Many interpretations of Eve focus on her early days in Eden: all that juicy stuff about the serpent, the tree, the fruit, the expulsion.

But I wrote “Open the Ground” while pregnant with my first child, so I chose to focus on what happened after, when Eve became a mother. Eve’s took on new meaning in the face of my first pregnancy. Writing this song, and being pregnant, I felt like an explorer in territory both utterly ancient, and completely new. As I began to explore what Eve’s experience might have been like, I felt like I was shining light in dark corners, using the head-lamp of my own twenty-first century experience to this incredibly old tale in a new way.  (This, by the way, is the power of creating midrash - you get to explore how your own intimate questions and worries and joys through the lens of these shared legends. And you end up with a deeper understanding of both yourself, and the story.)

As often happens, Eve’s story resonated powerfully with the experience I was having at that very moment. I was struck by how easy it felt to connect to Eve, once explored her story through the prism of a specific experience in my life. After all, like all first time mothers, we automatically had something huge in common (besides our bellies). Just like the strangers in my prenatal yoga class, we were bonded simply by undergoing this experience, whatever the differences between our lives.

But I also noticed a major difference between me and Eve as first-time mothers. I was surrounded by wisdom and advice, not to mention prenatal yoga. Eve had none. No books, no internet, no videos, no midwives, no mother. No one had ever been pregnant before; no one had ever given birth. And in fact, she would continue alone in this radically new situation as she raised her two young children without the benefit of parenting classes, advice from friends, or babysitters to take the boys off her hands for a few hours.

Focusing on the fact of Eve’s utter aloneness in mothering, I felt myself drawn to focus on her relationship with her first son, Cain - not as a baby, but as an adult, deep into their family story, after Cain has killed Abel. In my song, I wanted to ask the almost unbearable question: how does Eve feel about her firstborn at this moment?

The answer that came to me was heartbreaking and felt true. I think - or more accurately, feel - that Eve would still love Cain despite the terrible pain and grief he has caused. In fact, I imagine Eve thinking of Cain even even as she buries Abel. In this love song to a troubled child in exile, Eve tells Cain the story of his gestation, birth, and childhood; she wonders if she could have raised him differently, and laments the difficulty and danger of raising children in this world.

I think there is something of Eve’s mothering that echoes through a parent’s experience. Despite the mythic poignancy of motherless Eve learning to be a mother, and the intensely dramatic scale of this family story, Eve’s story reflects the complicated nature of parenthood. Even with all the support and guidance we have today, in the end, we parents straddle the line between omnipotence and powerlessness.

Whether biological parents or adoptive, parents assume full responsibility for another human being’s life - an impossible position. We have so much power in this role, and so little. We are responsible for our children, yet we cannot control them. No one can give us the answers, and no one can foretell the future. We just do the best we can and, as I imagine Eve doing, love our children. No matter what.