becoming mother

In pregnancy there were pivotal moments when I realized I was being shaped into becoming a mother. One of the most profound moments of this ontological shift happened as I prepared to cross the street at Columbus Circle. Becoming a mom to one child is so much bigger than we ever imagined. In this shift of becoming amother we, on some level, become mothers to the world. We are never again the same. I will always thank this man who mediated the grace of this profound change in me.

Emerging from the depths of the number 1 train, I stand at Columbus Circle waiting to cross Broadway. The winter winds slap my coat around my tired ankles. My appointment today is for 3:30pm. Today I will see the baby via sound waves. Will I give in and beg to be told whether I am carrying a boy or a girl or will I not feel the need to know?

My busy thoughts are interrupted by a coatless, homeless man with a hunched back standing on the curb. His expression is of someone who has been beaten down so often that he is incapable of ever standing straight again. His eyes are vacant and unseeing. He’s dark, too – not the color of cocoa or chocolate but black like coal before it’s lit. As he lingers dangerously close to the street, I notice a trail of drool pouring out of his mouth in one long continuous strain. It never breaks as he swivels from side to side looking for a gap in the traffic. I am embarrassed and ashamed to be witnessing this much pain, but I can not look away.

I am certain he shined the day his mother gave birth to him. Perhaps it was a hard rough labor. The pressure of energy swirling about trying to move this piece of raw material through the earth’s crust into the light of day was almost unbearable. But oh how that baby glowed! All wet and gooey, he struggled to give sound to a voice that had never been heard in this world – his own. And a tired mama, offered her breast to his lips, trusting that her body would feed when every other part of her groaned for rest. She held him tight and loved him.

I don’t know what transpired from that day on. How did he come to be a homeless man standing on the corner of 60th and Broadway with a string of saliva reaching down to the depths of the very earth he emerged from fifty years ago?

Today I am no longer a fellow city dweller watching a homeless man on the verge of self- medicating himself to death. Instead, this baby moving in me leads me to the realization that in becoming a mother everything is changing. Standing here what I know to be true is this man’s sacredness. We are all children of God. No exceptions. Now, though, I feel it so completely I find little separation between me and this man standing next to me. We are one.

This little baby growing in me is teaching me that all we are really asked to do is to love this world. On this bitter Broadway street corner, I feel a mother’s love and I see this homeless man as someone’s precious baby: loved and cherished and perhaps my own.