As soon as I knew you were coming I bought clothes for us and packed the cupboards with food and went for walks every night. I took down a closet door to create a room for you in our tiny apartment. I began scrubbing the walls of my soul. I wanted your home to be pure.

And I began to write letters to you, a stranger, my own flesh and blood, as you took shape inside of me.

December

We can’t have a child. We live in a rented apartment in the basement of a men’s dorm. We are full-time students. We are so unprepared. But it’s time. I don’t understand how it could be time, but I know it is. I must trust, I must surrender. To be loved, to love, is a continual surrender. You can’t control love, you can’t love another person on your own terms. I must surrender to a person in me smaller than a grain of rice.

January

Yesterday I confirmed my pregnancy. The pregnancy test instructions said that if I saw two pink lines I’d know. Yesterday morning I watched in awe as two pink lines appeared and I knew you were inside of me, and my whole world turned upside down.

Are you ready to be found by our love?

Do you pray, little one? Have you seen the face of God?

February

Today we caught sight of olive-sized you on a sonogram for the first time. We saw your tiny heart, pulsing like a firefly. My body nourishes you, but you are God’s. He has breathed life into your tiny heart. You must know God in a pure way that I cannot remember – a way that I pray will never leave you.

March

Last night, soggy from the rain, I arrived at Compline. Father Paul was just inside the door. I told him that I had been thinking about how his mom told him that she carried him to church under her heart, and sixty-one years later, he is still there. “Now you are bringing your little one to church under your heart,” he said…

April

I felt you for the first time on Palm Sunday. I was sitting in church, and I felt a series of bubbles burst inside my stomach. I sat there with my hand on my stomach, feeling you kick inside of me. I felt the miracle.

May

I lie on my back for hours feeling you move. Nothing else seems to matter.

June

As I write you are kicking. This is too beautiful for me to understand. But my joy wavers when I think of the world of despair and pain you will enter. But I know why God creates life: love. Which also compels us to create and nurture life.

August

On a train through farmland I watch lightning cracking a somber sky. You stretch inside of me. The rain cuts my window with jagged lines. When the storm breaks inside my body, you will be born.

September 12, 2001

You are moving inside of me. Military planes screech overhead. Train tracks are silent. No one wants to go into the city today. The world is coming to an end, and I’m having a baby.

October

You are born and at night I nurse you in the dark room, candlelight flickering on an icon of Christ. The full moon shines through the window. A friend says that our apartment is awash with Pascha – the Orthodox word for Easter, meaning the dawn. When I was pregnant with you, sometimes I felt that all of my possibilities in life were closing, but I understand now that your life has opened a new world to us. You have brought the dawn to our lives, little one: to our hearts, to our marriage, to this room. Amen.

This article originally appeared in the April 2003 issue of Portland Magazine. Since then, it has been reprinted in the Mother’s day edition of The Beacon, and in the July 2003 issue of a church newsletter, also called The Beacon.