It's a Miracle!

My daughter gave birth this weekend to a precious baby boy for whom I already feel a lot of love though I just met him.  As two sets of grandparents and nurses gathered around the happy but exhausted couple holding their newborn I heard the word over and over.  It’s a miracle.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I am thrilled that mom and kid are healthy, ten fingers and toes, etc.  But I somehow missed the miracle part.

Miracles are extraordinary positive events manifesting divine intervention in human affairs; events that cannot be explained by natural or scientific laws.  Yep, I missed that.  I missed it somewhere during the nine months she carried this baby and gained weight and bought fat clothes and waddled around and lost sleep and had a hard time breathing.  I missed it during her 17 hours of labor, the pain reduction meds, all the dilation effacement discussion, the OB/GYN delivery, the crew of nurses who measured and cleaned the infant, and the cutting of the cord.  It all looked to me like biology at work supported by a team of medical professionals.  Nothing mysterious happened.  There were no angels in the hallway.  There were no shepherds.  The heavens did not open.  Stealing someone else’s’ line, I did say, “This is my grandson with whom I am well pleased.”  In fact, all I observed was one wise man.

As I looked at all my daughter endured coupled with all the support she got I see nothing miraculous at all.  In fact, if I see anything, it is the curse of bearing children.  This is a long, painful, tedious event that causes women to be shape shifters and scream in pain. 

If the Bible is to be believed, and I do not think it is, then all this happens because Adam and Eve sought knowledge when god told them not to so they were kicked out of the garden and destined to have such agony in childbirth.  OK, so god was mad at them and punished them, though his response seems pretty juvenile to me.  “I’m kicking you out of the house and I’m going to make you hurt.”  Well, I guess it is better than what he did at Sodom and Gomorrah and what he did to almost everyone with the flood.  Still, how long is god going to hold this grudge against Adam and Eve?  How many generations does he have to punish?  How can we call him a loving god when he is so mean?

And if childbirth for humans is part of god’s grand design he did a terrible job.  Chickens and gold fish have it better than human females.  Why women cannot just lay an egg, keep it warm and wait for it to hatch I don’t know.  We have this long term, painful ordeal while we still think we are up a few rungs on the evolutionary ladder from birds and fish and reptiles.

Nope.  This was no miracle.  If it is a product of divine intervention then god should keep his hands out of it because he is just making it worse.  If there is a miracle it is the epidural.