When Christmas Isn’t Supposed to Be This Way: A 5-Day Reading Plan for Pregnancy Lossનમૂનો

You Are Held

My mother’s mother was a self-described “pushy old broad,” and proud of it. She was the head of whatever committee she was on, whether it was for her Lutheran church or its larger synod, her nursing school program, or Meals on Wheels, where she ultimately became local chapter president. She didn’t take no for an answer, and it was in her personal rule of life to always sample a little bit of every dessert on the dessert table.

I love being her granddaughter, and can only hope some of her pluck has come to me by way of inheritance. She died before I could tell her about any of my pregnancies, but I remember after my first loss the astonishment and felt belonging of realizing the babies I never knew were more closely connected within my family than I first thought.

The science goes like this: your earliest biological beginning traces back to your maternal

grandmother’s womb. As early as twenty weeks in utero, a female fetus has developed ovaries with a lifetime supply of eggs. Meaning: there was a time in your grandmother’s pregnancy when she carried not just your mother, but also the earliest part of you. Her body, in these twenty weeks time until birth, was a haven to three generations—herself, your mother, and what would one day become you.

Likewise, when your mother was pregnant with you, she carried not just you, but the earliest known DNA of all your future children. Three generations in one body! But what means the most to me about this biological curiosity is the suggestion that we have all been held, carried, for much longer than we thought. As your maternal grandmother held your newborn mother in her arms, she held also the earliest parts of you, somewhere within. And when your mother cradled newborn-you in her arms, she was holding the earliest parts of your future children—those who would be born and live themselves, as well as those that would not.

Maybe your family history is a complicated one. Maybe the mother-daughter relationships along the line are fraught and painful. But I have to believe that if we were to take the long view and trace this particular biological connection back and back, daughter to mother to grandmother, all the way back to the original woman if you like, we will find care and goodwill.

The depth of this biological connection brings out new dimensions to my read of Psalm 139:13, “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.” The imagery in this beautiful psalm is that of a craftsman, speaking of God weaving. I imagine God at a loom weaving together a tapestry from double helix DNA, weaving love and belonging for which we are all meant. I imagine God holding each of our mothers, and each of our children, born and unborn. I imagine God holding the children we never got to hold, and singing over them a song of love that never ends.

The Bible speaks of God as the one in whom “all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17). This Christmas, if you find that you can’t hold it together, may you know that you are held by one who can.