What I have been thinking about most is that I am going to be the mother of three people.  And my visions vacillate.

In one, I am a super-mama; Sula on my back in the ergo, baby wrapped tightly in front  with my Moby, Mia holding my hand as we hike the trails that spread like veins all over the hills behind my house. I am back to my pre-baby weight in a flash, dining on vegan soups and homemade breads and fresh pheasant my husband brings home from the hunt.  We have a seamless routine; mornings are such fun, ritualistic, and consistent.  We wake with a smile, we read, we sing and dance, we eat, we dress, we brush, we errand and go to school.  Afternoons are sleepy, nappy and crafty; laundry and dishes and organizing.   Maybe even a sitter comes over and allows me to nap or write for my fabulous freelancing work or get a haircut and color. Evenings are warm and smooth; imagination play, cooking, rolling on the floor with kids, eating, calming down, singing, bathing, massaging and ahhhh, what a day…fast to sleep. And then my man and I have time and energy to make incredible love until we both burst with ecstacy.

Ha.

And then the other, I am on the couch, in five day old clothes.  Three kids are screaming, two need a diaper change and the other is bleeding from an unidentifiable wound.  I am crying or yelling or yelling and crying.  I am ugly and old.  My stomach flab hangs to my knees and I can smell the sticky sweat that clings to my fleshy creases. I can’t get anywhere or do anything because I can’t figure out how to get them all fed and dressed and buckled in a car. I pop open the Pinot Noir by noon and finish it by 2pm.  I have taken up smoking American Spirits by the pack, sneaking into the laundry room to suck down the nicotine. My man comes home to find me half-passed out, drooling red-wine saliva from my mouth onto the couch cushion. Mia and Sula are playing with knifes and the baby is covered in spit up. 

Both of these, of course rock the opposite ends of my pendulum, and I know that it will be somewhere in between, but I just can’t see it.  I can’t see how it will all pan out.  I can’t figure out how I am supposed to feel about not knowing.   And this makes me grumpy.  And scared.  I want to know now what it’s going to be like so I can prepare.  Preparation seems to be the magic word at this stage in the pregnancy.  Who knows what I feel so urgent to prepare for, besides a baby coming out, what else is there to do that can’t really wait?  Yet that pending sensation that so much has to be done or else I will just totally fail at the birth and beyond can take over my whole body.  I become paralyzed with fear.  The What If’s and I’ll Nevers and The No Way In Hells take me prisoner.  I’ll admit, I will have long hours of the days where I struggle with severe fear and depression because I am just not sure how I can ever do this, how I can be a decent parent to what seems like so many. And this fear takes me elsewhere, certainly not living in the now, with my kids.  I yell, I complain, I mope.  I don’t remember signing up for this when I forgo birth control.  I thought things would be neater, more organized, happy and cute, all finger-painting and organic gardens.  But instead, I am scared. Shitless. And on top of it all I am in a new place surrounded by vast space I haven’t explored yet, because I am so very pregnant. And that is all my body will allow me to be.

But I remind myself.  The flip-side of fear and darkness is self-discovery.  I try not to beat myself up in these dark moments before the birthing light.  I try to explore that path of discovery.  What can I learn?  How can the sensations of my shoulders to my ears and my heart tense and tight lead me to realization?

And it starts with a smile.  And an intentional thought about the shifting family dynamic.  And get all excited.  Because I love all three of them so much, and I see them all in a row, smiling or crying or sleeping across our big bed and my heart melts like ice under sun.  Who cares how it pans out?  I can only hope for the best, right? I can’t figure it all out now. Perhaps I never will.  I can only allow it to happen.  Some days I won’t get off the couch.  Some days I will. Some days I will drink wine because who says I can’t?  Some days I will “go ape” (as B and Mia call it when I get a bit loud around the house) from lack of sleep and lack of personal space.  But other times I’ll just breathe it all in and out I will be the willow in the wind and bend to the challenge.  Some days I will be pained with the weight of three humans on me, and others I will feel light, a whooping crane in flight, owning the sky.

And then again, hasn’t it always been this way, my life that is?  The future has always been a mystery, the unknown frightening and exciting. For years I have read and been told and have told myself to just stay in the present, which is still a  twisty and turny mountain road.  Sometimes I get stuck and I sit and have no choice but to smell the same sage bush all day (and if I stay present in my stagnancy, the smell of the bush will stay with me forever).  Sometimes the view from the present is wildly vast and birds-eye because I have traveled effortless despite the steep and dusty switchback.  Some days it barely feels like I am working on the journey, the slope downward just carries me along.

And there seem to be many, many days where I fall so flat on my face, I trip on stones and tree roots and even though I am moving, I am miserable.  Even in the present, but mostly this happens when my eyes are behind me or far ahead of me, not noticing the simple movement of one foot at a time.  The abrasions I get are impossible to cover-up and sometimes they take a long time to heal.  But they do.  Eventually.

