Pregnancy Reveal Quotes

From her thighs, she gives you life And how you treat she who gives you life Shows how much you value the life given to you by the Creator. And from seed to dust There is ONE soul above all others -- That you must always show patience, respect, and trust And this woman is your mother. And when your soul departs your body And your deeds are weighed against the feather There is only one soul who can save yours And this woman is your mother. And when the heart of the universe Asks her hair and mind, Whether you were gentle and kind to her Her heart will be forced to remain silent And her hair will speak freely as a separate entity, Very much like the seaweed in the sea -- It will reveal all that it has heard and seen. This woman whose heart has seen yours, First before anybody else in the world, And whose womb had opened the door For your eyes to experience light and more -- Is your very own MOTHER. So, no matter whether your mother has been cruel, Manipulative, abusive, mentally sick, or simply childish How you treat her is the ultimate test. If she misguides you, forgive her and show her the right way With simple wisdom, gentleness, and kindness. And always remember, That the queen in the Creator's kingdom, Who sits on the throne of all existence, Is exactly the same as in yours. And her name is, THE DIVINE MOTHER.

Now in my eleven years of conventional life I had learned many things and one of them is what it means to be convicted of rape--I do not mean the man who did it, I mean the woman to whom it was done. Rape is one of the Christian mysteries, it creates a luminous and beautiful tableau in people's minds; and as I listened furtively to what nobody would allow me to hear straight out, I slowly came to understand that I was face to face with one of those feminine disasters, like pregnancy, like disease, like weakness; she was not only the victim of the act but in some strange way its perpetrator; somehow she had attracted the lightening that struck her out of a clear sky. A diabolical chance--which was not chance--had revealed her to all of us as she truly was, in her secret inadequacy, in that wretched guiltiness which she had kept hidden for seventeen years but which now finally manifested in front of everybody. Her secret guilt was this: She was Cunt. She had "lost" something. Now the other party to the incident had manifested his essential nature, too; he was Prick--but being Prick is not a bad thing. In fact, he had "gotten away with" something (possibly what she had "lost"). And there I was at eleven years of age: She was out late at night. She was in the wrong part of town. Her skirt was too short and that provoked him. She liked having her eye blacked and her head banged against the sidewalk. I understood this perfectly. (I reflected thus in my dream, in my state of being a pair of eyes in a small wooden box stuck forever on a grey, geometric plane--or so I thought.) I too had been guilty of what had been done to me, when I came home from the playground in tears because I had been beaten up by bigger children who were bullies. I was dirty. I was crying. I demanded comfort. I was being inconvenient. I did not disappear into thin air.

Spiritual assistance isn't there to make things easy and have everything go your way, but to help you grow into the fuller version of who you are. Rather than revealing that you're on the wrong track, shake-up and breakup often indicate that you're really starting to get somewhere. Of course, it's hard to feel this way while getting battered around by the severe crosswinds of our time, but that's when you most need to know it. In the Western world we lack a clear set of guidelines for times like these. We lack meaningful rites of passage. We fail to equip people for knowing what to expect at key crossroads of the soul. We lack substantial guides for teaching individuals how to stay with their deep inner truth when all hell breaks loose. We get thrown into extreme life-changing passages like birth, first blood, first sex, marriage, pregnancy, child-bearing, divorce and death with only superficial guidance, and no deep cultural support for grasping the full significance of what we're coming out of and going into. So disruptions along the way don't usually appear as well-designed hurdles of initiation in a spiritual journey. Usually they appear as impossible dilemmas that bust your ass and belie evidence of any greater design. Major rites of passage in the Western world rarely come in the form of sacred rituals but are embedded within mundane circumstance. It takes special perception to recognize the initiatory path through the chaos. It takes a shamanic perspective to realize that, like a winepress of the gods, rigorous challenges are there to squeeze out your impurities and release your essence. ...

Archy was tired of Nat, and he was tired of Gwen and of her pregnancy with all the unsuspected depths of his insufficiency that it threatened to reveal. He was tired of Brokeland, and of black people, and of white people, and of all their schemes and grudges, their frontings, hustles and corruptions. Most of all, he was tired of being a holdout, a sole survivor, the last coconut hanging on the last palm tree on the last atoll in the path of the great wave of late-modern capitalism, waiting to be hammered flat.

We've never crossed paths before. I've never seen you walking down the street. I don't know the first thing there is to know about you. And the lines of my palm do not reveal nor disclose any untold secrets. Yet, here I am, holding the door as I whisper in your ear: "I'll be right across the street when you're done, my child.

