A little incarnation

On the weekend that my best friend was in labor with her first child, I started to write a new book. It was not intentional, this collision of beginnings, but it felt significant just the same. And as her child has grown and my book has continued taking shape, their lives have felt strangely intertwined. I do not have children, but I have written a few books. I had always known I wanted to write books, but I had always been ambivalent about wanting children, my want of them always conditional: with the right man, at the right time, maybe. But the year that my best friend had her baby also happened to be my thirty-fifth year—the age women have been trained to recognize as the signal that our time is running out—and so, I spent a good deal of that year thinking about children. I had yet to find that right man and wasn’t sure if I ever would, but while there was no “expiration date” on the possibility of getting married, there was one on the possibility of becoming a mother.

That year, I found myself in a state of anger and of grief, not because my want of children had changed, but because my ability to have them was beginning to be leeched away from me. I spent that year wrestling with God—wrestling with what, exactly, I was so upset about—and one day, I realized it was not the child but the choice. Fiercely independent and strong-willed as my father, I had spent my young life believing I could achieve anything I set my mind to. But as I moved through adulthood, I watched that belief get brutally and repeatedly rendered untrue, and I was still, at age thirty-five, trying to come to grips with just how powerless I was. The book I started writing the day my best friend was in labor is about that very thing: powerlessness and all the ways I have wrestled with God over it—all the ways He has met me in the midst of it.

It was while I was writing the first draft of this book and working through these tangled thoughts that I came across a line of C.S. Lewis from his Reflections on the Psalms: “For poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.” Though it was not the interpretation Lewis intended, for me, there was an old balm buried in those words. For many years, I had tried to convince myself that being a writer could somehow “make up” for not being a wife or a mother. Like most manmade constructs, it was unhelpful, at best, and damaging, at worst, and it had made me feel more resentful of my writing than better about those other things I might never get to be. It, too, had made me feel powerless, and I wasn’t about to start drinking that poison tonic again.

Lewis’s words stuck with me (as Lewis’s words always do), and I knew enough of my relationship with God to know those words had come to me at this time, in this way, for a reason. I could not, of course, read the word “incarnation” without thinking of Jesus, and because of the state of mind I was in, I also couldn’t read it without thinking of Mary. Luke’s Gospel is the only one that recounts the story of the Annunciation, when the angel Gabriel appeared to a young Mary, told her she had found favor with God and that, because of this, she had been chosen to bear His Son. I had thought many times about the awe and confusion and (I’m all but certain) terror that Mary must have felt upon hearing those words. But only now did it occur to me that, in this moment in which the fate of all humanity hinged, Mary was not exactly given a choice.

Gabriel did not ask if she’d like to become the mother of God. Engaged to be married, she no doubt had other plans, but Mary’s only question revolved around logistics: how, exactly, would a virgin bear a child? The angel told her the Holy Spirit would come upon her, and she would conceive—and to this most astonishing of statements, Mary said only, “I am the Lord’s servant. May it be to me as you have said.” With that, Gabriel was gone, and Mary’s life was forever altered. But as I studied this exchange, I realized Mary was indeed given a choice: the choice of refusal. How many people before her had seen God’s messengers show up in no less startling ways and plowed past them like they encountered the living God every old day? Mary could have said no—could’ve held onto what she had hoped would define her life and refused what God wanted to give her.

I wanted the choice to have children because I wanted to be the one to choose. I still wanted to be that powerful, fire-throwing, dream-catching woman I had long envisioned myself becoming. I did not want to watch yet another thing I could not seem to make happen float down the proverbial river and wonder what else, in the years to come, would float away after it. And in the back of my heart—punched down in the place where we keep our most gnarled dilemmas—there lay the fear that, if I did not become a mother, I would be missing out on something fundamental in what it means to be a woman. And what, in God’s name, could I do about any of that? Nothing. That was precisely the problem.

Though our circumstances could not have been more different, I could not help but think that Mary might have understood what I was feeling. If her story shows us anything, it shows us that the best and bravest thing to do when you find yourself confronted by something you never wanted or expected to face is to surrender it to God. “I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary told Gabriel. “May it be to me as you have said.” The choice she made was to hand the choice back to God. So that was what I decided to do, too. I handed over my powerlessness, along with all my fear and rage, and in the months that followed, a deep and abiding peace came over me—and it was a peace about not having children. For the first time in my life, I felt I could finally lay that question to rest, let all the “what ifs” and “why nots” fall from my hands and into the Lord’s. Of course, there were days (and still are) when the sadness of letting it all go felt unbearable, but there was (and still is) a tremendous freedom in choosing to let God show me where my path would lead.

And then, the Lord brought me back to Lewis’s words: “For poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.” Once I took my eyes off my dilemma and off the false equivalencies I had tried to construct, I saw so much beauty in this idea. I thought again about the mystery of incarnation—the wombing, nourishing, childbearing part—and how the act of writing draws from these, too. There is the moment of conception, the gestation as the idea takes shape and form, and the laboring to bring it into the light. While I would never say that writing a book is the same thing as having a child, nor fool myself again into believing that one could take the place of the other, it may be a way to exercise that same creative power that God has placed in each of us—to bring something into being that wasn’t there before.