A Marvelous Thing

I was playing with Heather today, watching her hands move as she talked and wiggled.  They are so expressive, those not-quite-baby-anymore hands.  I felt an intense, passionate love for that little tiny body, the way it moves and grows, the way it is mine because I made it.

I made those fingers, I made those eyes, I made that smile with all those shining teeth.  I don't understand how my body did it, but in nine months there was a new person in the world, a brand new person that no one had seen before.  But she was here and she was mine, whether I understood how it happened or not.

I thought that there could be a hundred scientists with a million petri dishes and all their strands of DNA and stem cells and they could make amazing things happen, maybe even make a human grow in a lab, and maybe they could do it, but even then I don't think they would actually understand it.

As this new body moves inside me, and I begin to feel the wiggling, tentative movement of impossibly small limbs,  I think of ears forming, and eyes forming, and a heart beating, all in a body the size of a turnip, and I love that turnip baby with a fierceness that would scare mama bears.

When the time comes, I will go through an unbelievable process to bring her into the world. However a mother chooses to do it, or circumstances force her into (because who would choose to give birth in a car on the side of the road on the way to the hospital?) giving birth is an unbelievable process.  Some days I find that I am scared spitless to go through it again.  But I will, and when it is over I will laugh like a wild hyena at what I have accomplished.

Until then there's the nausea and the headaches and the exhaustion and the aching back and the gagging and the memory loss and confusion and I never really know what is going on around me.  But there is one thing I know, even though I don't really understand it completely.  I love these babies.  They are mine and they are precious.