How could it be, she wondered. How could it be that the simple act of having a child did this to you? Had every birth in the world ruined every woman in the world? Was this a secret they’d been keeping, or had she just not been listening? Underneath all the vacuous, cruel wisdom the women who saw her in her late stages of pregnancy imparted to her, most of which had to do with banking sleep or measuring every precious moment because it all goes so fast, were they really telling her to mark her personhood? The other women in her prenatal yoga class had kept up an email chain, and in their messages, she tried to discern that they, too, were terrified and violated and sad and broken, but they weren’t. Trust her, they just weren’t. They made jokes about how they were tired and it was a tragedy that one of them had had an epidural and it was a tragedy that one of them couldn’t produce enough milk for her baby and had to supplement with formula. She wanted to write back to tell them she couldn’t look in the mirror at herself. She wanted someone to understand how small she was now. She wanted to ask one of them if this was the real her—if the real her had been revealed to her suddenly that day in the hospital, or if she would somehow bounce back. Bouncing back was a language they understood: their vaginas needed to bounce back, their breasts needed to bounce back, would their abdomens ever bounce back. With a few small adjustments, these women would acclimate to life. They would recognize themselves. But would Rachel? Would Rachel bounce back? The entire phrase “bouncing back” seemed to her like it existed to make fun of her. There was no bouncing. There was no back.

Should we consider allowing parents to fully sequence their children’s genomes and potentially terminate pregnancies with such known devastating genetic mutations? We would certainly eliminate Erika’s mutation from the human gene pool—but we would eliminate Erika as well. I will not minimize the enormity of Erika’s suffering, or that of her family—but there is, indubitably, a deep loss in that. To fail to acknowledge the depth of Erika’s anguish is to reveal a flaw in our empathy. But to refuse to acknowledge the price to be paid in this trade-off is to reveal, conversely, a flaw in our humanity.

Above all, there has never been a community that did not cohabit with its dead. But today, socially, the dead are no more. They are deceased. They are ontic has-beens. And with the vanishing of the dead, the most significant distinction between homo and all other primates is gone. When you show me a paleolithic skull, I recognize it as human not because of the cubic measure of the brain or because of the hand tools found in the grave but because of signs of burial. These reveal that this "person" lived a life on the borderline between the seen and the unseen, in the presence of the living and the dead. Neither the dead nor other invisible beings had to show themselves to be considered social realities.

Many mothers don't want to appear vulnerable, both our of fear of being diminished, infantilized, or threatened with unwanted interventions, and because they know they are almost solely in charge of keeping a new human being alive. Who the hell has time for vulnerability? It is a profound testament to the strength and resilience of women that so many of them suffer from debilitating fear, sadness, and confusion and yet they soldier on working, taking care of their families, getting the myriad everyday chores done. The fact that they're asked to do so, to carry and bear alone not only the child but the chemical and biological shifts, the solitude, the loss, the grief, the complex questions of their own transformation, reveals a society that values mothers only as passive, docile, keeping their motherhood safely tucked in the sentimental cultural space reserved for it. The idea is not to study the mother, to listen to her, to recognize her in her fullness, to explore her becoming, but to keep her contained: prevent her from causing harm, encourage her to follow the rules. Anxiety is an excellent weapon for containing women; it needs only to be gently stoked in the context of pregnancy and women will weaponize it against themselves.

She didn’t know what to do. There was no good answer. She was smart enough to know that. And dumb enough to be in this situation. “Leni?” She heard her mother’s voice, recognized the concerned tone, but it didn’t matter. Leni felt distance spreading between them. That was how change came, she supposed: in the quiet of things unspoken and truths unacknowledged. “How was Matthew?” Mama asked. She walked over to Leni, peeled off her parka, hung it up, and led her to the sofa, but neither of them sat down. “He’s not even him,” Leni said. “He can’t think or talk or walk. He didn’t look at me, just screamed.” “He’s not paralyzed, though. That’s good, right?” That was what Leni had thought, too. Before. But what good was being able to move if you couldn’t think or see or talk? It might have been better if he’d died down there. Kinder. But the world was never kind, especially not to kids. “I know you think it’s the end of the world, but you’re young. You’ll fall in love again and … What’s that in your hand?” Leni held out her fist, uncurled her fingers to reveal the thin vial in her hand. Mama took it, studied it. “What is this?” “It’s a pregnancy test,” Leni said. “Blue means positive.” She thought about the chain of choices that had led her here. A ten-degree shift anywhere along the way and everything would be different. “It must have happened the night we ran away. Or before? How do you know a thing like that?” “Oh, Leni,” Mama said. What Leni needed now was Matthew. She needed him to be him, whole. Then they would be in this together. If Matthew were Matthew, they’d get married and have a baby. It was 1978, for God’s sake; maybe they didn’t even have to get married. The point was, they

