abundance

Dear Miriam,

I have been your mama for nearly a month now. As I type, you are nestled against my chest in the mei tai, which you yell about every time I put you in it but then chill out in after approximately fifty-five seconds. Inevitably you then fall asleep after spending a while looking around at the world. (I am learning that time feels totally different as I spend my days with you: it flows like molasses in winter at points. Minutes feel like hours, especially the minutes when you're crying. But really those moments are brief. And the days and weeks pass more like honey runny from the sun.)

You ask more of me than I have ever had to give before. I have lived on this earth for three decades, racked up some accomplishments, sought to love people around me. But I have never felt so confronted by my own limits, the physical and the emotional. Nor have I ever had the chance to see those limits expanding, those capacities growing, to such a startling degree.

You, tiny person, hold up a mirror in which I see my imperfections, and you pull from me responses that astonish me at their goodness. I am, after all--or the Spirit within me is--a well of love that does not run dry. The pools of your eyes refill my soul, night waking after night waking, fussy evening after fussy evening. Deep calls to deep. As my breasts (tender, so new at this) do not run dry but only increase their supply in response to your hunger, so I am finding my patience and hope and even faith have begun to overflow. (This is not to say that I do not at times come up against the edges of my new capacities. Sometimes I need the space to replenish. Even when you were inside me, we were never one person, but two.)

You, Miri, are insatiable. But I am learning not to fear my lack. Your hunger calls out abundance in me. There is more than enough.