Belly cast in plaster of Paris. A body in a form that is no longer mine. It sits in a box on the kitchen table. Its rough white outline, round and full, awaits final fortification. It will be me and not me, its own image. It is another representation of this pregnancy...like the photographs filled with my ripeness and the tangled, verdant backyard of our house two floors below. Wild, high fennel reeds and viney fences all look like Eden in the photos. And, we, their loving hosts.
Images all. Images of what it is to be parents, to be on our way to birth, of being a trois now, no longer completely a deux. Images of me, and of someone else entirely. Last night, still more snapshots as we continued, the late evening hours, to create the baby room. Ben pry-barring the legs off of the dresser to-be changing table and carefully securing new protection for the now vulnerable bottom. Me wide-legged on the floor, adhering contact paper to the inside of the top drawer, where the piles of cloth diaper inserts will go. Diapers. I am preparing a drawer for diapers. Even more than preparing the drawers for onesies and layette, this says baby to me, this suggests that much will change. Much more than losing this belly, much more than the images I hold to be me.
The birth awaits, holding the strength of my transition from now to then. I don't know birth - yet. But she knows me. She will invite me to step into her joyful and aching space, not because I say so, but because it is time. I can only surrender.
Work has now receded as top priority, or one of them for the moment. Another facsimile of me, another kind of mask removed. I don't know yet who and what will manifest for me. I am looking forward to meeting her as I also meet this little person who will shape and mold her with every look and cry and touch.
These days feel an awful lot like the days before I left the close boundaries of Washington, DC in 2003 for a 5-month sabbatical in Asia. The anticipation, the experience of seeing everything for the "last" time and also the "first," the intense attachment suddenly to what had been my life and the complete release of it to what it would then be. Stepping, stepping into the fertile void. But perhaps the deepest knowing was that I would no longer be the same "I" that I knew, the same "me." The ways I defined myself would be only images, only words, in lands where I was another 30-something seeker with a backpack and some loot. I would define me every day by who I was being, by what I discovered, by what I gave. I craved that simplicity.
I am ready for this baby to come. Well, at least in body and spirit if not every last material way. So, the room still awaits some movement of furniture, some organizing, some decorating. There is nothing that stands in the way now. Not time, not my own ego, not fear, no lack or want for it to be different. At nine days before our due date, I stand ready. I wait for birth to call me in.
I can see Pam's face in front of me, her eyes taking me in completely. "August 24th" she offered assuredly at the winery opening party that Sunday afternoon near Glen Ellen. We had just met. "I don't have kids and have no idea why I have these feelings," she told me, between healthy sips of red wine, "but I have predicted a number of births." I smiled as she held my bare shoulders in her hands.
Today is August 24th. Bring it on.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Sunday, August 17, 2008
A pregnant parade
Yesterday, four of us, all verging on or past the 8 month mark of our pregnancies, went to sun and spa for the day in a Sonoma town fillled with t-shirts that say things like "Albert Wine-stein" and polo shirts bearing the mark of swank golf resorts and other valet-parking lands visited. Not where I would want to raise a child. Exactly where we would want to spend a day with nothing particularly pressing to do, no schedule to keep, little to suggest all the tasks of to-be-momhood waiting at home. And, even as I write this, I notice how middle class I feel, knowing that we have the means to have the concerns we do and to escape them, if briefly, just the same. This is one of the voices that is also me, one that cautions against liking all of this too much, warning me against getting too cozy with the desire to have a life, and not just a day, that looks like this. This is the same one that says it is possible to have a world that works for everyone, and not just those of us who can fill our gas tanks these days, a voice that suggests that while family is first, the family is far more than the usual unit of measure.
With the weather in San Francisco gray, spitting and barely making 55 degrees, our day trip couldn't have been better timed. Crossing the Golden Gate bridge, through the thickest of the fog, deep from the Bay, we eventually emerged into sunlight, all of our little limbs and spirits dancing in its warmth, and in realizing our good fortune.
From our four-belly line-up at the hotel pool to meandering through the town square, we became the bellies on parade, inviting the stories of the Mom who teared up when she shared how she just sent her youngest son off to college to the woman on reunion with her college roommates, all of whom became Moms upwards of twenty years ago. "Are you all a gang?," one store proprietor inquired slyly. "Yes, aren't you afraid?" we laughed. Some people were, I believe. For our act, choosing to bring a child into the world, is a hopeful one. It is also one that has women completely vulnerable to the world and able to destroy any obstacle in her path. We are four waddling women on a Saturday afternoon, holding in us all the power and mystery of giving life. This doesn't fit on the front or back of any t-shirt. We are an invitation for the richness of real stories, of people's deepest aspirations and their fears of their own capacities to bring forth and nurture life.
