Something Sacred

Something funny happened yesterday.  During a seemingly mindless, everyday errand, a bank teller poured her heart out to me like a best girlfriend.  She remembered a story I told her about my girls the last time I had visited, I asked her if she had children and it went from there.  I walked out the door of that bank several minutes later with tears in my eyes.  I tromped through over sized puddles to my car and prayed, not dear God please prayers, but just thoughts running in my head, feelings filling up my heart and overflowing for this girl I don't really know who wants a baby so badly and has lost too many in the trying.

I get told these stories a lot.  Perhaps infertility is really much more common then we think or perhaps I have the sort of face that says I will treat your heart kindly.  Oh man, that's what I really hope for myself.  But I don't know why these beautiful, loving, deserving women get placed in my path.  I always wish there was something I could do, something really profound to say.  And I do think of things to say; medical stories I've heard, clever adages I've read about everything happening at the right time and the best things come to those who wait.  But I've learned after walking the infertility road with a dear friend not to say any of those things.  I push them out of my head and just agree that it really, really sucks.

So in the end, what I find myself doing is praying.  I throw everything I have out into the universe to the God I'm getting to know, to the force of Nature, to the big and great force of Love and ask for babies.  I ask for the impossible to be possible for these women.  Because that's what I have to give.  It really doesn't feel like enough, and I wonder why I'm entrusted with these stories when this is all I have to give.

Babies came easily to me.  I never longed for children.  I never waited.  I never lost.  But my heart changed into a mother heart a little over three years ago.  And when I see that longing, hear it in a woman's quivering voice, smiling and trying to be strong, I want her to have what I have.  So that's what I give.  I pray a mother's prayer for a woman who needs a baby.  And I get the feeling that a mother's prayer for another mother holds some power.

We took our first family vacation on the Olympic Peninsula.  We spent a sunny day in Port Townsend, walking the streets of that salty, beautiful Victorian town.  There's a steep flight of steps that constitutes the smallest national park in the country and of course we had to climb them.  Darby was ten months old and asleep in the baby carrier against my chest.  She was all blond tufts of fine baby hair, rosy cheeks and pouty lips.  I carefully descended the steps and crossed paths with an elderly woman, slowly making her way up the stone stairs.  She looked at Darby and smiled and we held each other's glance for a few moments.  I could feel her remembering, feel her understanding and I know it sounds strange but I felt her love.  I felt just a little, just that strange mothering bond that woman hold for each other.  

I don't understand it but I really like it.  And I don't know if my prayers avail much, as the saying goes, but I will keep doing it.  It feels like something sacred, a prayer as a mother for a woman who longs for motherhood.