Reflections at the Dawn of Motherhood

A week ago today, I gave birth to my firstborn son, accompanied by the loving support of my husband. This last week has taught me so many theological lessons that I wanted to write an article to share with others who may be on this journey to motherhood, or interested in the philosophical underpinnings of marriage and of bringing new life into the world.

My experience has all been all the more relevant given that it occurred over the course of Holy Week. My husband and I commented on how even the weather here where we live seemed to reflect the mood over the course of the week, with cloudy days up until Good Friday and the sun coming out over Saturday in time for Easter Sunday. I went into early labour on Monday morning of Holy Week, my son was born on the Wednesday, and we were discharged from hospital on Saturday afternoon, which seemed to us to follow the path of Jesus to Easter. The whole of Lent felt for us like a countdown to birth that reflected Jesus’ journey to Calvary: preparing for the battle to come, followed by the joy of what came next.

Reflections on pain, suffering and love.

“This is my body, broken for you”. (1 Corinthians, 11:24).

Never have I understood better the meaning of Jesus’ bodily sacrifice than this week.

Most clearly, the labour and delivery process provided me with so much insight into accepting to undergo pain because of the love you have for someone. The pain of labour is a sacrifice made for the sake of your child, whom you love deeply. This closely mirrors how Jesus was willing to suffer for us, His adopted sons and daughters. It is easy to see how we can offer up our suffering during labour and delivery to God, and connect it to Jesus’ suffering for us. Furthermore, the pain and suffering that women experience during labour can give us a lived experience insight of what Jesus went through, which was simultaneously severe pain and suffering, and an overwhelming love and willingness to self-sacrifice for others. This opportunity to experience what God Himself experienced draws us closer to understanding Him, and shows how He also understands us.

In my case, I experienced some complications and damage to my body during delivery that required emergency surgery afterwards, which had led to heightened pain in the recovery process. This has specifically made me reflect on St Paul’s paraphrasing of Jesus’ sacrifice in the Last Supper and in His death - “This is my body, broken for you”. My body has been physically broken in the process of serving another person: ‘my beloved son’. For me, this has been another example of such a close parallel with Jesus’ experience that I feel I am almost living it with Him. God invites us to be in close relationship with Him and to understand the depths of His love for us inasmuch as we are able.

Another lesson on love and suffering has been realising that seeing my baby upset is more heartbreaking than anything, and how I would do anything to take away my baby’s pain. I have experienced this a couple of times so far, when he has had to undergo medical checks and blood tests that have made him cry intensely. In those moments, I was so upset to see this that I couldn’t help but cry myself seeing my baby suffer. I wished in those moments to be able to take away his pain, and immediately scooped him up to comfort him the second the medical checks were done. This is what God did and does for us. He made the ultimate sacrifice of laying down His life to save us from pain and suffering, and He wants nothing more than for us to run to Him for comfort whenever we are undergoing trials.

Being a parent is like being God, in that you can see the bigger picture.

The experience described in the previous section about seeing my baby cry while having medical checks done has also reminded me of the truth that God may allow us to undergo some trials for our own sakes, even when we cannot understand why. As a parent, you know what is best for your baby, but baby doesn’t always understand why you are doing things or allowing things to happen that make them suffer. My son doesn’t understand that having his blood test and other medical check-ups will ensure that he is strong and healthy in the long run - he just feels the pain of the needle and the discomfort of being stripped down and placed on a cold weighing scale, and is upset by it. This teaches us that God, like us as parents, can see the bigger picture, even when we cannot. He may allow us to suffer for our own sakes. It reminds us as His children to trust Him and trust that suffering does have a purpose, even when we can see no reason at all why we would benefit from undergoing it. It also shows us that God does not delight in our suffering, but rather, is extremely pained by it. Just as I cried seeing my son so upset, so too is God upset by seeing His loved ones suffer, such as when Jesus wept on hearing that his friend Lazarus had died.

The perfect structure of the family that God has designed, and the roles of men and women.

This week I have viscerally lived through the differences and complementarity between men and women in the family. By nature, women are the only ones who can give birth and breastfeed. The role of a wife and mother in the family is to give of herself selflessly and endlessly, for the sake of her family. Because the job of a wife and mother is to give and give, it is up to the husband and father to protect her and to provide for her, so that she has the fuel and the optimum environment to keep on giving. The role of protector is also linked to why the husband has the final ruling for decisions - so that he can successfully execute his job of looking after his wife, given that her disposition is to be entirely selfless. He can serve as a regulator that protects his wife even from herself as she seeks to give boundlessly.