With the weather in San Francisco gray, spitting and barely making 55 degrees, our day trip couldn't have been better timed. Crossing the Golden Gate bridge, through the thickest of the fog, deep from the Bay, we eventually emerged into sunlight, all of our little limbs and spirits dancing in its warmth, and in realizing our good fortune.
From our four-belly line-up at the hotel pool to meandering through the town square, we became the bellies on parade, inviting the stories of the Mom who teared up when she shared how she just sent her youngest son off to college to the woman on reunion with her college roommates, all of whom became Moms upwards of twenty years ago. "Are you all a gang?," one store proprietor inquired slyly. "Yes, aren't you afraid?" we laughed. Some people were, I believe. For our act, choosing to bring a child into the world, is a hopeful one. It is also one that has women completely vulnerable to the world and able to destroy any obstacle in her path. We are four waddling women on a Saturday afternoon, holding in us all the power and mystery of giving life. This doesn't fit on the front or back of any t-shirt. We are an invitation for the richness of real stories, of people's deepest aspirations and their fears of their own capacities to bring forth and nurture life.
Friday, August 1, 2008
"We move through negative spaces and dwell in positive spaces."
Thanks to Matthew Frederick, architect, for his clear and precise rendering of our human condition and our shared aspiration to be fully alive. ("101 Things I Learned in Architecture School) The thing is that he is talking, at least explicitly, about design and how we inhabit our built environment - living in the space (positive) and not the walls and roofs that boundary it (negative). "Negative spaces tend to promote movement rather than dwelling in place," he notes. So simple and yet not so easy.
We move through the negative spaces - out of holes and darkness, toward movement and light. Through the birth canal and into the world, our baby will come, from the safe, warm confines of the uterine walls into a world where distinguishing the negative from the positive is not always obvious at first. But still, left to choose we naturally migrate from the transitional space to the the space where we can find some room, find light. We as parents don't necessarily create these spaces, but rather offer up the ways to distinguish one from the other, to know where the positive spaces are. Eventually, our child will know too. The funny thing is that the baby, the child, is less apt to want to dwell in the boundaries. They want to move. Mine tells me every day in the womb that s/he is seeking room - a knee jutting out, a back rolling to the left, little arms flapping into my taut belly.
It is up to me, to us as parents, not to get stuck in the transitional spaces, in the places we have to go through to get to what' next, but where we never need to live. Like transition - those minutes in labor when it may be hard to see, to feel more than the negative, when I may believe that it will always be painful, that I can't do it, that the sensation is too strong.
I can't NOT go there. And, it is no place to dwell either. Something comes next. Moving through. I heard someone say recently that their new parent friends said the day before the baby was born, they couldn't imagine having her in their lives. The day after, they couldn't imagine life without her.
Becoming is in me, in us, always. The question is who we choose to be our teachers, who we allow to shape, influence, support and challenge us, even when the lessons feel uncomfortable or just completely unfamiliar. This baby. Matthew Frederick, architect. The client who most bugs me. An echoing voice inside.
How do I listen from where I am meant to dwell?
We move through the negative spaces - out of holes and darkness, toward movement and light. Through the birth canal and into the world, our baby will come, from the safe, warm confines of the uterine walls into a world where distinguishing the negative from the positive is not always obvious at first. But still, left to choose we naturally migrate from the transitional space to the the space where we can find some room, find light. We as parents don't necessarily create these spaces, but rather offer up the ways to distinguish one from the other, to know where the positive spaces are. Eventually, our child will know too. The funny thing is that the baby, the child, is less apt to want to dwell in the boundaries. They want to move. Mine tells me every day in the womb that s/he is seeking room - a knee jutting out, a back rolling to the left, little arms flapping into my taut belly.
It is up to me, to us as parents, not to get stuck in the transitional spaces, in the places we have to go through to get to what' next, but where we never need to live. Like transition - those minutes in labor when it may be hard to see, to feel more than the negative, when I may believe that it will always be painful, that I can't do it, that the sensation is too strong.
