impossible questions, to probe her heart that held five children and let each of us go in the hardest ways. But I know what she will say, “It’s hard. But you’re doing a beautiful job.” She can’t give words to the deepest yearnings and groanings. None of us can.

I wish I could ask my grandmothers, each of them gone for decades now, each of them matriarchs who raised big broods of their own. I never got to know them as an adult, but I have heaps of questions: How did you do it? How did you not lose yourself or your way? Or did you, and that was precisely the point?

I want a whole book of answers to impossible questions, and none exists. So I send my thoughts to the mothers of faith whose short stories, mere snippets on pages, have sparked small lights to guide me along. To Sarah and Ruth, Hagar and Rachel, Mary and Elizabeth. Every unnamed anguish the holy ones carried, every treasure of love they held in their heart.

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He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.”
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Imagine if we let ourselves be filled with the Holy Spirit to shout out with loud cries.
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Imagine if we gave each other strength and service, courage and compassion, as we kept asking how to answer God’s call in our ordinary lives.

When women meet, the world changes.

If you want to know how to fight for justice for your children, for your people, for this world, look to the Visitation.

The mothers will show us the way. They already have.

(Image from the “Windsock Visitation” by Br. Mickey McGrath, OSFS, commissioned for the Monastery of the Visitation in north Minneapolis.)
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Right now is a time to be prophetic and pastoral, a time for each of us to ask how God is calling us to act.
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