By Donald Schell
My wife and I are expecting. No, our own baby girl grew up and now she’s expecting her own baby. So actually we’re expecting vicariously or at one remove. Our first grandbaby is due in April.
As grandparents-to-be we’re fascinated to watch our daughter and son-in-law think, plan, imagine, and feel their way forward. They’ve researched car seats. They took a hospital tour and checked out the hospital’s ob-gyn practice and c-section stats. They’re being particularly thoughtful of each other in their time together as a couple while they imagine how different everything will be soon as their family of two becomes three. And they wait, by choice now and some friends feel eccentrically, to see if the coming somebody will be a boy or a girl.
I saw a shadow cross our daughter’s face as my wife was showing her pictures of the birthing clinic that our young friends Maggie, Andy, and Emily, and the people of eighteen nearby villages just completed in Malawi, Africa. Carrying a baby herself, our daughter sensed how frightening it would be to anticipate labor with no access to emergency maternity help.
Watching the soon-to-be parents moves us to gratitude. They ask us lovely questions about how we did things, and some practical questions too that are a pleasure to answer when we can. We share stories with them of our daughter’s own birth, and memories of her older sister and younger brothers when they were children. She’s imagining the long journey from birth giving to grand parenting days like we’re experiencing now. The mother-to-be is seven years younger than her big sister and ten years older than her younger brother. Storytelling feels very rich. We had lots of time to watch the children grow, and with four of them, we came to see how each child was his or her own self from the day each showed up and accepted (yes, sometimes re-made) the names they were given.
Now all our four are grown, each one someone we’d hardly have imagined when they were small. I pause from writing this to raise four fingers one-by-one – the history professor, the full-time youth-at-risk program director, the priest, and just grown, eight months out of college, our youngest, the actor, piecing together auditions, work, and what parts he can get.
Today’s expectant mom was ten years old when her youngest brother was born. She remembers our astonishment at her fierce little brother, the baby and child so prone to tears and rage. She remembers her “experienced” parents taking a multi-week Systematic Training for Effective Parenting class in desperation and coming home to try what we were learning in class on him and her and her sister and other brother.
“Expectant” is a funny word. It misses part of the experience. None of our four are anyone we’d expected. While we acknowledge that they graced and challenged us far beyond our imagining, we also must acknowledge that they’re not the children we imagined before they showed up. And it wasn’t even enough to ‘accept and know them’ when they arrived. They each did their own becoming. We had work to do, but our agenda as their parents came with each one, each different and distinct.
The whole family says the explosive baby brother has become our glue, the peacemaker, the one everyone can talk to, the one who makes us glad to be ourselves. All his intensity is still evident onstage where he can be breath taking, heart breaking, and even terrifying. Offstage he moves through life with a grace and ease that moves Ellen and me to say, “big improvement on his parents – just how did that happen?” He was our thunderstorm and tornado, now his smile is sunshine.
That reversal touches a part of the story we can’t tell our daughter completely because she’s got to live it herself as she becomes a mom. There’s more letting- go and letting-be to loving than we knew or now know how to tell her. She does glimpse it in her work where she’s practiced a lot of letting go and letting be with kids who have a parent in prison. And she was old enough to see her dismayed parents feeling everything they knew or had done before was useless with her second brother, and she joined her big sister worrying over him and loving him with us.
In these waiting months of watching her and her husband I’ve been thinking about the divine mother/father. If we actually think about parenting, what does that image tell us about God’s love?
In the beginning, it looks easy – all four children image the love they came from and the love that watched them grow. But their growing changes simple generative love into something more. Each of ours stretched us beyond who we had been before they entered our lives.
If God is parent, God is changing with us.
While calling God our ‘maker’ doesn’t seem to imply change to the maker, knowing a number of artists and having myself tasted the difficulty of writing what I hear in my mind’s ear or trying to remember and sing and teach others something I know, ‘creator’ does begin to hint at a more passionate relationship than control, something that partakes of both struggle and dance.
Any creative artist knows that material has its own energy and something like a ‘mind.’ Creative work counts on material, and material is unbalancing. It causes the artist suffering and ecstatic discovering as vision and skill meet what is, what’s becoming and what can be.
Calling God our mother or father takes the risk deeper still. Parenting images evoke the wildness of engendering, birthing, and the twists and turns of loving and raising one who is truly other.
I can’t tell this to my daughter in words that are big enough or strange enough, but she feels it. Mothering love and fathering love drive out fond hope and vanity’s imaginings to welcome a stranger, an autonomous person who is also wholly and unpredictably a parent’s joy. The coming stranger will give her, and perhaps even the grandparents, new becoming, new selves.
The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is
President of All Saints Company.