It is Mary who scares me the most when it comes to the Christmas story. Her line, “May your word to me be fulfilled,” terrifies me, though I’m not too happy about all her pondering and treasuring, and not sharing any of her experience either. If anyone had stories to share—if anyone could’ve started a Mommy Blog—it seemed that Mary could, and quite frankly, I thought it was rude she kept them to herself.

She was 12, wasn’t she, when all this started? Or was it 13? Either age doesn’t seem to be the peak of rationality and maturity.

When I was 12, I was in a choir called, “All God’s Children.” Every Saturday I met up with a few of the other Lord’s kids at the el stop on Oak Park Avenue. Together, we’d head downtown, each of us with a piping hot bag of popcorn from the health food store on the corner, with enough veggie salt to make it not healthy. For most of the day, we sang. We sang, and we sang, and we sang.

We’d perform, too. Not just in churches, but in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Hall, in polyester skirts and vests so thick they couldn’t burn when some of us held candles to them.

My priority at 12 was floor hockey. It remains to be the only sport I’ve ever been good at, and probably it’s because I’m left-handed, and the coach put me in left wing and since it seemed nobody else in the Chicagoland area was left-handed, I turned out to be a secret weapon. The game would start, my friend Laura faked a pass to my friend Mandy and passed to me instead. Nobody ever guarded me because in soccer, basketball, baseball, and really, even tetherball, there was no need, I was wide open and before you could say, “Da Bears,” I flicked the puck in the goal from almost half court. The three of us could get this done in less than ten seconds. Our record was seven, and I share all this because at 12, if Gabriel had paid me a visit and told me what he told Mary, the first question out of my mouth would’ve been, “But what about hockey practice?” Then, I would’ve gone to find my dad and basically tell on Gabriel. If anyone could get me out of something I wasn’t interested in doing, it would be my dad.

And in fact, it was my dad who got me out of the choir. I have a thick file folder of papers from my past on a bookshelf, and one of these documents is a letter typed by my dad on a Commadore 64 stating incredibly eloquently that instead of participating in choir, his daughter would rather play Rec and Ed floor hockey.

There is one song I remember well, though. Actually, I feel it more than I can sing it. It’s about Mary walking through thorny woods. We sang it in three part harmony and it was the most complicated song I ever sang but I remember standing with all my adolescent and pre-adolescent peers, all of us with voices that sounded one way now, but with no guarantee we’d sound this same way next week, and thinking, “Finally! A Mary I can walk next to!” The song was dark and mysterious, but there was a joyful acceptance about it, too.

Maybe Mary was pondering and treasuring, but she was doubting and she was fearful, too. Maybe it was the doubt and the fear that allowed her to tell God, “May your word to me be fulfilled.” And if that’s the case, then maybe I could walk through the woods with my doubt and my fear and tell God the same thing.

I know something about the song made me feel as though I was in the woods with Mary—that I could be in the woods with her – that I wanted to go into the woods at all.

It was Mary’s song that calmed me on a November morning in a hospital when I was miscarrying, and it was Mary’s song that floated around me—like an angel, like Gabriel, perhaps—on an October afternoon the following year moments before I met Hadley Grace. Two years later, and exactly three to the date of when I’d miscarried, Harper Anne was born. Hours before that though, I was walking the maternity ward imagining Mary’s thorny woods and hoping that my steps would bring my contractions back so I had the strength to give birth. Can you imagine, hoping for pain so that life can come? Certainly Mary understood this, and maybe that’s why she too walked. 

More than the proper positioning of my hands on a hockey stick, I remember the impossibility of Mary, and the miracle she was willing to help bring forth.

My girls are now Mary’s age, and I’ll confess, I’m not too keen on them telling me a story about some angel paying them a visit, but I do think this song I’ve been treasuring and pondering is probably ready to be passed along. It can still be mine, but it is theirs, too.

Because they’ll have thorny woods to walk through—woods that are not mine to tread upon. The broken branches, the tree stumps, the unpaved trails are theirs to figure out. Maybe it’s a good thing Mary didn’t tell too much of her specifics. Maybe it’s enough to know that she was young, that she was unprepared, that God loved her, and knowing all this, she said, “May it be so.”

Photo by N’tima Preusser.