Instead of wishing away nine months of pregnancy and complaining about the shadow over my feet, I'd have cherished every minute of it and realized that the wonderment growing inside me was to be my only chance in life to assist God in a miracle.

This line is commonly attributed to Erma Bombeck in the context of her reflective, late-in-life writing about motherhood—specifically the idea that, with hindsight, she would have approached pregnancy with more gratitude and awe rather than impatience and discomfort. Bombeck often drew humor from domestic life, but she also wrote poignantly about the emotional meaning of ordinary family experiences. The quote is framed as a retrospective “if I had my life to live over” sentiment, contrasting everyday complaints (the long wait, physical inconvenience) with a spiritualized recognition of pregnancy as participation in creation.

Bombeck frames pregnancy as something many people endure with impatience—counting down months, focusing on discomforts, and resenting the bodily changes that obscure ordinary pleasures. In hindsight, she recasts that period as uniquely sacred: a fleeting season in which a person participates in creation itself. The line’s power comes from its reversal of perspective—complaint to gratitude, inconvenience to awe—and from its moral undertone about presence. It suggests that the everyday irritations of motherhood can eclipse the profound, and that maturity often arrives as a belated recognition of what was unrepeatable.