Where's The Net?

During both my pregnancies, planned and unplanned, I was filled with a sense of foreboding. When I was seventeen and pregnant in high school, it’s not hard to imagine why I worried persistently about my future and the future of my baby. I processed the dilemma the way that I have always processed everything, by writing. Seven years later when I was pregnant with my own daughter, I was surprised by how much I still worried about my future as a mother.

What was there to be anxious about? I was married, happy, settled in Minneapolis, teaching. The situation should have been ideal and yet I worried about becoming a mother even more than I had worried about being a pregnant teen and placing my child for adoption.

Again, I processed my worries by writing. I wrote my memoir while I was pregnant with Twila and finished it right after she was born. It was during that season of my life that I thought about making writing a career.

If I had known then that nearly three years later, my memoir would still not be published, I may have simply set my pen back down. Perhaps that’s why we aren’t able to see to the finish line when we are in the midst of the journey. Maybe we are only allowed to see a flashlight’s beam ahead so that we will continue to move forward, one small step at a time.

Perhaps what I was to learn from the worry of an unplanned pregnancy was how to write my life; how to write my journey as I am on it. And maybe what I was meant to have learned from writing my memoir was simply how to write. The process of turning what was essentially a journal into a readable and interesting narrative was the longest hardest work of my life. But it opened up the way to writing effectively so that when I began my non-fiction manuscript about childbirth and adoption a year ago, I was able to convey my message more clearly.

Maybe the frustrating truth is we never know how each accomplishment in our lives advances the ball. Sometimes what we work so hard on, does not get us where we thought it would. Sometimes it helps indirectly with another journey. Sometimes it grants us a surreptitious reroute back on to a path we lost a long time ago but were still mean to be on.

I heard recently: “Jump and the net will appear.” This is a promise that has been kept time after time in my life. When I was eighteen, I made the sudden decision to place my baby to get her out of the mess that would have been my ex’s and my life together, and the net appeared in the form of her well-suited adoptive parents.

When I was expecting my own daughter and was filled with anxiety and worry about who she would be and what kind of mother I would be, the net appeared in the form of grace and patience and consistent unexpected help.

And now I am at another leaping off point. I am at the edge of the cliff of writing and pacing like a cornered lion looking for a favorable spot to jump. I am trying to put aside my fear and worry. I keep trying to peer into the future to see where the finish line is or figure out where the net may materialize.

But deep down inside I know that as at every other major juncture in my life, I cannot know all the facts before I leap. It just doesn’t work that way. In faith I have to just jump.