I can't NOT go there. And, it is no place to dwell either. Something comes next. Moving through. I heard someone say recently that their new parent friends said the day before the baby was born, they couldn't imagine having her in their lives. The day after, they couldn't imagine life without her.
Becoming is in me, in us, always. The question is who we choose to be our teachers, who we allow to shape, influence, support and challenge us, even when the lessons feel uncomfortable or just completely unfamiliar. This baby. Matthew Frederick, architect. The client who most bugs me. An echoing voice inside.
How do I listen from where I am meant to dwell?
Monday, July 28, 2008
More on becoming - note about where we go, but who we are
So, a bit more on becoming. What I hold to be true is that becoming a mom has us become more of who we are as women, as human beings, as leaders and colleagues, as wives and contributors in all sorts of ways; where we have been blocked; where we have been freed, where I haven’t even named it or where it feels unnameable. I have also recently learned that a core precept of Judaism - “I am that I am” - is really about becoming, that God was considered the God of Becoming- "I shall be that I shall be." As a Jew, also for me a practicing of becoming, not one of just belonging without question or agitation even, I feel this deeply. Being Jewish is also about who we be by what we do in the world - Tikkun Olam - it is our responsibility to repair the fissure in the world's core with our goodness, generosity with love. This is where we become, by being more of who we already are, at least who we aspire to be.
A dear friend reminded me this weekend that this isn't about anything to acquire or change. It is rather about what is already there, already HERE inside me, inside each of us. It is more a matter of the way we fertilize and till the soil, water it, give it the sunlight to grow. Yes, it isn't a from-to proposition, but rather a be-do-know one. I become by being, doing from there, knowing deeply that this is "me," even if, as Buddhists would suggest the "I" continues to be a swinging door.
A dear friend reminded me this weekend that this isn't about anything to acquire or change. It is rather about what is already there, already HERE inside me, inside each of us. It is more a matter of the way we fertilize and till the soil, water it, give it the sunlight to grow. Yes, it isn't a from-to proposition, but rather a be-do-know one. I become by being, doing from there, knowing deeply that this is "me," even if, as Buddhists would suggest the "I" continues to be a swinging door.
Sunday, July 6, 2008
"Now, we don't have children, we parent."
"Now, we don't have children, we parent."
David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction
Ben and I were on route late Friday, June 27th for a long overdue visit with friends in Tahoe. Stopped at Starbucks for our late evening drivetime adult sippee cups, as our friend Ailish calls them. Mine a chai. His a big ol' java. (I still say National, not Reagan Airport. I don't use the Starbucks code. It is a large cup of jo to me. Some small effort at being a citizen and not a faithful consumer of consumerism. Perhaps I am just a prudish Henry Higgins of the day -- "Why CAN'T the Americans?!!?....)
Waiting for our brews to come steaming from behind the reliable silver machinery, I opened randomly to a page in Sheff's book sitting atop the shelf and my eyes first settled on this quote. Parenting as a verb. Parenting as a way of life. Like our careers. We don't have jobs now, as perhaps our grandparents and parents did, we "career" and we set intention about how our contributions look and what we give and get from them. We create paths, we create new forms and we share them with others. So, to choose to have a child is in a new paradigm as well. We dont simply to add the being to our existing life, or "have" it. Parenting now has us. Parenting is a transformation from one form to another. And, there is much more room to fail, or believe that our acts have fundamentally failed our children. Maybe because we believe our parents did - leaving us a world with a whole lot more to be fixed to support life for the next generations. Maybe because we take greater responsibility for the act. Likely because we view the world from a narrow and class-based view in which collected research and resources give us room to worry about the organic mattress with no fire retardants or the new blue carpet that won't off-gas in our new baby's lungs. Likely a new becoming for us all as we find our way in an out of the aisles of Babies R' Us and Earth Mama websites, where we notice, yet again, who is and isn't shopping those same aisles. I feel deeply as I become parent the ways in which we are so far apart - separated by class, race, history and education - and the ways in which we all share the same aspirations for ourselves and for loving our children well. All of us parenting our way into the future, one small choice at a time.
David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction
Ben and I were on route late Friday, June 27th for a long overdue visit with friends in Tahoe. Stopped at Starbucks for our late evening drivetime adult sippee cups, as our friend Ailish calls them. Mine a chai. His a big ol' java. (I still say National, not Reagan Airport. I don't use the Starbucks code. It is a large cup of jo to me. Some small effort at being a citizen and not a faithful consumer of consumerism. Perhaps I am just a prudish Henry Higgins of the day -- "Why CAN'T the Americans?!!?....)
