Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Land Sighting
So last night went better. I managed to confine my panicking to the half hour before sleep, which I'm sure Andrew appreciated. Woke up early this morning, half hour before the alarm, which I hate, so rather than try to eke out a few more minutes of unsatisfactory sleep, I figured I'd get up and be productive. Kitchen's clean, litter scooped, and a load of laundry started. And yesterday, I made my first midwife appointment - January 11 - which also made me feel like I'd done something productive. If productivity keeps working like this at driving away nerves, you may arrive to the world's cleanest house. Not likely, but at this point, we are both free to look out at the distant shore and hope that what is there is exactly what we've been looking for.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Holy Crap on a Cracker!
Well, after a couple days of suspecting (first missed day was actually Christmas Day) and mostly keeping it to myself, I came home last night and took a pregnancy test. Which was positive. Which is definitely a good thing. We'd decided a few months ago that having a child was important to us for reasons that are now lost to me in my panic.
Don't take that personally if you read this some day, which you may very well do. (I'm pretty sure that once you get here, I'll always think of you as my best Christmas present ever!) After my mom, your grandma, died just before I turned fourteen, I found a stack of letters in her handwriting. They're on all sorts of different paper, in different inks, some very fully realized, while some trail off mid-sentence and are never resumed. They're all letters to me - to the me that I was when she hadn't met me yet, to the me that I was when she was waiting impatiently for me to move out already, and to the me that I became, the amusing distraction that kept her from finishing letters to the later me.
Other people reading this are probably thinking, "Oh, how sad," and it was, when it happened, but it's been a long time ago now, and I have to say I learned some important lessons from it. I hope to teach some of those to you - that you love people with your whole heart right up to the minute that they're taken from you, that you love them when they aren't always easy to love, and that your ability to withstand pain and sadness is so much greater than you can possibly imagine, but that when you need it, it will be there. But I also learned that life is unpredictable, and some day, as horrified as I am to admit it to myself, we may no longer be in the same place at the same time. (We'll always be together - the people you love and the people that love you are always with you. That's another one of those lessons.)
And I'd want you to know what I was thinking and to be able to look back on how I'd felt about you from the very beginning. I wish I had something better to report at this point than panic, but there you have it. It's not a terrible panic, and surprisingly, it's not a selfish one - I'm not thinking, "Oh, I'll never have a moment's peace again!" or "I'll not finish another book until 2025!" I'm thinking, "What if I screw up someone's life?" and "What if I make terrible mistakes?" Your father - you'll meet him later - is the kind of person who faces realities a bit bluntly. (In his defense, it was 3:10 in the morning when I woke him up in a tearful panic to question my decision-making skills and to inform him that I don't know the first thing about babies.) Anyway, his saying, "Well, you will make terrible mistakes" wasn't as helpful as he intended it to be, but he's the brave one. Or the one oblivious to enough of the world to be brave, says my cynical voice - sometimes looking closely at things only makes them more scary, and it's useful to have someone around with good gut instincts to follow when you start to cave in on yourself. When you meet him, you'll know that - that he's a good person to follow when you don't know what's best. (You can also thank him for not having a pregnancy test in your baby book - he made an "ew" face at the suggestion.)
From the minute I thought about having you, the world became a scary place. Not a scary place in terms of unattended swimming pools and lurking strangers, but scary in an everyday sort of way. I never noticed all the sharp corners and how easy it would be to burn your hand on the pellet stove and all the frightening openings between the railings on the stairs. Scary! There's the bathtub to slip in and the back deck to trip off of and a big bed to fall out of, and I'm going to be solely responsible for making sure none of that happens, which is an awesome responsibility, and if you are reading this years from now and don't see it as such, believe me when I say you're not ready to have children of your own!
