The days before birth

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.