Waiting for our brews to come steaming from behind the reliable silver machinery, I opened randomly to a page in Sheff's book sitting atop the shelf and my eyes first settled on this quote. Parenting as a verb. Parenting as a way of life. Like our careers. We don't have jobs now, as perhaps our grandparents and parents did, we "career" and we set intention about how our contributions look and what we give and get from them. We create paths, we create new forms and we share them with others. So, to choose to have a child is in a new paradigm as well. We dont simply to add the being to our existing life, or "have" it. Parenting now has us. Parenting is a transformation from one form to another. And, there is much more room to fail, or believe that our acts have fundamentally failed our children. Maybe because we believe our parents did - leaving us a world with a whole lot more to be fixed to support life for the next generations. Maybe because we take greater responsibility for the act. Likely because we view the world from a narrow and class-based view in which collected research and resources give us room to worry about the organic mattress with no fire retardants or the new blue carpet that won't off-gas in our new baby's lungs. Likely a new becoming for us all as we find our way in an out of the aisles of Babies R' Us and Earth Mama websites, where we notice, yet again, who is and isn't shopping those same aisles. I feel deeply as I become parent the ways in which we are so far apart - separated by class, race, history and education - and the ways in which we all share the same aspirations for ourselves and for loving our children well. All of us parenting our way into the future, one small choice at a time.
Falling into the hole alone. Climbing out supported.
The week just before Memorial Day weekend. 2008. A good 8 weeks ago now. (Everything counted in weeks now. Time extends just as my belly does, day by day to week by week, small, big changes.) Realizing - again - as I reflect on my experience throughout the pregnancy how much this baby is changing me. No, not changing ME. It is how I am choosing to BE changed by this being inside, to allow myself to be turned inside out and outside in. Or so I can reflect on it now when the growing pains aren't so acute or as unfamiliar. Time has new architecture these days. So does the terrain of the earth below my feet.
When the emotions have my full and rapturous attention, as they did this particular weekend, the ground is subject to tremors, to gaping holes opening where none existed before. My emotions dig them, deeper and deeper sometimes. I feel vulnerable, afraid I will diminish slowly and steadily as this little being keeps eating the food I ingest, tumbling around from the glucose in a summer white peach, jolted by sips of black tea I ingest when the fatigue is too much. I am most afraid of being insignificant, another woman felled by motherhood, trapped in a deep, dark hole where I am reduced to the next dirty diaper change and the elusive search for the most ecologically sound diaper choice, and where I feel like the resources that have served me my whole life long can't lead to the way out.
Grip of fear. The hold opens wide. Glimmer of awareness. Maybe I will climb out this time. Grip of fear. The hole deepens. Glimmer of awareness. I see help....No, again in the hole, falling, feels like falling.
The voices of the past are loud and insistent. "You couldn't even complete all these projects before you got pregnant. What makes you think you have any hope of it now? You have such potential...shame about having to put all of your aspirations aside for the next 20 or so years. When you moved to Calfornia, you already took the 'off-ramp,' to this backwater town, now you are REALLY off the professional highway. Yeah, might as well have the kids now...not like you were doing much anyway. " In the hole, I begin to believe these voices, hearing no others, feeling only a deep chill to my bones as I stand immobile, listening and waiting for light or some other sound or something. There is choice here too - I get to believe that I am alone here, that it is all on my shoulders and stored up in that being in my belly. Yes, this is another voice of fear. But, this time it is interrupted.
It is interrupted by my husband's voice, reminding me who I am. And it takes a few days for me to stop letting the fear tell me it is my voice, to stop listening to it that way. But, along this path climbing out, I begin to see just how many others are there - with ropes and pulleys and cheers and messages that tell me that I will never be stuck.
Since then something shifted, I have been climbing steadily, up to heights where I can no longer see even the outline of the hole. This blog is a solid walking stick. By looking at its contours and smelling the pungent earth, the hole begins to close.
I don't doubt there are others, sometimes places I need to fall to get to somewhere new. I have fallen since, and the ropes and pulleys have been there. I also no longer doubt that I have the strength inside and the support outside to get there.