But then I think about what a wondrous place the world is. Your grandma was so great at that - your grandpa too, about seeing how fascinating and interesting the world we live in is. To be able to share the mysteries of deciduous trees, to show you how tadpoles become frogs (your father was beside himself when he found out that next week you'll have arm and leg "buds" - he loves tadpoles and is so excited to be growing one himself), to explain hot and cold, to show you snow and flowers and birds, to be a tour guide to the most amazing place that we know about in the whole universe (at least at this point), that's exciting. People have children for different reasons - most of them egotistical, to be honest, but I'm not doing this because I'm excited about having grandchildren, or because I want someone to take care of me when I'm old, or because I just want to prove I can. I'm just excited about showing you where you're going to live and how incredible all of life is. Which is what I'm going to keep telling myself until the 3 a.m. panics subside!
Don't take that personally if you read this some day, which you may very well do. (I'm pretty sure that once you get here, I'll always think of you as my best Christmas present ever!) After my mom, your grandma, died just before I turned fourteen, I found a stack of letters in her handwriting. They're on all sorts of different paper, in different inks, some very fully realized, while some trail off mid-sentence and are never resumed. They're all letters to me - to the me that I was when she hadn't met me yet, to the me that I was when she was waiting impatiently for me to move out already, and to the me that I became, the amusing distraction that kept her from finishing letters to the later me.
Other people reading this are probably thinking, "Oh, how sad," and it was, when it happened, but it's been a long time ago now, and I have to say I learned some important lessons from it. I hope to teach some of those to you - that you love people with your whole heart right up to the minute that they're taken from you, that you love them when they aren't always easy to love, and that your ability to withstand pain and sadness is so much greater than you can possibly imagine, but that when you need it, it will be there. But I also learned that life is unpredictable, and some day, as horrified as I am to admit it to myself, we may no longer be in the same place at the same time. (We'll always be together - the people you love and the people that love you are always with you. That's another one of those lessons.)
And I'd want you to know what I was thinking and to be able to look back on how I'd felt about you from the very beginning. I wish I had something better to report at this point than panic, but there you have it. It's not a terrible panic, and surprisingly, it's not a selfish one - I'm not thinking, "Oh, I'll never have a moment's peace again!" or "I'll not finish another book until 2025!" I'm thinking, "What if I screw up someone's life?" and "What if I make terrible mistakes?" Your father - you'll meet him later - is the kind of person who faces realities a bit bluntly. (In his defense, it was 3:10 in the morning when I woke him up in a tearful panic to question my decision-making skills and to inform him that I don't know the first thing about babies.) Anyway, his saying, "Well, you will make terrible mistakes" wasn't as helpful as he intended it to be, but he's the brave one. Or the one oblivious to enough of the world to be brave, says my cynical voice - sometimes looking closely at things only makes them more scary, and it's useful to have someone around with good gut instincts to follow when you start to cave in on yourself. When you meet him, you'll know that - that he's a good person to follow when you don't know what's best. (You can also thank him for not having a pregnancy test in your baby book - he made an "ew" face at the suggestion.)
From the minute I thought about having you, the world became a scary place. Not a scary place in terms of unattended swimming pools and lurking strangers, but scary in an everyday sort of way. I never noticed all the sharp corners and how easy it would be to burn your hand on the pellet stove and all the frightening openings between the railings on the stairs. Scary! There's the bathtub to slip in and the back deck to trip off of and a big bed to fall out of, and I'm going to be solely responsible for making sure none of that happens, which is an awesome responsibility, and if you are reading this years from now and don't see it as such, believe me when I say you're not ready to have children of your own!
But then I think about what a wondrous place the world is. Your grandma was so great at that - your grandpa too, about seeing how fascinating and interesting the world we live in is. To be able to share the mysteries of deciduous trees, to show you how tadpoles become frogs (your father was beside himself when he found out that next week you'll have arm and leg "buds" - he loves tadpoles and is so excited to be growing one himself), to explain hot and cold, to show you snow and flowers and birds, to be a tour guide to the most amazing place that we know about in the whole universe (at least at this point), that's exciting. People have children for different reasons - most of them egotistical, to be honest, but I'm not doing this because I'm excited about having grandchildren, or because I want someone to take care of me when I'm old, or because I just want to prove I can. I'm just excited about showing you where you're going to live and how incredible all of life is. Which is what I'm going to keep telling myself until the 3 a.m. panics subside!
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