Please God, don't let me be like Mary

Caucasian Mary with absolutely ripped Caucasian baby Jesus throwing a gang sign. 

As a teenager, the end of Christmas always brought about relief from one of my greatest fears: immaculate conception. 

In all Christian faith traditions, Mary, the mother of Jesus, gets a lot of play leading up to Christmas. An angel comes to her and tells her she is going to have God’s son. She wonders how that could be since she’s a virgin. The angel assures her God will take care of it. Her fiancé’s pissed because he thinks she cheated, but then the angel comes in a dream and tells him the whole deal with Mary, so Joseph becomes cool with it. Then some months and an uncomfortable road trip later, boom: baby Jesus. 

I grew up evangelical (and still mostly consider myself as such, if I could divorce all of the conservative political grossness that is attached to it from the legit tenets of my faith), so Mary isn’t quite the big deal she is to, say, Catholics. Like we believed Mary eventually did the deed with Joseph and don’t pray to her or anything. But she - and her virginal conception - are still highly revered and discussed. You hear the cutesy “baby in a manger” stories as a kid, and when you get a little older, you learn that there was almost a 100% likelihood that Mary was a teenager when all of this happened. 

Which brings me to my great teenage fear of immaculate conception. To understand this fear, you must understand the role premarital sex played in my evangelical upbringing. Basically, it was the worst thing you could ever do. Like three steps worse than listening to secular music, and only a small step below murdering someone and dancing in the rivers of blood that flowed from their body. I know people who got married right out of high school just so they could finally knock boots without going to hell. 

Forget that the first time a guy touched my boob was in the swimming pool of the church camp where the evils of fornication were so fervently preached to us. Forget that half of everyone in my youth group still did it anyway but just felt rampant guilt. But remember that one girl from that group did get pregnant at 17, and over 20 years later was denied a leadership position in the same church because of her teenage transgression. And remember what I wish I could forget: the infamous hand job talk my mother gave me at 16 when I’d been dating a guy for a while. I think she was worried I would have sex with him, so she wanted to ensure I knew the alternatives. 

As it turns out, I wasn’t having sex in high school. Not even a hand job! But I lived in a world where the only thing attached to sex was shame. (For what it’s worth, this wasn’t even really coming from my parents. They were pretty cool [obviously - hand job talk], but from church and my friends and leaders there.) I also was an over-achiever and had big plans for college and beyond, so getting pregnant seemed a fate worse than death. And then when you hear over and over and over how pregnancy happened to a teenage virgin, it starts to mess with your head. 

I did not think myself super holy or anything. But I knew a lot of girls who drank alcohol underage and had sex with their boyfriends, so I figured if Jesus was planning his second coming through a virgin birth again, he wouldn’t take up residence in their sinful uteruses. Mine would make for an OK candidate. Does the Bible say Jesus will be coming out of lady bits for his second coming? No. It’s more of a descend-from-the-sky kind of thing, but there are a lot of metaphors and literary devices in the Bible, so it’s hard to be sure. What if “sky” really means vagina?

I anxiously awaited my period around Christmastime. (Though biologically, I should really have been paying attention to it more around March.) No angel ever visited me in my yellow bedroom to advise me the Messiah would be implanting in my uterine wall soon, but that did little to ease my concerns. When Christmas was over, however, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Maybe because I just got a break from hearing about Mary so much. Maybe because I realized I wasn’t an ideal vessel for the Christ child because I sometimes cussed and went to second-base with boys to whom I wasn’t married. 

Now, at 39 and married, my greatest fear is not immaculate conception but the good, regular, old-fashioned kind of conception. The pregnancy part wouldn’t even be so bad were it not for the child you have to raise (and lose a year of sleep with) afterward. I wonder if newborn baby Jesus woke Mary up every two hours. I bet she had some less-than-holy thoughts during those times. Been there, girl; been there.