There is a woman in the book of Samuel who prayed so hard for a child that the priest watching her mistook her for a drunk. Her lips moved. No sound came out. She promised God that if she was given a son, she would give him back, and then she kept that promise in a way I still do not fully understand, weaning him young and delivering him with her own hands to a house that was not hers, to be raised by someone else, to grow up seeing his mother once a year.

Hannah’s prayer became the model for how Jewish tradition understands prayer itself, quiet, wordless, born in the heart before it ever reaches the mouth. I used to think her story was about longing for a child. Now I think it might be about something harder, about what a mother does with a love that has nowhere left to go once the child she prayed for is no longer hers to hold every day.

After birth, a mother’s womb slowly folds itself back into the body until, from the outside, it is almost impossible to tell it was ever stretched at all.

The heart never does.

It keeps the shape of every child who has ever lived inside it, permanently widened by each child who passed through her into a body of their own. My heartbeat has sounded different since becoming a mother. Sometimes it carries a quiet, expansive joy, the kind that heals old places inside me I did not know were still waiting to be loved. Sometimes it pounds with the terrifying knowledge that pieces of me now walk through the world in bodies that are no longer mine to protect.

When my oldest daughter stepped onto the camp bus this summer, I felt my breath go with her. My arms........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)