misplaced mama

Little Dove.

Moments when the moon is high and again when the dawn is born, I feel your spider-like movements, tickling the inside of my womb, exploring and moving about within your inner cosmos, an atmosphere you call home.  These quickenings are just beginning to happen, setting me free from wondering: is there really human life growing inside?  Until now, I have just felt bursts of pure love. But you grow like the rest of us now; hands, feet, heartbeat, sex organs, eyes, lids, toenails.  Your small strong flesh has large life, big spirit, humungous love. 

Even though your dada is not hip on the Dove images I have all around me (he thinks you will be born with that name and it’s not in his heart right now, but I explain it’s our special thing).  It is still how I envision you soaring.  I keep thinking of the Italian folktale about the Prince who finds his true love after cutting open a lemon.  Out of it flies a beautiful fairy, his wife, just like he always imagined her to be; white skin, hair as red as blood.  When her life becomes endangered she turns herself into a dove,  dove with white feathers and a red beak and flies away to escape harm (eventually she becomes a fairy again and they live the life together).  But for some reason you are a blend purity and wild passion.  Fairy and Bird. An evolutionary and revolutionary.  Spirit and flesh. 

I feel so amazing.  Never in a million years could a predict that I could feel so strong, energized and light with a two year old AND three year old to run after while I carry you in my bulging belly.  But I feel like I have this supernova style energy swirling inside of me: you.  Despite all the frantic housecleaning for showings and stress of still waiting for the right buyer, I am fabulous.  You make me feel utterly sexy, actually.  I am embracing the curves and the dips and the molds.  I actually like the extra 13 pounds I have packed on in 19ish weeks.  Perhaps because I am happy and called to move, those pounds feel solid and good, soft and pliable.  Through your life,  I found my Astanga yoga practice again.  The sweat and movement, the constant backbends and handstands, greeting the sun for almost two hours straight and then the stillness and the Vedic chanting.  It’s been exhilarating to practice this path pregnant.  Never have I thought I would attempt anything other than prenatal or yin-like yoga while with child, but I am now fully wonderful in a very yang practice and it is what my body wants.  But I am taking it easy.  As my teacher said the other night: Easy is so much better than harder. I agree and although we bring ourselves inside out, we make it easy, joyous and never pushy. You are pretty bad-ass little one.  You long to rock-climb in thunderstorms, spearfish in shark-infested waters, and snow-shoe over crevasses.  After spending the majority of time with Sula inside sitting on the couch, nursing a toddler, I enjoy feeling this freedom.  I feel empowered.  Just like our beautiful friend AD said; “This baby is really allowing you to step into your true Goddess form.”  I agree. 

Now if only my insides weren’t falling out, everything would be pretty much perfect.  As I sat in M’s office for our 2^nd pre-natal:

So, are you doing you Kegels?

Um.  Yeah. (Pause. Smile.)  No.  Hell no.  Those things…ugh.

Well, I am just thinking about the incontinence you had after Sula…..

What?  Me? Leaking?  Huh?  Ohhhhhhh.   Yeah.  That’s right.  My mind erased  those weeks after she was born when I pissed every time I sneezed and at the drop of a hat I would just out and PEE my pants. Completely. It was like there was less than a second notice that it was coming and there was no way I could make it to the toilet this quickly.  So I would actually pee the whole time I ran to the toilet and by the time I got there I had soaked my pants. Once when I was hiking down Camelback Mountain, about a month after you were born, I peed.  Just like that.  In front of a troupe of people.  It just came out.  M did remind me then to do those kegels.  I didn’t listen.  It did finally go away so I thought all was good. 

Gotcha.  Ok.  I’ll start.  I promise.

So of course I didn’t do them until one day last week I felt like my yoni had gained about 10 pounds and it actually felt like my bladder and my transverse colon had dropped and were trying to squeeze out through my urethra.  My perineum felt more swollen and sore than in the 9^th month.  I felt like I was carrying 20 pound weights in my crotch.  And of course I emailed M and reminded me of my little issue with kegels and suggested I should wear a belly scarf, nice and tight, like all the smart mamas in other cultures do to keep their muscles and organ all in one place.

