Baby Jubilee

I don't know who she is. I can't feel her growing, a little promise, inside me. I can't watch my belly fill and expand. I won't feel her hands or feet press against the uterus wall. But she is mine. She is almost filling the open space of my arms.

I've had two boys and relished carrying them in the bed of my belly. I loved the weight of them. I was amazed at my body that was always re-shaping, contorting itself, pulling up, pressing out, hemming those two creatures in, protecting.

This little girl is tens of thousands of miles away. She might be laying in a crib somewhere. She might still be cradled in the belly of another woman. Still, I feel no less pregnant than with my first two children. If anything, I am more stretched, uncomfortable and anxious than I ever was before. Time has stacked one month upon another and we are standing over a year and a half, with only a glimmer of the end in sight.

Something was in me, even as a girl, something filled with hope and adventure. I always had an international heart, was always dreaming of God in empty spaces. The first time I set foot in an orphanage I was fifteen year old. My heart still expands, like breath caught in the lungs, when I remember those round Guatemalan eyes. There were so many. I vowed that someday I would find a motherless child, I would wrap my arms around them and call them my own. It's been 12 years and that something is still in me. An ache for a child that I know is mine. I have dreamed of her, wanted her, prayed for her, loved her.

Her name is Jubilee. And someday soon, I will hold her in the crook of my arm and actually feel her. I'll touch her skin, look into her eyes, smell the scent of her, feel her breath on my neck. I will think about how long I've waited. I will thank God for planting her in depths of my heart before I even thought of her. I will know that she is prayer spoken and answered.

And I will celebrate.