My pregnancy
The prayer from the Women’s Siddur for a mother to be calls for strength while carrying the baby, giving birth and for protection of mother and child during pregnancy and childbirth. It also expresses the hope that the child will walk G’ds paths and shows the desire of the praying mother that the baby will be born prosperous.
The Women’s Siddur gives instructions for how one can pray that a child may grow up to a wise and G’d fearing person and carefully shows my hope on my next pregnancy and birth. To read and pray this makes my pregnancy intense. I think it’s a correct way to pray this way and to involve The Eternal One closely to these very feminine things.
When the Eternal One, blessed be His name, had made me fruitful and gave children to me, I felt the happiest mother on earth. Motherhood is something without which I would not know how to manage. Meanwhile my eldest son is 16 years old and I have experienced the great responsibility and great concern about the welfare of my children. Nothing is ever completed and nothing is ever to bear without HaShem taking my concerns away. And there are countless blessings and beautiful, memorable moments. An intense enjoy of my job as a mother performs a far prevailed purpose to my life.
The baby in my belly is our sixth child. And still it’s a blessing and a new experience to be preferred to be the mother of this creature. G’d has entrusted it to us. Amazing the faith he trusts in my husband and me! While I’m doing everyday things, below my heart the miracle of weaving this new life is being accomplished. G’d makes it complete and sees to every aspect of the soul of our baby. Of course, my daughters would like to have a little sister and my sons a brother. With me they watch little baby pictures in magazines and cry loud: Oh! That is sweet! And: Oh! Lovely!
If I didn’t know that Adonai might help me, how would I be able to accomplish? That is how non-believing women do. It seems impossible to me. Adonai is the One Who makes my baby, who protects it and knows all the secrets. Every single hair He has counted and He monitors its welfare. Him I can ask for protection at every stage of pregnancy and express my hope so that the child will walk in His ways. My thanks to Adonai is very, very big. To express this to him and to plead for a good delivery for both of us is the least I can do to bring justice to His creation. I feel privileged because of the intensive contact with the baby before birth that I can do and feel.
But also responsibility because of good care of the body: good nutrients and sufficient rest. I will cherish the baby as it is born and nourish it with the milk that is produced by a similarly large miracle by the parent body.
My husband will be able to get to know the child and the children will play around with it. I will share the contact with other people and soon it will be that again we realize that this child takes up a special place: a legal place from Adonai himself. That he has decided that this child would come up, with a task that only he knows yet. While I keep praying for my family and the baby, and while the hope of a good birth is almost assumed, I still enjoy several weeks of the little one in my belly. All honor to HaShem. All honor to the Holy One, blessed be He.
Lilian van der Wel.