So little one, in the mail this week, this will arrive. Because there is NO WAY in hell your mama will be putting on anything like this.  And I have taken upon the very strict practice of doing more kegels than one could think humanly possible.  I do their step ones, the holding 10 second kind, and I even sometimes do them to the beat of the music in the car while I’m driving. 

I like how you express yourself with your specific, very specific needs in food.  Eating really has never been so much fun, and babylove, mama loves to eat; she lives to eat.  She gets up in the morning because of the potential foods that she will cross paths with during the day.  You have been relatively vegan in taste.  For the first four months any sort of animal by-product besides cottage cheese made me throw-up.  This month I am slowly swallowing and enjoying organic chicken and turkey and the occasional gelato from one of the best gellaterias in The States.  You like the particular flavor they only make on Thursdays and Fridays; fresh organic yogurt and figs from Sicily.  It is truly the closest I get with God when I eat it.  It makes us hum with joy.  But not often, just occasionally we eat it and when we get a bit it carries over time.  Other than that, creamy cheesy things aren’t your favorite.  Which surprises me because I love a good cheese. We still go for the cottage cheese, but only because I know it to fill us with needed protein.  Otherwise we down rice noodles with soy, sesame, nut butter and tons of Sirracha.  Wilted greens, sprouts, tomatoes, shredded carrots added.  These little chocolates from Trader Joes that are like mini-peppermint patties and are so refreshing, we like those, don’t we.  Tasty. I made a batch of Baba Ganoush on Sunday and we have been smearing that on Wasa Crackers all week.  Delish. And at the same moment we began craving it, M prescribed me cooked and spicy foods.  My heart beat was so slow and my pressure so low that at our last prenatal, I actually inquired if I was dead or alive.  Spicy foods might take up my internal constitution a notch.  I need some heat.  I think that I try to be so cool in this true external desert heat (eating raw foods like cucumber, cherry tomatoes, fruits, high quality salmon sashimi, etc) that my inside temp lowers and I slow way down.  So Indian food has been bringing us to spicy food heaven as of late. Channa Masala, Spicey lentils, curries, you name it, and we are feeling a bit more heat. You alre also very certain that for lunch every day I make a dressing from veganaise, the juice of 2 lemons, 2 cloves of pressed garlic and olive oil.  It doesn’t really matter what I eat this dressing with, but I eat it.  I must.  And this week black licorice has been your demand.  And pineapple is a sure winner.

I can’t believe there ever was a time when I knew nothing of you.  When I thought you may be out there in the ether, keeper of the akashic records, I figured you to be just a spirit guide.  But now, in my blessed life, I have the opportunity to hold you in the flesh; to guide me this plane.  Your sister Mia, who more than ten times a day comes up to our belly and lays her sweet porcelain cheeks up against it and whispers, “I love you baby, I love you” told me something interesting just today.  She said that when she lived at the source nobody was there but Sula, you and the other baby. 

Other baby? Honey, there is only one more baby coming to us.

But there was another baby there, mama.  But I was going to be first.

There was another baby.

Uh-huh.

Little one, there is not other baby with you in the space, is there?  I mean, I know not in my belly space, but in the big space?  Perhaps it was our angel, who of course, in all innocence and purity would be a child.  When your sister said this, I felt sick.  My whole life I felt like I was meant to be a mother, but never a mother of many.  Many would be four.  Three is so perfect. I see things, feel things in odd numbers.  3. 7. 21.  Those are the numbers in my life.  Certainly the latter are impossible.  My insides are trying to squeeze through my yoni, no other baby can live inside.  Mama gettin’ old.  Dada gettin’ snipped.

Your sister Mia also said something funny today.  She has been insisting that baby is a girl.  You can only be a girl, because that is all she wants.  I smile and say a girl would be perfect, but so would a boy.  And she says no not a boy, a girl. But today she said

Mama, I think I want a boy baby.

A boy.

