Nine.
Nine months.
Nine months ago, she experienced the most frightening and the most miraculous night of her life. Mary thought back to that night. It seemed so long ago. She had experienced so much since. Embarrassment and pride, joy and sorrow, love and selfishness, weakness and strength, faith and fear. The shunning of her friends, the scorn and ridicule of her neighbors, the shock and disappointment of her parents, the disillusionment, then trusting acceptance of her promised Joseph. It seemed a lifetime, nine months. It was the lifetime of her son.
Here she was, trying to rest on a small pallet in the back of a stable cut into the side of a hill. With earth and rock on three sides, top, and bottom, the stable was damp and dark, and only slightly warmer than the exposed part of the building. The damp, woolly smell of the sheep competed with the acrid stench of their excrement to fill her nostrils. The racket of prized male goats butting against stall doors. The squeak of mice and the rush of pigeon wings. The sight of an unsupervised kid…. goat or child peering around the edge of the next stall. Privacy was nonexistent.
Joseph was gone again. Picking up small jobs, sometimes in his trade, sometimes just unskilled labor. Whatever he could find in order to earn a few coins to keep them fed. Joseph thought she didn’t notice when he slipped most of his food onto her plate, making sure that she and the baby were well nourished. He was so considerate of her needs. As miserable as she was, her one joy was see the love he had for her, shining in his eyes and clear through his every action.
“God of my father’s father,” she breathed,” will your son be born here? Will your son be born tonight? I’ve carried him for nine months. You’ll have to carry him now. Will he be soiled by the filth of the stable as we are fouled by the obscenity of sin? I can’t keep him clean. You’ll have to cleanse him, my God, even as you purify me. Only you can. Only you.”