A Christmas Story (Paraphrased and with License)

While it is the case that the majority of Christianity would find my theological beliefs unpalatable and while I'm sure they also leave some people trying to figure out why I call myself Christian, I have always loved the Christmas season.  That might have more to do with family traditions and experiences growing up and my love of all things winter and hot cocoa while it's snowing but I also love a good story.

The wonderful part of the birth stories for me is that we essentially have a family who, for whatever reason, has fudged the cultural expectations of there day a bit. Joseph got Mary pregnant before their "marriage" was officially official.  The sticky wicket in which they found themselves, however, had more to do with political expectations.  Rome was in the middle of making sure they were getting all of there taxes (as empires do) from everyone they "owned" and it was decreed by the provincial governor that every man (along with his family, because, ya know, only men count) was to return to their place of birth in order to be counted and taxed accordingly.  It was a bit of a hooplah and Mary was in her third trimester.  I imagine Traveling with a very pregnant woman is no big deal.  I mean, there's only the threat of early labor, dangerous traveling conditions, potentially life threatening situations; if ever there were such a thing as a cake walk, this would be it.  They didn't really have a choice, so they went.

Thankfully, mercifully, gracefully they arrived in Bethlehem without major incident. I say major because I can imagine there were myriad and justified amounts of discomfort, complaining and anger from everyone involved.  What I mean to say is everyone arrived alive.  But of course, owing perhaps to the slower pace which they were forced to take on account of Mary's very pregnant condition, one of the few places left to stay was somebody's stable.  Soon after Mary went into labor. We have no idea how long or how hard that labor was for Mary (thanks, undoubtedly, to the male writers of the gospels and their keenly honed sense of important details).  From what I can cobble together from the women in my life, that shit ain't easy.  It's absolutely true that said labor involved lots of blood, body fluids, ungodly amounts of pain and a healthy stream of cursing unleashed in Joseph's direction.  Mary probably called him a viper a time or two which in today's parlance translates to something like, "Joseph, you fucking asshole, this is all your fault," (I looked it up).

Anyway, they did it.  Mary gave birth to a very loud baby, wrapped him in some blankets and laid him in a feeding trough as is the customary thing to do...kind of (but not really at all).  As good Jews they took the baby after eight days had passed circumcised him and bestowed upon him the most godly name they could think of, Jesus (or Yeshua or Joshua or something or other; the point is the name is actually quite ordinary).  And later, as is prescribed in the Torah, they presented Jesus at the temple in Jerusalem with a sacrifice honoring their god, their culture and their ancestors.

The point of all of this has nothing to do with Jesus as god's son born to save the world from itself.  That's not really my thing.  The miracle is in the fundamental and ordinary experience of creating and caring for life.  The wildly divergent emotions and expectations and everyday life of people sharing the struggles and joys of bringing a child into their lives.  The miracle is that life happens in some of the most peculiar and ordinary and exceptional ways.  For myself, there's no place for some fabricated fanfare about a virgin birth or a chorus of angels and there's no need for shepherds and wise men paying homage to a new king (although it does make for nice story-telling).  I feel like and think that the point has something more to do with the fact that the birth of and care for any child in any place at any time should be enough to call all us to hope (and act!) for peace and love to reign on Earth.  I think we would do well to pay more attention to those mundane things in life, to remember that ordinary doesn't preclude the experience of the sacred or transcending but that the ordinary is very much the heart of what is sacred and transcendent.

I'm not a Heroine Addict But If I Was I'd Be Good At It

It was an early nondescript weekday morning that I found myself entering an unassuming four story building the purpose of which was to deposit yet another sperm sample for doctors and embryologists to ogle.  Don't ask me why they need so much of my sperm, I can only assume that their sending it all over the country as examples in medical schools of what you don't want to see under a microscope. Posterity.  So, I walk into the office, write my name on the little sheet (even though I was the only one there), the receptionist hands me forms to fill out and turns to the nurses behind her saying, "The sperm freeze is here."  This is my life now.  I no longer have a name.  I'm just "the sperm freeze."

Being known around town for the state of your sperm is an interesting place to exist.  Most people don't know what to say or how to react when they ask how things are going or are unfortunate enough to make some quip asking "when are we going to have a baby" and are met with a stony, if not irritated, response. Being "the sperm freeze" brought it to a whole new level.  The nurses in the back kept repeating it to each other (to spread the news I guess) and I felt a tinge of frustration that was followed by incredulity and eventually ended in subdued acceptance of my new identity.  I guess there are worse things in the world to be known for...  And besides, this first step in the IVF process was but a small penance to pay for the insanely unfair position my partner would be in.

This week on Intervention...

I've been carrying around a fair amount of guilt over all of this.  I'm the one with the problem and she gets to endure all of the poking, prodding and monumental discomfort IVF entails. She's the lucky winner of shiny new nightly injections and a veritable cocktail of pharmaceutical magic.  And I get that this is just the practical piece of how this has to happen, I do, but man if I don't wish I could account for even a small piece of the shit end of this stick.  For now, I'll pay my penance by gearing up for lots of puke and poop clean-ups and attempting to find a way to be able to do those things without adding my own adult-sized vomit to the mix; no small task as my gag reflex is notoriously sensitive.  I still can't eat peas without an immediate involuntary heave.

So anyway, for about two weeks I stuck my partner with needles in order to entice her ovaries to produce as many follicles as humanly possible.  After more monitoring sessions in which I slowly watched her ovaries grow to the size of baseballs it was time for the retrieval, which of course meant more pain and torture for her.  This would require a doctor to stick a needle through the uterus and into the ovaries to suck out the follicles in which reside the eggs.  It all sounded very medieval to me.  They did at least put her under anesthesia for the surgery which probably doesn't mean much when you can't really stand up or walk for a few days afterwards.

All of this is a horribly abbreviated flash forward through a process that is about as satisfying as learning there is a cure to some long-standing grief that requires you to intensify and transform said grief in new and varied ways.  And of course it all ends with more waiting; waiting that can feel so interminably long that you almost forget you've already been trying and failing for years to have a child on your own. So we do the only thing we've been able to do and wait.  There are moments when we dare to hope and moments when we feel like we need to prepare ourselves for the worst but never a moment when we aren't acutely aware how long we've been waiting.  I guess, in a way, it's fitting.  Here we are in the middle of a season of waiting and we wait.  Small consolation at times but at least its helpful to be reminded that we're not the only ones in the world waiting for something.