Around Christmas 2003, we visited Chris’s parents in Texas. I found myself exceptionally hungry, though I couldn’t figure out why. When we came back to California, I just felt something was off. Could I be…pregnant? Nah. I bought a pregnancy test just in case. Chris and I had always planned to have children, but we weren’t in a rush about it. In fact, we had only recently decided to be “a little less careful.” It was a compromise between our spontaneous impulses and our careful planning instincts, which we both shared. We figured, if it happens somewhere in the next year… I was upstairs in the house working when I decided to take a break and check things out. Wow. WOW!!! Chris happened to be home fiddling with something in the garage. I ran downstairs, holding the stick in my hand. When I got there, I held it up, waving. “Hey, babe,” he said, looking at me as if I were waving a sword. “Come here,” I said. “I have to show you something.” He came over. I showed him the stick. “Okay?” “Look!” “What is it?” “Look at this!” Obviously, he wasn’t familiar with home pregnancy tests. Maybe that’s a guy thing-given that the tests reveal either your worst nightmare or one of the most exciting events of your life. I’d wager every woman in America knows what they are and how they work. Slowly it dawned on him. “Oh my God,” he said, stunned. “Are you…?” “Yes!” We confirmed it at the doctor’s soon after. I know you’re supposed to wait something like twelve weeks before telling anyone-there’s so much that can go wrong-but we couldn’t keep that kind of secret to ourselves for more than a few days. We ended up sending packages with an ultrasound and baby booties-one pink, one blue-to our parents, telling them we had a late Christmas surprise and to call us so we could be on the phone when they opened them.

Occasionally, you may have the confusing case of a mother who appears to be in active labor, with contractions coming every five minutes, lasting up to a minute. But after a few hours, contractions taper off, and internal exam reveals her to be only 2 or 3 cm dilated. Women who are strongly athletic or highly intellectual by nature tend to this pattern, based on the inability (at least at this juncture) to let go and cross into the active phase. Uterine inertia often results, with a meal and some sleep the best solution. Labor will soon start up again—and dilation may take place quite quickly.

Some of her confidence faded. "I'm not quite as sexy as I once was, I'm afraid." He growled. "Nonsense." Lifting the hem of her top, he exposed her belly and traced the stretch marks left from her pregnancy. "These are battle scars you should wear proudly.

And Mary and the Church both, like You, labor for the world. Mary's labor figures, reveals, and clarifies the Church's own labor. The Church, like Mary labors to bear divine presence into the world. The Church, like Mary, participates in Your new creation and hearkens to Your first. In the figure of Mary, creation, church, and pregnancy all entwine as images of one another. A pregnant woman's body, the Church expectant, and You, the womb of creation, all come together in the image of pregnancy.

When my wife was pregnant with each of our two children, I used to sing to them in the womb. It was an old Russian song that my grandmother had sung to me, a child’s song about her love for life and for her mother—“May there always be sunshine, may there always be good times, may there always be Mama, and may there always be me.” I sang it—in Russian and in English—during the last trimester of pregnancy, when I knew the auditory system was wired up enough to register sound coming through the amniotic fluid. Then in the first week after each child was born, I invited a colleague over for a “research study.” (I know, it wasn’t controlled, but it was fun.) Without revealing the prenatal song, I sang three different songs in turn. No doubt about it—when the babies heard the familiar song, their eyes opened wider and they became more alert, so that my colleague could easily identify the change in their attention level. A perceptual memory had been encoded. (Now my kids won’t let me sing; I probably sounded better underwater.)

This is why murder and suicide are both sins. It is God's prerogative alone, as Creator, to give and take innocent life..asserts human beings are the ones who control life and death..A moral duty to honor life supersedes the personal hardship that might come due to pregnancy..Jesus reveals that this man was born blind so that one day he might see, know, declare, and delight in the glory of Christ..If the rapist were caught, would we encourage this woman to murder him in order to get emotional relief?..the God of the gospel has a proven track record of working all things, including evil things, for his good purposes..he has the power, love, goodness, and grace to give you and me all that we need to persevere through difficulty..It's moral silliness and cultural suicide to say that government shouldn't take away people's right to choose. What matters is what we're choosing..Of course we are pro-choice on these and thousands of other things..I plead for you to step out of a muddled middle road that says, "I may not choose abortion, but I don't think we should take away others' right to choose it"..Such thinking is not enlightened tolerance; it is sinful indifference..God does not desire for you or anyone else to live with the pain of regret. It is altogether right to hate sin in your history. The pain of past sin is often a powerful deterrent to future sin, but don't let it rob you of the peace God has designed for you in the present.

