12 CREATIVE NONFICTION Do I need to tell you that I long to become a mother? I imagine it sometimes—a part of my body distended and tender with new life. I imagine that damp living place where a new personality is nourished and enfl eshed. I envision doctors and nurses explaining my body to me and drawing blood and telling me what not to eat. Food cravings. Morning sickness. I remember a little child, weeks old, whom I saw earlier this week, kicking, working her arms and legs, and trying to talk. Her little dark eyes looked uncomprehendingly at the world—it was all so much—and her face was still red from being born. She had the little baby mittens on, the kind that keeps them from scratching their faces, so I could only see the skin on her head and neck. And I try to grasp something of the glory of sacrifi ce, of laying your life down not just in one moment, but daily and hourly, renouncing even the claim on your own body to let the new life in. And I wait for the day when that little red-faced, wide-eyed, mittened baby will look at me and know me. I wait for the time when I see the wailing newborn and know that he, or she, is mine, that the Lord has given this child to me and we have a claim on one another till death do us part. I wait for the day before that when I will know I am a warm, safe place. ~ “Zoe” is the Greek word for life. It’s the prefi x of “zoology,” the study of a particular kind of life, of profusion, of abundance. When the Septuagint translators had to render the name “Eve”—the mother of all the living—into Greek, they named her Zoe. My dad, a seminary
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