 ***

I have given up the bedtime struggle.  They climb in bed with us at some point every night, never earlier than 4am, but never later than 6am. I have been on a mission to stop this.  I have really tried to force them/convince them to go back into their own bed, and when that becomes too loud and crazy,  both of them crying for my body to snuggle against (Sula more than Mia), we do everything to figure how to keep them away from me, and get them both to settle on the opposite side of B.  Somehow I thought this was necessary and that is was the time was now to create my own little space on the bed, with room to wrap my arm around the empty spot a little baby will soon sleep. My mind kept repeating the same thing: a baby will be next to me, there will be no room for them to envelope me in like this. They can’t be here anymore. I have to stop this.  And this was sad, but my mind reminded me it was the evolution of the family. And in consciously stopping this semi-co-sleeping, we endured middle of the night tears and tantrums, heart-ache and loss of sleep.  And in the morning we all woke exhausted.  This has been happening for months. 

And finally, my mind snapped and my heart space won over. I had to release the control and say fuck it. It became obvious trying to change what was happening wasn’t good for any of us. I was trying to change our story when the page hadn’t turned yet.  Baby isn’t here yet. So now I let them come in and cuddle me.  Sometimes I ask one of them if they would lie  on the other side of B and sometimes I let them both on either side of me. Sometimes it goes smoothly, sometimes not. But I tell them honestly,   Mama’s gonna enjoy sleeping so close to you now, because when the baby comes, she is going to need more room.  The baby is going to be lying right next to her.  But until then, snuggle on in. In a few more moons you will have stay in your own bed, or we can set up a bed on the floor here.  And dada is always here to cuddle you when you need it. And I think they get it.  I think they are trying to get their last taste in before everything really changes.  I have decided that’s what I would like to do, too.  I remind myself to savor the last moments of it just being me and my two girls and really, I want to be in that place. And so who says this is the time to wean them from me?  Who says with patience and honesty it just won’t happen, somehow, organically? In its own time.  They have grown so fast, so big.  Why do I always fall back on the rush?  Everything else happens on it’s own.  Why not this?

 ***

Did any of that sound convincing?  I talk a good talk.  I am not saying I am fraudulent, pretending I am someone I am not.  But my writing heart sometimes takes me to places of therapy, sometimes I believe what I write and I love it.  Sometimes, like right now, I gotta come clean.

This dark tunnel, this lead blanket of blackness that holds me in this place is real.  I am tired, emotionally.  I walk with my headspace in a blur.  I think of death, but more I think of life and how hard it can be.  I think of the tangible pain my yoni might feel as it opens for a baby to stretch through (I say might because there is a great part of me that sincerely believes that I can mutate that energy into something wonderful and sensual and pleasurable).  There is great doubt I will be able to survive this mothering experience, this moving experience, this marriage experience.  I am in a hole.  No hands can pull me up.

My man opens his lap for me to bury my face in and sob.  He lets me feel this.  And that feels better.  He brings home a pint of ice cream.  That feels good, too.  When I tell him that it has been a decade since I have felt this low, he reminds me the last few weeks of pregnancy with Mia and Sula I said the exact same thing, which is: I feel like I need to be committed.

The reality of all this is, regardless of my spiritual practices, is that in essence my walk to labor and through to the other side to mother is more than hard. It’s fucking intense.  It hurts. I feel like every last part of me is being cracked open and exposed to raw and bloody truth. And I am one of the lucky ones.  I am loved, not alone, and birthing in a safe environment.   And yet, it still feels like the biggest risk I can ever take.  This journey should be honored, revered.  Mothers and mothers to be everywhere should know that they are not alone, that we all initiate each other on this path.  I extend this experience out to everybody who also feels it; you are not alone.  It is real.  And it is okay.  Feel it.  We are meant to feel this intensity.  It prepars us for something grand and mystical.

And Baby stirs inside.  Its body shifts and I imagine it trying to find it’s perfect position, knowing the time to travel down is soon  An elbow jabs me and it feels really good against my skin. A bottom presses against my stomach and I imagine a big old stretch happening in my womb.  There are hiccups. There is a pleasure with this baby’s movements.  They arouse me in the most innocent way, makes me want to get up and dance, to spiral my hips and lift my knees or to lie on the wet dirt and feel it against my skin. And so above it all…there is a mountain of hope.

PHOTOS of the Dove Belly and the girls, COURTESY OF JASON BYAL.  

The sun rose at 8am today.  It seemed to sink sometime around 4pm.  The moon was out by 1pm this afternoon.

These have been dark days.

And for the first time in a long time, it is truly dark for me, literally; the light is gone.  We wake in the dark and walk to get the afternoon mail delivery in the dark.  For the past 11 years I have lived under a spotlight, between California and Arizona, the winter sun is strong and you have to really pay attention to see the shortening of the day.  And now I live at a different latitude where I have been swallowed by a force impossible to ignore; the sun wanes.  It goes away.  Nothing else to it. Life revolves around it’s absent..  People retreat inside early not fighting the darkness instead they lie against it.   There is a mystery surrounding people’s homes as we take an evening walk in wild wind.  I sense my neighbors all sit around their fire and unconsciously wonder, like the ancients did as the days got darker and darker:  Will there be light? And there was. 