For example, a few days after giving birth, I was absolutely exhausted from lack of sleep and the whole labour and delivery process, but my son wanted to feed throughout the night constantly for hours on end. I got to the point where I was practically collapsing from sheer exhaustion, but I still wanted to keep feeding my son. My husband could see that it wasn’t benefitting either me or my son to have me collapsing from tiredness, so he made the executive decision to ask his parents (who were staying with us and looking after us) to take the baby for a few hours so that I could sleep. This gave me a few hours of much-needed rest, so that I was able to feed my baby more effectively in the morning. In this case, my husband was regulating to make sure that I wasn’t giving too much of myself.

Another example is during the labour and delivery process, where being comforted by my husband gave me the strength and energy get through even the most intense and difficult moments. He was the source of strength that I was able to draw from to undertake my role. This to me demonstrates clearly the relationship between God and His church, reflected in the roles of husband and wife as being like Christ and His church. Christ is the source of strength that the church draws from to be able to achieve her mission in the world, just as I was able to draw on my husband to allow me to get through labour.

On a slightly different note, I have been reflecting on how the current paradigm of women in western society, which implies that women should be treated just like men in order to be fully respected, is misplaced. The popular paradigm right now is to talk about not limiting women by granting them the exact same opportunities as men. We talk about women as though they have been forced to not be allowed to achieve things in the way that men have. There is some truth to this in cases where women have deprived of opportunities to achieve their full potential in line with their nature (such as not allowing them equal access to education, even though women benefit just as much as men from learning). However, this is very different from saying that women are treated as less valuable than men because they have a different role to men. Women have superpowers that no man has - the ability to grow a new baby, give birth to that baby, and feed him or her from her own body. Why is this not seen as an extraordinary set of gifts that should be held up in high esteem, at least as high as whatever men can do, if not higher? Why do we not pave the way for women to be able to do these things in a way that is socially easy, taking away concerns they might have that using their superpowers will mean that their life, education or career are over? Why are we not making it the path of least resistance for every woman to be able to achieve the full range of her potential, rather than telling her that she can only achieve a small range of things, either in a career OR as a mother, but not both?

Overall, the lessons above have shown me that God has perfectly designed men and women to be complementary, and to serve each other in the family structure that he designed.

The nature of unconditional love.

Having my baby has filled me with a fountain of unconditional love. Just seeing my baby’s face brings tears to my eyes. Similarly, God loves us ‘just because’. We are His beloved sons and daughters whom He made. In the same way that I love my baby just because he exists, we don’t have to do anything special to obtain God’s love. But He does want us, for our own happiness and well-being, to be in right relationship with Him and with others, as I will want my son to grow up to be a good person with happy and healthy relationships.

The humbling experience of birth, and reflections on dignity.

Giving birth and recovering afterwards is a humbling experience. God sends us angels to look after us, through the form of kind doctors and nurses and selfless family members who are willing to care for us at our most vulnerable. We learn to accept their help, even when we would like to be doing things for ourselves.

In the last week, many of these doctors, nurses and family members have seen me in my most vulnerable state, at points literally naked as well as broken. Some of them have had to care for me, clean me, when I wasn’t able to because I was too weak after surgery. I was reflecting on how this could superficially be seen as a loss of dignity for me, having to be looked after in a weak state, but actually it shows a huge display of dignity. Even at my weakest and most vulnerable, kind people came and saw me as worthy enough to literally clean me, like Jesus cleaning the feet of His disciples. This shows us the huge importance of the sanctity of life - how everyone, very much including the sick, has extraordinary value and dignity in the eyes of God. It is also a sign that those people who helped me are carrying out the work of God, looking after me as Jesus instructs us in Matthew 25:35-36; they are His angels sent to show His love on His behalf to me.

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Overall, my experiences of labour, delivery, and caring for my son over the last week have been a reminder that marriage and parenthood are a vocation designed specifically to bring us closer to God. Marriage offers the perfect environment for us to learn how to take care of each other, and how to see things as God sees them, both of which draw us closer to His divine love. In marriage, a husband and wife love each other so much that their love becomes a whole new person, like the Holy Spirit arising as the love between the Father and the Son to bring about the Trinity. Parenthood puts us in the role of God. Mothers and fathers each have a different experience of being parents, but they each acquire insights into the nature of God.