Women's Words Ep8/Gaby

This is part of an extended series, Women's Words which tells personal stories of Catholic women from all walks of life. We invite you to hear their stories and to allow Him to speak to you through the tapestry of their lives.

Episode 8: Love in the Times of Covid-19

Tonight, before falling asleep, I told my husband I was scared. I was not talking about getting sick, or the ever increasing death count we see everyday in the news. Neither was I talking about the chance of running out of food before the shelves were refilled at the shops, or not knowing how long we could last living on our savings because I am not working and he has just been furloughed. These things are constant worries, so constant and present that, somehow, I have found myself learning to live with them after just a couple of weeks; weeks that have felt like months, or longer.

I was scared of being woken up two hours later by our newborn.

You see, motherhood came to me very much like this pandemic came to most of us. Experts could foresee it, but in the middle of being absorbed in my own quotidianity, it took me completely by surprise . My husband and I met and married in our early-mid twenties and were planning on spending a few years (emphasis on the plural) developing our careers, getting ready for a family and enjoying ourselves. I am not sure how much growing we were actually doing in the first 10 months of our marriage, but we were definitely enjoying ourselves. So much so that when I found out I was pregnant, I just thought I had a very bad and extended hangover.

Parenthood, however, did not come to us as a consequence of lack of planning or irresponsibility. The truth is, it came when it came as the result of our faith. We are both practicing Catholics, and, while it is commonly held that Catholics believe that the use of contraception is a one-way ticket to hell, the prevailing motivation behind our practices was love, not guilt. We believed, and still do, that we love one another more than we ever thought we were capable of loving, and that if God wanted life to come out of that love, we wanted to welcome it.

And so we became parents. And if I had the time I could write a very thick volume with all the events, feelings and lessons that our little one has brought along with himself. Maybe one day.

And my baby did wake me up two hours after the conversation I mentioned above. And now I find myself incapable of going back to sleep, even though I know he will be up again in another hour or two. I cannot sleep because I lied to my husband. I told him I was scared of being woken up by our baby and finding that he wasn’t well. It is true that, a million times more than the empty shelves and full hospitals, the headlines and our bank accounts, my baby’s health and well-being is the one thing that keeps me up at night. But this time I was not only worried about being woken up to a sick baby. I was worried about being woken up. Period.

I was ashamed to admit that I was dreading the prospect of yet another night with no more than 2 consecutive hours of sleep; just as I am ashamed to admit many things that often come to me, like embarrassment that overcomes me when I see my disheveled, tired and thicker face on a Zoom call because I cannot recognize myself; or the guilt that fills me when I am suddenly saddened by the fear that I will never have a fulfilling career or work on any other project outside of my child; or the frustration that comes when I am less able than before to make myself understandable in English because I have been talking to my baby all day in Spanish and I am just too tired to do a language switch graciously.

The thing is that, these days, I am ashamed of many things. I think this is because, ultimately, all these things that came when I first encountered motherhood are conflicts between my old and new self. It is not that I do not have aspirations beyond my family and motherhood. It is that I am so new to this state of being that I have not managed to reconcile my new identities of mother and wife with that of the hard working and passionate person that wants to go and change the world for the better. It is not that I do not have dreams anymore. It is just that, most of the time, I am so preoccupied by my little one, and so tired, that I cannot think about them. Sometimes I do not even have time to shower, let alone plan my next career move.

And on the top of all this, my storm of changes has come at a time when it is close to illegal to leave one’s home. When it is truly impossible for family and friends to visit or for us to visit them and support each other in this process.

But this is where the story gets interesting; or at least interesting enough for me that I have decided to keep typing on my phone while breastfeeding at 2:30 in the morning.

As I mentioned above, I am a practicing Roman Catholic. I am not very good at keeping my church obligations, and I honestly do not consider myself to be very knowledgeable of my own Rite. But there is one piece of knowledge about the Roman Catholic tradition that is not that common, and to which I keep going back since the day my baby was born.

There is a service that priests are obliged to pray every night, and that was common for everyone to pray in ages past (but that’s another story for another time). Night prayer, or Compline, has a set of prayers that gets repeated every night, and one of them is the Song of Simeon, which goes like this:

Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine, secundum verbum tuum in pace:

Quia viderunt oculi mei salutare tuum

Quod parasti ante faciem omnium populorum:

Lumen ad revelationem gentium, et gloriam plebis tuae Israel.

Which in the English translation used in England and Wales is:

At last, all-powerful Master, You give leave to your servant to go in peace, according to your promise. For my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared for all nations, the light to enlighten the Gentiles, and give glory to Israel, your people.

Without the back story, someone could think that whoever is saying this is very excited about finally going to sleep after having a very awesome, but long, day. At least I did, and it turns out that that is not far from the truth.

According to the ancient tradition, a few centuries before the birth of Jesus Christ, Saint Simeon was told by the Lord that he was going to live until he saw with his own eyes the salvation that God had planned for humanity. If I were he, I would have woken up everyday expecting to see the sky opening into a sea of light to give way to an army of angels... or something like that. But one day he was going about his business in the temple, praying as usual, when a couple arrived to present their newborn child after the mandated time, according to Jewish law. When Mary put the baby Jesus in Simeon’s arms, he understood that he was beholding the salvation for which he had been waiting.

Love beyond measure. Hope that surpasses human comprehension. Unshakable Faith in a God Almighty Who has not forsaken his people. All of it contained in the little bundle of joy that is a baby.

Saint Simeon went to eternal rest after seeing the baby. And I dare to think that, even when sometimes I find it hard to believe that I will ever rest again, I see in my baby a little of what he saw in Christ. I dare to say it because all my struggles are true. But it is even truer that when I first held my baby after his birth, that I felt for the first time that my life - with all its ups and downs, happiness and hurt, light and darkness - was exactly the way it was supposed to be, just so that he could be in my arms in that exact moment, just as he was then.

I saw my own salvation. In my baby I found then, and every single day: the Faith in God needed to believe we will have what it takes to make a caring, nurturing and loving home for our child and ourselves; the Hope that keeps proclaiming that Earth can be as it is in Heaven if we are willing to work to make it so; the Love that keeps us, to this day, joyful, kind and united in the midst of the great uncertainty we are all living.

And my salvation, my love story, came in the time of COVID-19. My baby brought to our home the love and grace that Christ wanted us to have during one of the hardest times our generation has faced. These gifts help me everyday to go beyond the fear, the worry and the tiredness. It makes my husband and me grow quickly out of our selfishness because we have to be ready to love and protect our son. He gives us strength we did not know we had to stay out of despair and hopelessness, and to be joyful and grateful in a time of fear and uncertainty.

And this is just one of the inumerable things that God has prepared for his people.

I hope you manage to see what has been prepared for you because this, all of it, shall pass. And just like beloved friends and missed family, I also will reconcile my old and new selves, closer, stronger and more joyful than ever before.

I am so sure of this that I am still typing at 3:30 am, knowing that my little one will wake up again in an hour, or maybe two if I am lucky, because I hope our little story with an undiscovered ending reaches someone who is also struggling with sleepless nights, dirty nappies and/or social distancing with a simple message: you are not alone. God is with you, and so are all of us.

Gaby was born in 1992 in Mexico and moved to the UK for her university studies in 2012. Holding two STEM masters degrees from UCL, she is now pursuing a third one in Information and Data Science at UC Berkeley while working as a Data Engineer at BBOXX, a company that delivers affordable solar energy in developing countries. She is aiming to develop a career where data can help give visibility to the most vulnerable groups so they can get the services and support they deserve, and she wishes to do this while learning how to be a good mother, a loving wife and a true follower of Christ.