I worked up to 38 weeks with my last baby, 12 hour shifts in the hospital, taking care of women who hours before had just had their own babies and the babies themselves.

There was a real convivial spirit in most of the interactions I had with those women, who could look at my swollen belly and see that we had at least one thing in common. Women who led very different lives from myself in other ways, who sometimes didn’t even speak English, could look at my form and know that I was feeling similarly to how they were a day or two ago, that I was anticipating something really vast and unpredictable just like they were yesterday. Their joy and exhaustion was my own.

When there was a sense of somberness in place of the convivial, there was a different sort of relational clarity among us, one pregnant woman who knows not what lies before her, one very-recently-pregnant woman who found out what laid before her, sometimes tragedy, sometimes hopeful hardship, sometimes something in the middle.

When the outer betrays the inner, our mere existence becomes an invitation for relation (sorry to rhyme like I’m writing a riddle for children but hey here we are).