Okay, so Sarai/Sarah's story can read a million different ways. There's reading it before you've ever been pregnant, or thought too much about being pregnant. There's reading it when you are, unexpectedly and joyfully, pregnant. There's reading it when you have just found out that your baby died inside you, that it never could have lived, anyway, and when you are going in later to have it suctioned out, and when you are waiting to be Ready to Try Again.
God gave me something, see, and I thought -- like people do -- that I deserved it. I want a child, badly. I thought it was My Thing, the thing I would have to justify my existance -- where I don't know, day to day, why I am here. It was a less destructive Thing to have -- maybe -- than an eating disorder. But you will see that, having lost it, I went right back into bulimia. Furiously. Resentfully. Meanly. If God couldn't get with the fucking program, well, I'll just make my own life, make my own fun. Find my own way to wake up and believe I should be awake.
And I feel like I'm going crazy, and I go to all this therapy, and it's because of one fundamental thing that I fail to get. Which is: you don't make your life. You don't have to make your life -- as liberating as that possibility can seem. You -- I -- have been given a life, with a million things that could be wonderful and painful and disappointing and incoherent and surprising and comforting and sublime and correct. And you take and do and experience the things that seem like the best idea at the time, and, for God's sake, try and be there for them rather than looking for the next thing.
Right now, I don't have a child. I may believe that God wants me to have children, or adopt them, or not have or adopt them and do something else, but I'm just reiterating my own ideas of what my life should be until or unless I actually shut up and stop moving and trying and actually listen. If God wanted me to have had this child, I would have had it.
Maybe He didn't because I am supposed to go to this foster orientation thing and find my child there. Maybe He didn't because I'm supposed to go to nursing school, first. Maybe He didn't because I still need to get over myself and accept that things don't happen because I want them to. Maybe God wants me at CAMBA for the rest of my life and that is something to praise Him for, not resent.
I don't know. I keep thinking I know, but I don't. And that is, for me, the lesson that keeps me creeping through Genesis, because it is so hard for me to get. I have wonderful things for you -- not things you choose and order out of a catalog, but things of a value you can't yet understand. What you would choose for yourself, and what I will choose for you, can't be compared. So hold still, stop coordinating your husband's paternity or your career or your family planning, and notice the things you've been given. Notice that I want to be close to you -- and remember that once, before you got what you thought you wanted, that was what you wanted.
If, through losing my baby, absolutely nothing changes except that I understand something about God, and life, and loving others, that I did not understand before, then that is still a gift. And my responsibility, as sorry as I feel for myself now, is not to try and interpret what happened in a way that I can accept. It is to accept that I am not in charge, that God doesn't need to seek my approval before my life changes, and that enjoying what is, is actually a more valuable skill than envisioning and then forcing what is not.
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