Anticipating the Great Journey, in Room 2

I’m sitting in the hospital, birthing room 2. I’ve mooned three people already but they assure me that I’ll stop noticing that stuff soon. 

One sock of mine has a hole in the heel so I feel the cool ground when I walk, though the labor and delivery ward is very warm today.

I’m at 41 wks and 3 days and the baby has mostly shown no signs of wanting to join this earthly party. Yesterday my doc did a membrane sweep to “stir up some trouble” as she called it and looks like she did. I was up all night w demonic cramps and I met my mucus plug this morning which was even more disgusting  than I was prepared for. 

I’m at the hospital for a Miso, which is the next lily pad in the steps we’re taking towards evicting my tenant. 

It’s strange to want Showtime—since Showtime involves your body cleaving into two people, lots of blood and hemroids but it’s as everyone said it would be — you just get to a point in pregnancy where you’re over it and you want the baby out. You’re ready to trade one set of discomforts for another. 

The past few weeks, as the discomforts of the third trimester mounted (the mortar and pestle grind of the baby’s head in my pelvic basin, numb hands, continued insomnia and blah blah blah more maternal complaints), I found myself complaining a lot and dwelling in a negative headspace. Work was insane-the project’s climax was pending (slated for 2/28) and every body was on edge. 

When we finally transitioned management of my project to my maternity leave xoverage person last wk, I found the quiet I needed to really stop and appreciate how I’ll be meeting and holding our baby any moment now. As happens, I was so caught up in the now and the hectic chaos of work, I hadn’t tapped into that feeling. It’s like when you plan a big trip and you only realize—like really realize—you’re going when you’re in seat 2d watching the plane’s wings cut through the clouds.

Even now it doesn’t feel quite real, sitting with the rhythmic heartbeat of our baby punctuating the air in room #2. My little kangaroo has been content to hang out in this nesty pouch for what seems like forever and it doesn’t seem real that I’ll be sweating and hollering and pushing a tiny little life out of me soon. But it’s nice to have these four hours where I’m just waiting and realizing it’s coming. It’s forcing me to appreciate that Nick and I have embarked on the big trip. That I’m sitting in 2d, that there’s turbulence coming and moments of calm, and at the end of the runway, a grand adventure or a return home. 

Beatific Acceptance: Baby Will Come When Baby Come

My due date is this upcoming Monday, Valentine’s Day.

For much of the past week, I was convinced it was Go Time. I was just in a constant state of tension, the way I expect you’d feel if you thought a small meteor might hit your farmland at any moment.  After a couple weeks of Nights that Seemed Very Promising! I came to the conclusion that my body basically just falls apart by the end of the day, tired of lugging around what my pregnancy app tells me is the size of a small pumpkin at this time, which makes sense, as I’m picturing the baby with a sinister jack o lantern grin most days.

Feeling swarmed by these apprehensive wide-eyed nerves was not a pleasant way to be walking around or attempting to interact civilly with other humans.

On Thursday, after pacing like Cujo for too many days, some sort of strange veil of peace came over me.

OK baby, I thought, you’re coming when you’re coming and no amount of cursing or cosmic begging is going to change that. I reached some sort of platform of beatific acceptance. I imagine this beatific acceptance will feel slightly out of reach when I’m trying to push a human head out of what begrudgingly fits a Super tampon on a good day, but I’ll take moments of peace when I can get them.

This realization that I have no control, and must cede to a higher power of unknown forces (cosmic, hormonal, who knows)—this is always a good reminder and probably no more timely than now, when our lives are going to be burst open by a tiny needy ball of ruddy pink love.

By day, I work as a Project Manager and one of the four pillars I manage is Time. Telling a client “Ya, we’re not really sure when the Most Important Event of the Project is going to happen,” would be grounds for a deal never getting signed to begin with. And yet, that’s the journey we sign up for when we sign up for Project Baby—no clue really, when the little bean will luge their way into the world like a kid on Disney’s Summit Plummet.

A baby is a reminder to the “Real World” that in the REAL WORLD—of animals, plants, of living breathing things—that we’re guessing half the time and every human, every life, is pretty much a friggin miracle and definitely not one that can be charted in a Smartsheets project plan.

So maybe I’ll have the baby tonight, or tomorrow, or two weeks from now. And while I’m sure I’ll be continue feeling the spectrum of human emotions as I wait for the Grand Arrival, a part of me is good with this journey unfolding as it’s meant to.

Love,

The girl diffusing clary sage and ordering Indian food for dinner

Unexpected Feelings after Soft Launch of my Second Book A Guide to Growing Wings

I’ve been working on my memoir about my mother, and my healing journey after she took her life in 2013, for a long time. I think I first picked up the pen about it a year or so after she died. I scrawled hundreds and hundreds of pages in an effort to wring the sorrow out of me—to get it out, to make sense of the Biggest, Hardest Thing I’d ever met.

This project has taken up a huge space in my life—I’ve put it on the back burner a couple times, pushed it away, but I knew it was an incredibly important tribute to my mother and me that I would need to release in order to move on. After I published Be Surf, I picked the memoir back up. A few lessons I learned through Be Surf helped me finally give the memoir shape and, more importantly, complete it.

And as for a sense of urgency—the baby in my belly gave me a natural deadline. I knew that I wanted to get this book out, in some way, before the baby arrived. So I released the ebook on Amazon last week—a soft launch. At this time, I’m only telling a few people, because I want to really launch it with the print book.

I expected to feel proud, and confident, of the accomplishment (which I do) but I did not expect this—the feeling of an immense boulder suddenly rolling out of my path, and the feeling that I was free to choose other types of work and projects now. I hadn’t realized how tethered and cuffed I felt to the project. Not even in a bad way (right, because prison metaphors are a “good” thing…) but it’s true. I felt an incredible amount of pressure and duty to complete this project. It felt necessary to honor my mother in this way, and to share that story which is uniquely ours, one that no one would ever tell the same way.

And so, when I pressed “Publish,” and the book went live—it just felt like my world opened up. It’s like—ok wow! This tribe of elephants that has apparently been blocking my path has scattered and now my road is totally open. This is a really exciting and beautiful feeling.

I’m really excited to complete the book in its additional incantations—print and audio—on my on pace, around the baby, and I’m also really excited for what opportunities I get to give time for now that this incredibly important, urgent and individual project is done.