The Little Island 5 comments

By Jessica Mesman Griffith

I’m pregnant again, twelve weeks now, and I’m experiencing the same disconnected feeling I did the first time. I’ve never felt so alone as when there is life growing inside me. Every morbid impulse in my psyche flares in the first trimester, and my thoughts linger on mortality.

I felt it with Charlotte, but there’s something different this time. Back then I was in a sort of spiritual ecstasy. I’d just emerged from a major conversion experience, and I thrilled at the idea of aligning myself with Mary in the mysteries of the rosary. Charlotte was due in December, so even the lectionary supported my view of this parallel journey with the Madonna. There were, like now, endless days of morning sickness and lots of hormonal tears, but I was also high on the holiness of pregnancy.

Now, four years later, my spiritual life has cooled to something that I tell myself is more realistic. But the truth is God doesn’t seem so near, or so real. Without Him, I can’t get around the animal fact of pregnancy, the stubborn will of my body bent with gut-wrenching focus on the creation of another body, whether I can keep up or not.

I know I should pray, and so I try to pray. When I can’t concentrate I copy out the Psalms on little slips of paper and tuck them into books I can’t read—theology, O’Connor, Rumer Godden, stuff that used to fascinate me but at the moment seems either terrifying or remote. The rosary brings no comfort this time. I don’t want to meditate on motherhood, or pregnancy, or the baby. Not yet. I’m afraid.

Charlotte was sick last week, and Dave was away, so I let her sleep in our bed. I lit a candle and read her two random selections from the library: First The Creation, an oversized picture book with only the sparest text from Genesis and beautiful watercolors of the empty cosmos filling with life, and then The Little Island, a gentle Margaret Wise Brown book about the seasons passing on an island. Charlotte was soon asleep, her breath rattling in her chest. My arm brushed her fevered body as I turned the pages. I continued reading, feeling more peaceful than I have in weeks, comforted by the gentle rhythm of the text, the way the candlelight and shadows fell on the illustrations, the company of my daughter.

When I woke in the middle of the night, I read it again, The Little Island.

Around it the winds blew
And the birds flew
And the tides rose and fell on the shore.

Clouds passed over it
Fish swam around it
And the fog came in from the sea
And hid the little island
In a soft wet shadow.

A little black kitten comes to the island on a picnic and wants to know how this little land is still a part of the big world. A fish tells the kitten, “You must take it on faith.” What’s that? Asks the kitten. “Faith is to believe what I tell you about what you don’t know.” The fish goes on to tell the kitten how all the land is one land under the sea, and the cat’s eyes shine with the secret of it.

When I blew out the candle again I closed my eyes and saw a page from the other book, The Creation, the great black page of the empty cosmos, and I imagined God filling and filling and filling it, and finding it good. God creating. God resting, enjoying what he made. I lay there in the dark, feeling my body, life happening, growing, changing. I felt the warmth of the little girl sleeping beside me, and I remembered how she’d once made my insides burn the same way.

In the morning I googled John Donne and Margaret Wise Brown, assuming some English major mother before me had made the leap from the Little Island to “No Man Is an Island.” (It turns out that in the play Wit, an English professor takes comfort in Brown’s Runaway Bunny when John Donne’s sonnets fail her on her deathbed.)

Reading Donne’s meditation again online, my cheeks flushed, and my stomach flipped. I felt something I hadn’t felt in so many months: a rush of recognition. God with me.

But I don’t think I would have felt it if I had gone to Donne first—how many times have I read “No Man Is an Island?” But this time, Margaret Wise Brown had opened my heart.

Later that day, a friend posted a quote from Madeleine L’Engle as his Facebook status: “If it’s going to be too difficult for grown-ups, write it for children.”

No man is an island entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

A part of the world, and a world of its own.
All surrounded by the bright blue sea.

I was in my bed with my daughter beside me, a new life within. And for a moment, I was shining with the secret of it.