Yeah.  I thought of a really cool boy name.  Elroy.  Isn’t that a cool name?

Dove, you will not be Elroy if you are a boy.  Don’t worry.  I think Dada and Mia watched Jetsons while Mama was in San Jose a couple weekends ago.  Elroy.  And we’d of course have to get you a dog named Rover.

I have been thinking of your birth.  I wonder where it will be.  Here.  Washington.  Somewhere along the way. With a midwife.  With friends.  With just me and dada. At home. In water.  In the hospital. Vaginal. Surgical. I am preparing for it all.  Having Mia and Sula, in both their diverse, safe, private births at home have brought me to where I am today.  I know however you choose to come, where you choose to come, it will be perfect.  It may be exactly how I want it to be.  It may be different.  Either way, it will be the moment you are born; sacred, intense, a miracle.  It’s strange how with your sisters I refused to even glance in the direction there might be a transfer or intervention.  No way. Not me. But I am so comfortable in my birthing role now that I don’t fear any of it.  Not one bit. I can’t even fear death.  The only thing that might possibly bring fear into my being is not being supported in thewhatever moments evolve, surrounded with love and comfort is all that matters.  I know as long as I envision a circle of health and love and peace,  we will be provided for.  Again, how you have opened my mind, empowered me, allowing me to see things not only from my own inner and outer eyes, but from a universal source, a place where there is no judgment, a place that is teaching me to release propaganda that I once thought to be truth/knowledge and outcomes that I once thought were fixed.  You are holding my hand, walking me closer to that place to be really in the moment, to finally get inside that popular saying ‘just be’ where it is all empty.  Empty of all mental knowledge and become Beginners Mind.  I am seeing that is my only no-path to freedom.  To look at all things not with thoughts of wisdom and knowing, but thoughts of newness and vulnerability. To learn in my cells from that behind me and to be destined for what is in front, but never to sway in either of those places.  To be a teacher I must be a true student, a brand new student. I want to be a good teacher to you, and to me too. Thank you little one.  Thank you for these gifts. I open them slowly.

And on a lighter note.  Maternity clothes all suck.  I have a freakishly long torso which makes being pregnant quite easy, lots of room for you.  But I have short legs and the ass of 2 melons.  Don’t I sound freakish?  Well, let’s just say the maternity clothes out there try their hardest to assure me I am. Nothing fits right.  Nothing.  But fuck them.  I am filled with the shape of you and I am strong.  My whole body becomes pregnant, not just my belly.  In this reality, people make clothes that are a boxy and ugly and tent like or oh-so-adorable and chic and too tiny for my pregnant curves.  So I have found perfection in other clothes.  Besides 2 pants (some way too expensive jeans i have yet been able to afford to buy and some Gap cargos that actually fit all areas of body) a cheap skirt, and this shirt, because come on, how could I not, I am boycotting all other maternity clothes until I am too big and I live in the cold, and then maybe I will just wear blankets wrapped around me.  So all my tops come to me sweatshop free and made in the USA from here (just a size or 2 bigger and there tanks and T’s truly are so soft and stretchy) and I will forever live in these pants here.  And that’s it. Nothing else. Unless it’s handed down and cute.  It’s got to be cheaper than a whole wardrobe of ugly-ass clothes that don’t fit.  I am all for highlighting The Bootie…not smashing it into jeans for asses the size of a 12 year old boy.  Just remember that little one, if you are a girl, rock it.  Rock your curves.  If you are a boy; celebrate and honor the flesh a woman’s bones are gifted.  They are a gift to you, too. We form it to protect you.  It layers upon to make your milk.  It is righteous and needed.

These past five months have been a shock, a sickness, and whirl of excitement, the beating of two hearts within and many, many gifts of love and patience and simple daily joys of just knowing you and I are still One.  Your sisters, your father, and me, we all adore you. We feel like we may have caught a shooting star, by the luck of Jupiter.  We welcome your changes and shifts and honor each stage it presents itself to us.  We hold you.

Let’s keep reflecting each other, Dove.  It’s so good.

I love you sweet soul.

Mama.