At one point when I was in the middle of the first season, I asked myself why I would want to watch a conservative Democrat destroy teachers’ unions and have joyless sex with a woman who looks like a very young teenager. I still had not answered the question when Claire pushed things to the next level in a scene so intensely creepy that it might count as the most revolting thing I have ever witnessed on television. A longtime member of the couple’s Secret Service security detail is dying of cancer, and Claire goes to visit him alone. On his deathbed, he reveals that he was always secretly in love with her and thought that Frank wasn’t good enough for her. Her response is almost incomprehensible in its cruelty—she mocks and taunts him for thinking he could ever attain a woman like her, and then puts her hand down his pants and begins to give him a handjob, all the while saying, in true perverse style, “This is what you wanted, right?” Surely Claire doesn’t have to emotionally destroy a man who is dying of cancer—and yet perhaps in a way she does, because she uses it as a way of convincing herself that Frank really is the right man for her. Not only could an average, hardworking, sentimental man never satisfy her, but she would destroy him. By contrast, Frank not only can take her abuse, but actively thrives on it, as she does on his. Few images of marriage as a true partnership of equals are as convincing as this constant power struggle between two perverse creeps. Claire is not the first wife in the “high-quality TV drama” genre to administer a humiliating handjob. In fact, she is not even the first wife to administer a humiliating handjob to a man who is dying of cancer. That distinction belongs to Skyler White of Breaking Bad, who does the honors in the show’s pilot. It is intended as a birthday treat for her husband Walt, who is presumably sexually deprived due to his wife’s advanced pregnancy, and so in contrast to Claire’s, it would count as a generous gesture if not for the fact that Skyler continues to work on her laptop the entire time, barely even acknowledging Walt’s presence in the room. In her own way, Skyler is performing her dominance just as much as Claire was with her cancer patient, but Skyler’s detachment from the act makes it somehow even creepier than Claire’s.

It's a sad thing, of course, but miscarriages reveal the wisdom of nature. It's for the best that you don't give birth when it isn't good for your health. A miscarriage indicates that the woman can conceive, so it is not necessarily a fertility matter.

During a belated New Year’s cleaning, I come across my grad-school coursework on the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl. Scanning my notes, I begin to remember his story. Frankl was born in 1905, and as a boy, he became intensely interested in psychology. By high school, he began an active correspondence with Freud. He went on to study medicine and lecture on the intersection of psychology and philosophy, or what he called logotherapy, from the Greek word logos, or “meaning.” Whereas Freud believed that people are driven to seek pleasure and avoid pain (his famous pleasure principle), Frankl maintained that people’s primary drive isn’t toward pleasure but toward finding meaning in their lives. He was in his thirties when World War II broke out, putting him, a Jew, in jeopardy. Offered immigration to the United States, he turned it down so as not to abandon his parents, and a year later, the Nazis forced Frankl and his wife to have her pregnancy terminated. In a matter of months, he and other family members were deported to concentration camps, and when Frankl was finally freed, three years later, he learned that the Nazis had killed his wife, his brother, and both of his parents. Freedom under these circumstances might have led to despair. After all, the hope of what awaited Frankl and his fellow prisoners upon their release was now gone—the people they cared about were dead, their families and friends wiped out. But Frankl wrote what became an extraordinary treatise on resilience and spiritual salvation, known in English as Man’s Search for Meaning. In it, he shares his theory of logotherapy as it relates not just to the horrors of concentration camps but also to more mundane struggles. He wrote, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” Indeed, Frankl remarried, had a daughter, published prolifically, and spoke around the world until his death at age ninety-two. Rereading these notes, I thought of my conversations with Wendell. Scribbled in my grad-school spiral were the words Reacting vs. responding = reflexive vs. chosen. We can choose our response, Frankl was saying, even under the specter of death. The same was true of John’s loss of his mother and son, Julie’s illness, Rita’s regrettable past, and Charlotte’s upbringing. I couldn’t think of a single patient to whom Frankl’s ideas didn’t apply, whether it was about extreme trauma or an interaction with a difficult family member. More than sixty years later, Wendell was saying I could choose too—that the jail cell was open on both sides. I particularly liked this line from Frankl’s book: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

Although the reveal goes against Penny’s wishes not to have kids, the writers chose to have her get pregnant as a way to pay off the line from the pilot where Leonard, in a moment of wishful—and maybe delusional—thinking, says to Sheldon, “Our babies will be smart and beautiful.” But many viewers and critics had a problem with Penny’s surprise pregnancy, including Vulture’s Kathryn VanArendonk who wrote at the time (May 17, 2019), “There are several reasons why this makes me want to rip my hair out… This was always Leonard’s vision, but never Penny’s,” and “In an otherwise heartwarming finale… it’s infuriating and unfortunate that The Big Bang Theory would essentially erase a woman’s right to choose from her own narrative.