When the emotions have my full and rapturous attention, as they did this particular weekend, the ground is subject to tremors, to gaping holes opening where none existed before. My emotions dig them, deeper and deeper sometimes. I feel vulnerable, afraid I will diminish slowly and steadily as this little being keeps eating the food I ingest, tumbling around from the glucose in a summer white peach, jolted by sips of black tea I ingest when the fatigue is too much. I am most afraid of being insignificant, another woman felled by motherhood, trapped in a deep, dark hole where I am reduced to the next dirty diaper change and the elusive search for the most ecologically sound diaper choice, and where I feel like the resources that have served me my whole life long can't lead to the way out.
Grip of fear. The hold opens wide. Glimmer of awareness. Maybe I will climb out this time. Grip of fear. The hole deepens. Glimmer of awareness. I see help....No, again in the hole, falling, feels like falling.
The voices of the past are loud and insistent. "You couldn't even complete all these projects before you got pregnant. What makes you think you have any hope of it now? You have such potential...shame about having to put all of your aspirations aside for the next 20 or so years. When you moved to Calfornia, you already took the 'off-ramp,' to this backwater town, now you are REALLY off the professional highway. Yeah, might as well have the kids now...not like you were doing much anyway. " In the hole, I begin to believe these voices, hearing no others, feeling only a deep chill to my bones as I stand immobile, listening and waiting for light or some other sound or something. There is choice here too - I get to believe that I am alone here, that it is all on my shoulders and stored up in that being in my belly. Yes, this is another voice of fear. But, this time it is interrupted.
It is interrupted by my husband's voice, reminding me who I am. And it takes a few days for me to stop letting the fear tell me it is my voice, to stop listening to it that way. But, along this path climbing out, I begin to see just how many others are there - with ropes and pulleys and cheers and messages that tell me that I will never be stuck.
Since then something shifted, I have been climbing steadily, up to heights where I can no longer see even the outline of the hole. This blog is a solid walking stick. By looking at its contours and smelling the pungent earth, the hole begins to close.
I don't doubt there are others, sometimes places I need to fall to get to somewhere new. I have fallen since, and the ropes and pulleys have been there. I also no longer doubt that I have the strength inside and the support outside to get there.
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
On becoming
"To change or to grow to be; change or develop into by growth."
I looked up the definition of what it is to become. I felt this word roiling around in my gut - like the baby somersaulting and spinning inside my now stretched out belly. Like the perfect name my husband Ben and I will land on... soon, soon. The word called out to me some weeks ago, an opportunity to move into a new home -- where being Mom and being Me co-exist, negotiating chores, conversing over dinner as the day turns to night in brilliant hues. Becoming. So simple. Not so easy.
It begins with awareness, but if it stops there, it is just a nice day's outing and nothing new is really discovered, no new path is dug. This blog is a space to step into all of these new forms and to honor the old - less than a year ago, i became partner and wife to Ben, months later, from married to pregnant, now nearly no longer pregnant, but Mom, a form that is yet without clear lines. I can't see her --- yet. She hasn't arrived - yet. How will i welcome her when i don't always want her to show up. Will she step - hard - on "my" toes? Will she take over and raid my closet and call herself Mikaela? Yes, she will. I admire, love and fear her - the Mom that I am in the act of becoming.
Becoming is first a choice to step into who I am, who I perhaps have even been, but never embraced as me. I can't yet see distinguish the form, the outline and pulse and flesh of this new body.
I looked up the definition of what it is to become. I felt this word roiling around in my gut - like the baby somersaulting and spinning inside my now stretched out belly. Like the perfect name my husband Ben and I will land on... soon, soon. The word called out to me some weeks ago, an opportunity to move into a new home -- where being Mom and being Me co-exist, negotiating chores, conversing over dinner as the day turns to night in brilliant hues. Becoming. So simple. Not so easy.
It begins with awareness, but if it stops there, it is just a nice day's outing and nothing new is really discovered, no new path is dug. This blog is a space to step into all of these new forms and to honor the old - less than a year ago, i became partner and wife to Ben, months later, from married to pregnant, now nearly no longer pregnant, but Mom, a form that is yet without clear lines. I can't see her --- yet. She hasn't arrived - yet. How will i welcome her when i don't always want her to show up. Will she step - hard - on "my" toes? Will she take over and raid my closet and call herself Mikaela? Yes, she will. I admire, love and fear her - the Mom that I am in the act of becoming.
Becoming is first a choice to step into who I am, who I perhaps have even been, but never embraced as me. I can't yet see distinguish the form, the outline and pulse and flesh of this new body.
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