Waiting

September 23, 2025

I sit here waiting, knowing that in the matter of hours, days, or maybe a week, everything will change. It sounds cliché to write it like that, but there is no other way to express it. Those of you who have been present since the early years of my writing life have already seen some evolution—from my obsession with family history, to life as a young widow, to finding myself (my new self) in the years that have followed. And now motherhood. Matrescence. Parenthood. My future family. No longer am I mostly writing about the faces of the past.

It’s September 23rd and I’m two days past my due date. Our baby will be born sometime in the next 10 days which this year corresponds with the most important time for the Jewish people, an identity our child will inherit. It is a period of reflection, repentance, restart and rebirth. It’s when we are asked to be most connected to our inner selves and take stock of our relationship to our outer worlds, individually and collectively. And here I am waiting, doing just that in the most literal way one could. This growing soul inside of me will come from the inside out. They are the safest they will ever be right now being inside of my body. And soon enough they will begin a journey that takes them from pure innocence and helplessness to that of flawed and responsible, as all of us humans so beautifully are. Like every new parent I have many wonderings of who they will be, but in this moment I am consumed by the waiting.

Our child—with so many new children in our community—are entering this world in a year that is plagued by pain and fear. The instability and questions of what will be is a heavy weight. And like many in my millennial generation, I question if it’s even right to have a child. The stories I’ve studied in my career have only made that question more real. What decisions will we have to make on their behalf to keep them healthy? What losses will we endure together? What rights will we have stripped? What compromises with our values will we be faced with in order to have a safe home? My selfish decision to want a next generation means I may bear a child who knows more unjustness than I ever did in my growing up.

But the wisdom of my elders prevail. Since losing my first husband all those years ago, I’ve been told by those older than me that it is my duty to marry again and raise a family. I could feel sighs of relief from the spirits of the dead when T.J. came into my life. It’s as if they could rest easy knowing that I was emotionally taken care of by a good man, a just man. And as I’ve spent the last nine months growing a child, I’ve felt the words of past generations reverberate inside of me, and something only they could have prepared me for happened: in a landscape of darkened politics and war, my hope has outweighed my despair. This child is a choice, as is my relationship with my husband. Investing in my local community is a choice, as is the hard work to find a balance between work and play, pleasure and pain.

So here I sit waiting. Our bags are packed and ready for the hospital. The freezer is full of food. We have a homemade sweet bread and local honey sitting on our table for the snacking to honor the Jewish New Year. It will be a sweet new year that will bring both novel struggle and love like we’ve never known.

It is up to my body and the baby now, the most intimate parts of me that I have no control over, to gift us the change.

Self-portrait at 37 weeks pregnant / August 31, 2025