Excluding her from her life and her pregnancy, acting like she was ashamed of where she came from. According to Mom, Natasha wouldn’t even let her bring a dish to the gender reveal party. (Just let the woman make you samosas, you brat! Everyone likes them.)

After a few more minutes, Josh guzzled back the rest of his beer. “Gotta head out. Elizabeth is making me go to a cake-tasting party tonight. Since when did everything about weddings turn into a damn event? I’ve had to go to a food tasting, a band showcase, and a floral-presentation party. Vegas is sounding better and better.” “Just wait.” Chase stood. “Anna had a bridal shower, a pregnancy-announcement party, and a gender-reveal party. You’re just getting started, buddy.” “What the hell is a gender-reveal party?” The parents-to-be give a sealed envelope that contains the sex of the baby to a bakery, and the baker puts pink frosting inside the cupcakes if it’s a girl and blue if it’s a boy. Then they have a party, and everyone finds out at the same time, including the parents-to-be. Pure. Fucking. Torture. Whatever happened to the kid popping out and the doctor giving it a smack and yelling it’s a boy over the thing crying?

Lying by Johannes in the darkness, envying him the unquestioned habit of sleep, the way he could remove himself, I wished that I might pause, take stock; that is a thought that comes back to me now: that I would like to pause pregnancy like a film, to walk away, do something else, returning later when I have had time to rest or think. I had always, before my pregnancy, regarded my body as a kind of tool, a necessary mechanism, largely self-sustaining, which, unless malfunctioning, did what I instructed of it, and so to have my agency so abruptly curtailed, revealed as little more than conceit, felt like betrayal. I no longer listened to my own command. Inside me, while I wished that I might be able to be elsewhere, that I might leave my body in the frowsty sheets and go downstairs to sit in the dark kitchen, unswollen and cool, cells split to cells, thoughtless and ascending, forming heart and lungs, eyes, ears- a hand grew nails- this child already going about its business, its still uncomprehending mind unreachable, apart.

In classical art this 'aura' surrounding motherhood depicts repose. The dominant culture projects pregnancy as a time of quiet waiting. We refer to the woman as 'expecting,' as though this new life were flying in from another planet and she sat in her rocking chair by the window, occasionally moving the curtain aside to see whether the ship is coming. The image of uneventful waiting associated with pregnancy reveals clearly how much the discourse of pregnancy leaves out the subjectivity of the woman. From the point of view of others pregnancy is primarily a time of waiting and watching, when nothing happens. For the pregnant subject, on the other hand, pregnancy has a temporality of movement, growth, and change. The pregnant subject is not simply a splitting which the two halves lie open and still, but a dialectic. The pregnant woman experiences herself as a source and participant in a creative process. Though she does not plan and direct it, neither does it merely wash over; rather, she is this process, this change. Time stretches out, moments and days take on a depth because she experiences more changes in herself, her body. Each day, each week, she looks at herself for signs of transformation... For others the birth of an infant may only be a beginning, but for the birthing woman it is a conclusion as well. It signals the close of a process she has been undergoing for nine months, the leaving of this unique body she has moved through, always surprising her a bit in its boundary changes and inner kicks. Especially if this is her first child she experiences the birth as a transition to a new self that she may both desire and fear. She fears a loss of identity, as though on the other side of the birth she herself became a transformed person, such that she would 'never be the same again.

The Hope family murders. Lenora’s pregnancy. Mary’s death. They’re all tied together in a complex knot of secrets, lies, and misdeeds both past and present. I’m certain that if I can unravel it, the truth will be revealed. About Carter and Mary, yes, but most of all about Lenora. She’s the person I need to understand the most.

Both of them walked down and sat in the garden. “Every day, I cried silently. My loneliness became my burden, and the bishop chained me with authority. I knew he had exploited me day after day, and sex was his recreation. After two years, I realized I was pregnant and told him about it. The bishop replied that Mother Catherine had become pregnant twice, even though she regularly took the pills. The bishop told me the embryo could be aborted in a hospital five hundred kilometres from there, and he knew some doctors there. I refused to undergo the abortion. Then, in the convent, I told the mother I was pregnant but did not reveal the pregnancy source. Within a week, she asked me to vacate the convent and closed its door before me, and I was on the streets,” Ann Maria narrated. “It shows the brutality of the church. There is no love, no mercy,” Ammu reacted.