Interest, admiration, embarrassment, inadequacy, at moments remorse, peace of mind—a jumble of contradictory feelings swept over me as I read the pages of the latest issue of Ombre e Luci, devoted to what the editors called "A Difficult Waiting".
I lived my pregnancies as enchantment—a transforming, singular experience, repeated yet always fresh. Each one made me feel the limits of our creaturely condition while granting me, however confusedly, a glimpse of infinity, of that image of God that dwells in each of us.
Each time, my sense of anticipation found confirmation and comfort in an easy pregnancy, in reassuring and moving test results, in straightforward births and the arrival of "healthy" babies. Each time my faith was strengthened. I recognized family life as the substance of my vocation. I confirmed the choices I had made as a girl and young woman. Each time it seemed my marriage was fortified, that the grace of our happiness multiplied, enriched by the finest fruits of the love we shared.
And alongside all this: a certain pride. A poorly hidden satisfaction, as though—despite believing everything comes from God—I secretly claimed some credit for my motherhood. I took pleasure in the affectionate words, sometimes tinged with amazed disbelief, that greeted my children.
The less fortunate experiences of people close to me—family members, dear friends—never truly shook my certainty or dissolved my self-satisfaction. I had treated them as accidents, natural exceptions to a scientific rule that, in its extraordinary completeness, echoes God's creative power.
Read also: If I Had Listened to My Despair?!
Then one day I was asked to read the latest issue of this magazine—and more, to write my thoughts as a believing mother. I felt interrogated about something intimate, hidden. Strong embarrassment came over me at the thought of offering an opinion that risked intruding upon, violating, the deeply private experiences of others. Experiences shaped by feelings so powerful that, as far as I know, they can barely be expressed, and often only in shallow, inadequate ways.
I began to reflect on my own story, to set it alongside the "difficult" experiences of those closest to me. I reconsidered my expectations before the ultrasound, the waiting for clinical results, the overwhelming emotion of birth, the tenderness of first holding my newborn. I tried to imagine how it would have been if, instead of reassurance, I had received worrying reports or some unexpected news. In this reconsideration, fears I had buried resurfaced—fears that came especially in my last pregnancy, when my more mature age meant higher statistical risk. I felt again that cold dread in my stomach, the panic before the unknown, the terror that something could go "wrong".
And I had to admit how hollow my certainties were, my self-satisfaction and vanity, when faced with such a possibility. How easy it is to believe when your life experience fits the "beauty of God"—and how little glory there is in that. "Do not even the pagans do the same?" I looked at my faith, poor and small, and asked myself how I would have lived, how we—as a couple and as a family—would have lived a "difficult" experience.
I reconsidered the lives of families I know who welcomed a "different" child. I read and reread the words of mothers in the magazine. I thought again of the words and the looks of other mothers I have known in these circumstances.
And it seemed I had understood almost nothing—or only a fraction of what I might have grasped. I realized I had been looking, until now, at life and motherhood from the wrong angle, or at least a limited one. There is no "accident" in a different life. But there—precisely there, absurdly there—one can touch something of that infinity I have sought and only sometimes dimly perceived. In the helpless gaze, the abandoned limbs, the uncertain or poorly coordinated movements of these children—here, it seems to me now, God becomes vivid in a stronger way. In these lives whose meaning escapes us, and in those devoted to them wholly, with tenderness and without limit, we can see Jesus: flesh and history, true and real among us.
So much more to learn, then. If this intuition is right, it demands a radical turn, an absolute shift in perspective—one that cannot come from rational thought or occasional reflection alone.
It requires a movement of the heart that opens outward with passion to embrace the one who asks only to be welcomed; that turns its gaze from itself and its own desires to open it toward the other and their hunger for love; that stops searching for its own happiness within itself and discovers it can only be found in working to make the other happy.
I felt unease and embarrassment at my instinctive vanity. I sensed a distance between myself and those who accept and live motherhood not only when it projects and fulfills their deepest desires and their need for love, but also when it demands the total surrender of self to answer another's hunger for love. I am grateful for the chance I was given, and for the light that has slipped in to illuminate my heart and mind. I trust that prayer will guide me through the transformation I feel I am being called to undertake.
Cristiana Vigli, 2006
