wait.
Recently I began writing Sula’s birth story. I meant to finish it for her by her second birthday, but things with the house-selling-life has not made for a leisurely writing life. Like Mia’s story, I didn’t pen it until well after the actual birth. Not because I didn’t want to or because I didn’t have time, but because the space between birth and now fills me with understanding. Both of those births, so different from the other, had so much to do with more than when contractions came or what I felt during the birth, or who was there and what I felt like afterwards. Although those things hold great value and weight, to process and remember they are crucial, but for me, birth has to do with the whole body journey walked and the lessons learned, from conception to present moment. I began writing Sula’s because I finally got it. I took it too one word, one lesson. A very big one for me.
It was about the wait. Waiting. Waiting without needing to act upon or rush the wait along. With Sula, it was about the week before she arrived and less about the perfect arrival that she chose. Her “labor,” the pains and contractions that presented themselves to me to breath through were in the days I was in waiting, the days of letting go of ‘dates’ and releasing heaviness and heat and longing. That right there is were the essence of this child’s birth story lies. The labor was sweet gifts, a gentle, primal taste of heaven, hardly anything to write about, because bliss just is, it cannot be told. Instead it was a scripture in patience. To gather the patience I had to learn to surrender. And to really feel no gravity of surrender I had to just trust, or have faith.
In writing parts of her birth story down a couple weeks ago, I continued to reap the rewards of her emergence in my life. Because now once again, it teaches me. I wait.
I am not good at it. I will be the first to admit it. Waiting sucks for me. I don’t like waiting for the cookies to be done, or the movie to start, or my house to sell. I don’t like waiting to do something I am really excited about, especially when there is nothing, and I mean nothing to do but wait. Powerless, I sit, and try to find power in this moment of stillness.
In the past, if we were ready to move on, or I wanted to change jobs, it was easy. Hand in my notice. Find another job. Weasel out of the rental lease. Get in the car, throw the dogs in, pick our next spot on the map and GO. But now I find myself in another situation. I can’t just go. I have a house to sell. And there is nothing I can do (except magic, pray, visualize) but wait. I am so impatient my tongues itches. But then I am forced to remember the birth of Sula Pearl. When I tried to speed things along, wanting her to come out because her ‘due date’ had way expired, and began taking Cohosh cocktails and castor massages, I heard a small yet freakishly large voice whisper to me; Stop. Mama, I will come when I am ready. Sit on the couch, eat another piece of chocolate cake and wait.
Again, I try to live in those moments when I finally understood that there was nothing I could do but admire the way the Earth spins and the sun rises and falls and the moon glows above. A baby would be coming in her own time. And now this house will be selling when it is ready to be passed on, when we are ready to move down that road we paved. I try, and I get it most moments, but I have to say that my cultivation of patience is suffering from drought. My ability to fold forward and surrender myself to this earth, this moment, is shaky and sore at best. My faith, I begin to question like prosecutor at the stand.
And it has only 12 days. 12 days. And I could peel my skin off from anxiety. I call Bill 100 times a day, Anything? An offer? Yet? And to make it worse I spent the entire morning, hours, at the bookstore with two books in my hand: Bellingham and Mt. Baker and Northwestern Washington. I drooled over the local restaurant listings in Bellingham, words like “all local ingredients” “fresh crab legs” “homemade ice cream and donuts for 30 years” “children’s outdoor exploration theatre” “short ferry ride to Lummi Island for fun with kids” “organic coffee shops” “walk everywhere on the interurban trail” “Outdoor movie theater”….I could go on and on. I torture myself. I live there already in my head. How can somebody so ready to expose their wings and fly not be ready to go elsewhere? Worse than that, how can somebody, with a belly beginning to swell like the sea, midwifeless, not need to find home and settle? I sit in this wait, and listen. Subtle sounds calm me, heavy winds inspire me. I hear things that I can rest in. Still, I have ants in my too-tight-around-the-belly pants.
Yet there is no induction for this. No drip IV or medication to wipe me out until it’s over. I must feel this longing. I have no choice. This desire and yes, at moments pain, because it is stressful to wonder and not know and have so much at risk, financially and emotionally. But I must, there is no other way around it, than to honor this. This is nature, human existence. No intervention needed. I listen to the house creak and the flies tap their dance against the window. I hear the wind bend my backyard’s desert trees. I learn about this time, of just being here, looking at my kids as they spend their last moments dancing on these crooked bamboo floors. Their last moments running through the sprinkler in this very sweet and unnaturally grassy backyard. I feel my heart yearn for change, my feet ache to travel. My skin burn for rain.
This morning for the first time ever, after a very horrendous and aggressive tantrum at the store, Mia expressed to me her sadness in leaving her house.
Mia, wha’ts going on? What are you feeling? You are such a nice person Mia, gentle and kind. why are you choosing to do things like hit your mama?
Because I’m sad.
Why, baby?
I don’t want to go to Washington. I don’t want to swim with Orca whales. I don’t want Satchel and Uncle Osso to visit and go on daddy’s boat. I want to stay at my house with my dogs. Tears and more tears stream down her face.
I didn’t say anything for a while. I just rubbed her soft pink leg and looked into her eyes. I briefly explained that the house is a good house and everything in it we will take with us, especially the dogs, and her books and dolls…everything she loves will come with us. Her face softend as if she had not thought her things would follow us there. Then I said to her
But let’s just have some fun while we are here waiting. Let’s just live here now and have fun. Okay?
She brightened up, light coming from her eyes, beaming down like a Jacob’s Ladder.
Yeah mama. Let’s have fun! Let’s have fun! Can I have some gum?
Sure. And maybe we’ll make a chocolate cake too and sit around and eat it.
It’s all in the wait. It makes the final outcome all the sweeter, finer and more infinitely perfect. This, I am sure of. I have to be.
