For me, the celebration of Christ’s birth is inseparable from the rising panic of progressing labor, the ever-tightening of contractions as the clock winds down to transition, the impending delivery that is coming, ready or not. Thoughts of Mary bring me back to moments of pushing, involuntary thrashing, gushing waters, blood, and a squalling newborn, slippery and covered in vernix. That first Christmas birth, scary and far from home, echoes in the recesses of my mind every time I hear about a birth in desperate circumstances: a war zone. The back of a taxi. A prison. 

I’m not saying there’s not beauty and power in the work of birth, because of course there is: in the few days after my first child was born, I felt like a badass who could do anything. It was a serious high. But there were unexpected and unsettling experiences with my body, too, like all of the unpleasant smells emanating from me: the musk of lochia, the tang of sour milk, the shockingly strong BO. I worried about whether I was normal  when I passed blood clots that were dark, gelatinous golf balls and when I reflexively kneaded the loose dough of my stomach, wondering if my skin would ever again feel non-alien to my own hands. These are the things, mostly unshared, that many women experience after birth. Did Mary experience them, too?

As with most stories passed down through history (and far too many stories recorded even today), the female parts of the Nativity are largely absent. The birth aspect of Jesus’ birth is completely sanitized, wiped clean by generations of male religious leaders, many of whom never even married, let alone became fathers, and viewed women’s bodies as foreign at best and disgusting at worst. And so when I read the euphemistic “And she brought forth her first born son,” all I can do is fill in the gaps with my own experience, my own emotions, my own body.

I think about Mary, the lone female in each Nativity set, surrounded by male shepherds, male wisemen, even male angels, and I think, did God not care to send messengers to tell women about the birth of Mary’s son? Or, far more likely, was Mary tended to by midwives and female relatives, visited by female shepherds, cared for by women bringing food and necessities as they have done and will do forever and ever, amen, and we just don’t know about them because even scripture (too often, especially scripture) erases the lived experiences of women?

When I think about Jesus, I think about women: those he interacted with, the harm done in his name to women in the past and present, and what his message could potentially mean for women today and in the future. I think about the captive being set free and about the last being first. If I could write my own book of Lamentations, these words would groan from the depths of my being, not unlike the half yell, half moan that labor drew from me: How long, O Lord, before women in this world–in our governments, in our healthcare systems, in our churches–will be seen as much “fully human” as men are? How long until women and their bodies belong to themselves and not the men who rule over them, whether as husbands or fathers or legislators or priests; how long until all spaces and roles, including those of speaking and serving in your name, are open to all; how long until women no longer face harassment and violence and discrimination and death just because they are women?

If we cannot talk honestly about the truth of birth, whether Jesus’ or any other baby’s, and if we continue to erase and dismiss the lived experience of women and center the lives and bodies of men, how can we ever view Mary, or any woman, as fully human? In the words of Kaitlyn Shetler’s poem, below, “sometimes I wonder if this is all too vulgar to ask in a church full of men without milk stains on their shirts or coconut oil on their breasts preaching from pulpits off limits to the mother of god.”

Sometimes I Wonder
By Kaitlyn Shetler

sometimes i wonder
if mary breastfed jesus
if she cried out when he bit her
or if she sobbed when he would not latch

and sometimes i wonder
if this is all too vulgar
to ask in a church
full of men
without milk stains on their shirts
or coconut oil on their breasts
preaching from pulpits off limits to the mother of god

but then i think of feeding jesus
birthing jesus
the expulsion of blood
and smell of sweat
the salt of a mother’s tears
onto the soft head of the salt of the earth
feeling lonely
and tired
hungry
annoyed
overwhelmed
Loving

and i think
if the vulgarity of birth is not
honestly preached
by men who carry power but not burden
who carry privilege but not labor
who carry authority but not submission
then it should not be preached at all

because the real scandal of the birth of god
lies in the cracked nipples of a
14 year old
and not in the sermons of ministers
who say women
are too delicate
to lead