Expecting Miracles Sneak Preview: Section 1

A Time to Prepare for Motherhood

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When I was in the ninth month of my first pregnancy, I was already researching babysitters. I was anxious, to say the least, about taking on the awesome responsibility of becoming somebody's mother- a job with unpredictable conditions, and a life-long and unbreakable contract. I feared that as a mother I would have no time left over to invest in my own happiness and fulfillment after meeting the demands of caring for and raising a tiny baby.

The women in this section confronted these same fears, whether they came from internal or from external voices, and described how they have come to see the ways in which motherhood has changed their lives for the better.

Motherhood and a Spiritual Awakening

(Please note: In all Expecting Miracles interviews identifying details and names have been changed). Talya is a 27-year-old mother of one child. She grew up in California in a Reform family, and after graduating from Yale University she came to Israel to begin a Masters in Jewish Education at Hebrew University . Through friends, she began attending classes at an Orthodox women's yeshiva, and at that same time, she met her husband, who grew up in England in a family of Lubavitcher Chassidim. Talya's story of pregnancy starts with the worry surrounding a near-fatal infection she developed when she first arrived in Israel , and her fears that this infection had rendered her unable to have children.

Talya:

A Scary Illness

When I first started my Masters, I had an ongoing low-grade fever for a lot of the year and then I developed serious abdominal pains. I was misdiagnosed by a naturopath, and he pressed something in my lower abdomen, which then caused terrible diarrhea. I was shaking and shaking and getting up every hour to go to the bathroom, and then I fainted in the bathtub. A friend of my mother's was in Israel , and she knew I had been feeling sick, so thank G-d, she took me to the Emergency Room.

The doctors felt my appendix, and kept on asking me if I was pregnant, because they thought I had a fallopian tube pregnancy, because my fallopian tubes were ridiculously large. And I kept on saying there was no way I could be pregnant. So they cut me open, and saw that everything was infected. They took out my appendix, swabbed down everything else, and sewed me up. They put me on every kind of antibiotic, and I was in the hospital for a week. I got better, thank G-d. It was a complete miracle that I had the doctors that I did, and that I received the treatment that I did, and that I healed. They said that in another day, that would have been it. Kind of gruesome. My system had basically shut down.

I told Chaim about all this when we were dating and considering marriage. He got really scared that maybe I would have difficulty getting pregnant because my fallopian tubes might have been damaged. When the Lubavitcher Rebbe was alive he said that everyone should have a rabbi to ask questions to, so Chaim called his rabbi in England , and he said, "Get her medical papers, take them to one doctor, and do what he says." So we got my papers from the hospital in Israel , and took them to a doctor, who said it shouldn't be a problem for me to get pregnant.

So we got married, but we were both still nervous. We didn't say anything to each other, though. We just kept it to ourselves.

Getting Pregnant

Chaim knew I was pregnant before I did. We were in the States at the time, and before we knew I was pregnant we had this really serious discussion about names, and the only name we could agree on was Yehuda. We couldn't think of any girls' names at all. It was a really charged conversation, and he took this as a sign that I was pregnant.

We had been married for four months. When we got back from visiting my parents in the States, my period was late by over a week, but I was thinking maybe it was because of flying. But then I went one day to the Dead Sea by myself, and was feeling nauseous, and I thought "I'm totally pregnant!" I needed that day to myself to bond with the idea that I was pregnant, and I got all psyched up about it.

When I got home I told Chaim, and we went and bought a pregnancy test, and it was positive. It was so exciting, and right before Shabbos! But then the next week the worry set in about all sorts of things, like about the fact that I'd been taking antibiotics when I got pregnant. And then I started worrying that it was a tubal pregnancy, that the fetus was stuck in my fallopian tubes, because of the time when my fallopian tubes had gotten so infected. I had this image of the tubes inside of me being all twisted and the egg not being able to find the way to my uterus. But I had an ultrasound at seven weeks, and everything was fine.

Who knows? You never know... One nurse told me about women who had had babies without having wombs, and other miraculous stories. Maybe that's how it is with me too- that it's a complete miracle I even got pregnant at all, and had this baby, but we don't even know it.

When I was pregnant I couldn't relate to the fact that I had a baby growing inside of me. I remember trying to talk to it; I'd heard all these things about bonding with your baby, and I tried singing to it. But I just didn't feel inspired to do any of these things. I would rub my belly, but besides that it was hard to connect really in any other way. I was pretty much just going on with my own life, and feeling like a single person, even though logically I knew there was something growing inside of me, but I couldn't emotionally connect with it.

Another thing about being pregnant was that I loved being pregnant, and I loved looking pregnant. I loved walking down the street, and thinking, "I am pregnant! Yay!" I felt like I looked really alive, like a woman. I felt a bond with every other pregnant woman in Jerusalem , and I would think that all the women around me were pregnant. I would start noticing, "Everyone in Jerusalem 's pregnant!" In America , no one's pregnant. If you see a pregnant woman you stare. And here it's such a normal thing. I would see other women and I'd say, "I'm going to look like that in a month" or "I used to look like that."

Struggles of Faith

Even though I was really happy, it was also a bit difficult at times during the pregnancy, since I wasn't working. I've been doing whatever I've been doing since I came to Israel , which means I do something the whole day, but I can never account for what it is. I guess I'm running errands, or going to the clinic, or something like that, but I ask myself all the time what I'm really doing for the world. I hadn't imagined myself as a housewife, and I find it sort of depressing sometimes. I daven [pray] a lot that my husband and I will find our place in this world, to know what we're supposed to be doing, and for me to figure out how to incorporate motherhood into my own personal journey.

My husband always tells me I should have more faith. He says, "G-d gave you this baby, and He'll make you healthy, and He'll make the baby healthy. Don't worry. It's all in G-d's hands." I wish I had as much faith as my husband; I'm working on having more emuna [faith]. But it's hard. Maybe it's easier for him since he grew up religious, so he just naturally sees that G-d controls the world. It's so hard for me not to be thinking in terms of the natural world, that, "People get sick," and that, "These things happen. Maybe the baby's going to be deformed." It's hard to suddenly start thinking, "It's all in G-d's hands."

I felt badly because after the birth my husband said, "How could people see the birth of a baby and not believe in G-d!" and I said, "Well, I could understand that." For him, it's so clear that the birth was a miracle. I studied biology in university, so for me I know exactly how the baby's forming, and all the biological processes. It's harder for me to see beyond the physical.

I'm realizing, though, that my faith and understanding of the spiritual world is going to grow when I have to teach everything to this baby. I see they're already growing. That was why I loved teaching in Hebrew schools for four years before I came to Israel , because teaching made my belief so much stronger. I think being a mom I'll have to learn a lot more, and get really psyched.

My davening [praying] was much stronger when I was pregnant because my bonding with the baby was through davening. I mean, I would daven that we would be good parents and know what to give the baby, and at the end of davening, I would put in my own prayers. And even if I'd been spaced out for most of the davening, I'd at least have that one second with kavana [concentration] where I'd say, "Please, G-d, give me a healthy baby."

I'd also daven for me to be healthy, and to have an easy birth- even though in the end the birth wasn't easy. I davened that G-d should let me give the baby space and give him love and give him the attention he needs, but not be overprotective, and to find the right balance for him. I felt like a lot of energy was going to the baby through davening. I could really feel it.

Also in this section: Fourteen Babies Calling from Heaven, The Reluctant Mother

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