The Transcendent Beauty of Ordinary Love
/DOMINIKA RAMOS
Once I heard an older acquaintance remark how she and her friends had such great plans for their lives in high school, but then they just grew up, got married, and had babies.
That won't be me, I thought. I'll get married and have babies and accomplish all my creative dreams. But life hasn't turned out exactly that way.
PHOTOGRAPHY: KIRSTEN ANN PHOTOGRAPHY
I got married two weeks after my college graduation. I had spent the previous semester not job hunting but working on my undergraduate thesis and wedding planning.
After we returned from the honeymoon, I had to find a job, any job, so I took on a customer service position at an eye doctor's office.
As I snapped pictures of people's retinas and failed dreadfully at small-talk, I thought about friends who were blazing through their masters' programs, doing mission work abroad, or beginning professions in fields they were passionate about.
It left me feeling a bit deflated--here I was, not using my English degree, not disciplined enough to pursue my dreams of writing in the evenings, and, let's face it, as a Catholic newly-wed with a blithe sense of natural family planning, likely to have a baby sooner rather than later who would then upset any individual ambitions I was harboring.
Before my five month stint in the world of healthcare was up, I was indeed pregnant. And while there was much I looked forward to in motherhood, there was an attitude I couldn't shake that between me and my due date was a countdown to the end of time I could call my own.
As I waited for that baby to arrive, I feared that my life story, too, would be that I grew up, got married, and just had babies.
Well, I wasn't wrong about being robbed of my time. The baby made basic tasks about as easy as walking up an escalator backwards and blindfolded.
And perhaps the life story I once feared will remain true, but motherhood transformed my perspective and made it so that I don't fear that life story.
I didn't just become a mother in some general sense, but to a particular person. Just as falling in love with a particular person, my Joe, buoyed me over any hesitation I had toward marriage, so too did this little boy with his lamb-like cries, delicate frame, and arresting gaze, my Leo, shatter my hesitations over any tedium in motherhood.
I wasn't expecting to be stunned by the beauty of even the most menial tasks of caring for another human being. And yet those tasks frankly were menial, and getting married and having a baby is still a conventional path.
When I became a mother, I recalled a professor of mine noting that falling in love is so extraordinary an experience precisely because it is so common--that everyone from a supermodel to the girl next door can be engulfed in that ennobling sentiment of love makes it all the more meaningful.
And having my son filled me with a like awareness--that the mysteries of motherhood have indelibly marked the lives of so many women from time immemorial is strikingly profound.
In my individual vocation as "the queen of our castle" as my now five-year-old puts it, I go beyond myself in a symbolic way.
Through the dress and veil I wore on my wedding day, through the rings I will wear all the days of my marriage, and through the body that has carried and nurtured my children, I, with every wife and mother that has ever lived, make visible these mysteries of life and love--mysteries that point to the ultimate mystery of God.
Yet while it is illuminating to be aware of how, through my very being, I body forth a bridal dignity, it's also haunting to be aware that all those brides and mothers throughout history that I am linked with have been largely forgotten in time.
Their bodies--those very bodies they loved and mothered with, those bodies they quite literally carried history forward with--have turned to dust, and so too will mine.
Even this unsettling thought of being forgotten has become redeemed for me though.
Early in my marriage, I read the novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder, in which a friar, Brother Junipero, tries to discover why God would permit the sudden death of seven people in the collapse of a bridge. Neither Brother Junipero nor his author can logically answer for the ways of God. Instead the reader is left with this observation:
"We ourselves shall be loved for awhile and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."
To do the work of love all the days of our life without the consolation of knowing that we will be remembered here on earth is something that requires courage and faith.
To build up with your spouse what in your child's eyes is a kingdom and in the world's eyes something as ephemeral as a sandcastle is to live in hope.
As Wilder suggests, love is the only intelligible force amidst the tragic decay of this life, and even the most ordinary acts of love give a glimpse into eternity.
I still hope to fulfill my creative ambitions. With the perspective of being five years into parenthood, I can see how my panic that children would make writing impossibly difficult was a bit dramatic--they do eventually learn how to sleep on their own and stop nursing round the clock.
Yet, there's a peace in knowing that if I live these primary vocations as wife and mother faithfully, whether or not professional success is a part of the picture, I will have lived a life of transcendent beauty.
