Guest Post: Premature Birth

[image error]by TMarie

On Mother’s Day last year I found myself pregnant with my second child (a girl), dealing with an intense fear that she would be born early. My pregnancy was considered high risk for this due to the fact that my son was born 7 weeks premature, which caused him to spend 4 weeks in the NICU. There were no warning signs of preterm labor with my first pregnancy and my doctor didn’t have any kind of explanation either–I had even just had a sonogram and an exam 5 days before I went into labor where my doctor reassured me that everything looked great. I was lucky to have made it to the hospital at all. I found a lot of blood after going to the bathroom and that’s why I had come in, when I got there I was already 8.5 cm dilated and I hadn’t felt any contractions at all. My son’s premature birth was spontaneous and had no known cause. I was paralyzed with fear that it would happen again.

On this Mother’s Day I had also found myself in the intense beginnings of a faith crisis after realizing that many of the teachings of the church regarding gender roles and women left me feeling inferior and unloved as a daughter of my Heavenly Father. I was feeling particularly betrayed after searching for information about Heavenly Mother, which I had always understood to be half of what we call “God” and proof of the eternal worth and the gospel’s honoring of women, and finding President Hinckley’s prohibition on praying to Her. I had asked my husband for Rachel Hunt Steenblik’s book Mother’s Milk as my Mother’s Day gift in hopes of finding some balm to my soul on the silence surrounding a divine feminine. It was so beautiful and affirming of my feelings. The book really resonated with me. It inspired these poems about the parallel of the feelings of disconnection and powerlessness I felt during my first month as a mother, which were now resurfacing during my second pregnancy, and my sudden yearning for a relationship with my Heavenly Mother.

Premature Birth I

I wake up

Frantically searching for my baby

He is not inside my womb

He is not beside my breast

Where is my child?

What has gone wrong?

I look up

Frantically searching for my Mother

She is not inside His House

She is not beside His Image

Where is my Mother?

What has gone wrong?

Premature Birth II

I wake three times a night

Breasts engorged, spilling milk

A machine in place of my baby

Twenty minutes each side

Pain in my breasts and my uterus

My heart

Wide awake, longing for my child

Wondering if he is lonely

This is all I can do for him

Carefully store and label

Until I can deliver the nourishment he needs

Is my Mother spilling over with nourishment for me?

Carefully expressed and stored

Longing for Her child

Wondering if she is lonely

Waiting for her to cry out in hunger

Premature Birth III

I sit staring at his little body

Incubating with tubes and wires

Only allowed to hold him once a day

Obsessively watching the lights and noises on the machines

Waiting from moment to moment

For another breath

I am his mother, yet I can do nothing

Feeling hopeless and useless

Wondering if he knows

I am beside him

Is this how She feels?

Unable to hold us

To talk to us

Watching from moment to moment

For another breath

Wondering if we know

She is beside us

TMarie is a Texan and mother of two sweet babes.