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.
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