DANCING, ADORABLY, IN THE WOMB.

Recently I had an obstetrical ultrasound, nine weeks and three days into a new pregnancy. Its purpose was routine, merely to confirm the due date and the "viability," as the doctor said, of the fetus. I had been through this before, and expected no surprises. Indeed, with three other children at home, my main worry (admittedly far-fetched) was that I might be carrying twins.

After the ultrasound technician, a tall, soft-spoken man named Fred, had established the presence of only one fetus, he brought it into focus and zoomed in. I am by now fairly experienced at reading these things myself, and right away I saw the baby's tiny heart beating, eagerly and impossibly fast. Then Fred and I saw something else: "Oh look, the baby's doing the mambo," Fred chuckled. And it was. Its toes were wiggling, its body jiggling around, and its proportionally enormous head was bobbing about.

Fred paused a moment, drew in his breath. "Look at that baby moving," and he held up his thumb. "And to think it's about the size of my thumbnail." He returned to his work, remarking, "No matter how many ultrasounds I do, I'm amazed every time that something so small can move like that."

This is my fourth pregnancy. I would have predicted that by now my capacity for wonder would be diminished by pragmatism, experience, or the mere passage of time. Instead, I find the opposite to be true. There was something special about this ultrasound and the minuscule human being I saw in fuzzy black and white, dancing for joy. At nine weeks and three days, nothing is guaranteed, and, up until the ultrasound, I had chanted the usual self-protective mantra of the early days: "Wait until the first twelve weeks are over before you trust it." But when I saw that baby dancing, I fell irredeemably in love. Even if I were to suffer a miscarriage the next day, I simply had to love it from that moment on. It was not a matter of choice.

Part of my delight sprang from foreknowledge: the exuberant movement of this tiny creature prefigured, I well knew, the squirming smiles of an infant, the baby wiggles, the toddler's happy hugs, the joyous flips, kicks, and cartwheels of the preschooler, soccer player, and gymnast who inhabit my household today. The love I have for these three, enlarged and deepened over eight years as a mother, has enabled me to extend myself to this child I barely know in a way I have not experienced.

In the Frick Collection in New York City, tucked away in a side room, is a small miracle of a painting. Rendered by Gentile da Fabriano in the early fifteenth century, it is titled Madonna and Child, with Saints Lawrence and Julian. Jesus looks to be about eighteen months old, a beautiful blond toddler sitting in the lap of a regally robed Mary, who cocks her head affectionately toward her son. What arrests the viewer is the animation, the joy of this baby. He leans down toward the supplicating Julian, his eyes alight, his cheeks rosy, the toes on his right foot caught midwiggle. Were it not for Mary's loving restraint, he would surely catapult into Julian's arms. It is an uncommonly touching picture of a baby reveling in life. I am no theologian, but it seems to me that the joy animating the child Jesus is the same divinely granted joy that propels the dancing of my child within.

I am lucky: despite occasional qualms about my ability to manage four children, I am able, and willing, to answer the call to love a child who is yet unborn but, oh, so alive. There is no real conflict about offering up the "yes" to God. Others, perhaps, are not so fortunate, and truly find a pregnancy difficult, or impossible, to bear. Yet my dancing baby has reminded me that clinical terms like "first trimester," "viability," and "fetal tissue" obscure the deep and awesome truth of a human life in the making, a life that is, in the poetic words of the psalmist, "fearfully and wonderfully made."

We are not entirely out of the woods yet. There will be tests for chromosomal abnormalities, and, to judge from past pregnancies, plenty of anxieties, aches, and pains between now and my due date. I pray for a healthy baby and as few varicose veins as God can bear to give me. But whatever happens, I know that I shall carry forever within me the image of the dancing baby, wiggling, jiggling, dancing for joy, expressing in its own miniature way the presence of the divine.

Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill, a frequent contributor, is co-author with Joseph Papp of Shakespeare Alive!