This is my favorite time of year.  Not because my energy is at a peak or because I get things done or because I love the cold or because it makes me feel good and alive.  Quite the contrary.  This time of year I go so deep, so inside, like a crab I crawl and withdrawl inside my shell and wait; protected and hermit-like. I die a bit, happy to get rid of some things that I don’t need. I sleep in hope of something else, not expecting or anticipation, just knowing. The possibility of light, I suppose, whatever that word ‘light’ means.  Not good or better, just different. My insides create a new path for the next cycle during this hibernation, the light on the other side just helps me walk it; a little more clearly and out in the open. This is what I like about it all.  Knowing that even though I can’t see shit right now, soon things will be revealed, things that have always been there I’ll be able to see a bit more clearly. This year there is child within this dark mystery, and with the return of some daylight hours, my baby comes closer to reality.  There is nothing symbolic about the Solstice and birth of newness this year.  I live it tangibly.

Growing up Catholic, our life was infused with ritual; frankincense and myrrh resin burning in golden vessels, holy water held in bowls throughout the house.  We chanted mantra to Mary, fingering beads until we completed each mystery. The Mother held center in the faith, through Her we could ask for grace.  We had prayers for an array of saints, all representing a variety of needs from hopeless causes to lost keys.  We had little altars set up everywhere.  We never, ever owned a Bible.  In essence, I was being schooled in paganism. As every good Catholic should know: their religion was cleverly modeled after the pagans and indigenous cultures they sought to reform. 

At an early age, the face of my god could be found in a knot of a tree or in the quick shift of a weather system.  I found salvation watching the dandelions turn from yellow flower to puffy seeds. My childhood was totally inconsistent inside my house, things changed on a daily basis with no meaning to me.  I never knew if I should be scared or happy or if I was bad or good, no boundaries where ever defined and depending on the moods of my parents, nothing was ever the same, no rules or schedules were ever implemented to feel safe and real. But I found my own sense of peace through ritual and system; I watch the weather change with my nose pressed up against my window.  I sniffed for the fallen leaves and the chimney smoke in the air.  I waited for the ice to melt into water and drip its ping-ping from the storm drain onto my awning.  I knew it was time to run wild in the sun and get color in my cheeks and on my nose at the first scent of grilled meat and sweet wild strawberries wafting through the neighborhood.  These seasons, these shifts, are what gave me license to truly live, to grow.  To feel safe and to feel protection, what lacked in my home, I got from the Earth..

Because my birthday just so happened to land on the Winter Solstice, we always celebrated that day.  It was festive. It came natural to us, being bound by winter and the unconscious desire to bring in the newness were good reasons to party.  My parents would hold their yearly bash for their youngest girl combined with a huge Christmas party.  This day the fire was lit strong, wine bottles were emptied, shot glasses of Sambuca were clinked with the chorus of Salute! My mother’s biscotti was arranged in pretty little dishes all over the house and the cherries jubilee was aflame.  There was drunken singing and ladies in funky seventies faux furs dancing in my living room.   It was a party of all parties and I loved every minute of it.  And because my mother always said to me, On the darkest day of the year, a light was born: You. I got the deeper meaning of the day.

And so despite my Catholic upbringing, I was well aware of what happened on the Solstice.  And it was hard not to see the parallel from a very early age: The birth of The Son (Jesus) just so happened at about the same time as The Birth of The Sun.  In the middle dark, the virgin midwinter Sun appeared and gave us hope; for food, for warmth, for days filled with light to guide.

And so I celebrate the Sun.  I gave thanks.  And as I  get older and less judgmental and less righteous about my beliefs, I see no difference in a Son being born, or the Sun being born.  I give thanks to both.  They both deserve celebration and reverence; lighting a fire, doing a little dance, getting a little drunk, committing to love and warmth, sitting in meditation or prayer, taking a walk in the night womb right before The Great Labor begins.  I will savor these moments; the last ones where I can really hide inside, curl up in the coziest (yet sometimes uncomfortable) internal ball and catch a few more moments of deep sleep and learn just a bit more about myself, embracing the ugly and the beautiful of my inner winter, my raging storm, my dark sky. And then I am invited to open up wide and catch a glimpse of what is to come, I can see it a little better with the sun on the edge of the world, that heat burning a bit flame into my sacred heart.  But tonight, on the eve of the Solstice,  I will stir that soup in wool socks and sweats one more time and put myself to bed right after I am done eating it.  I will sit in this space and not bother to turn on more lights to keep the day going a bit longer.  It is over soon.  Tomorrow is a new day.  The darkest day, but also the portal to an expanding light.

Here’s to what’s been so very dark.  And to the precious gift of tomorrow, heres to The Sun; a light savior, indeed.

Baby’s heart arrhythmia is still heard.  I’ve gone back and forth from being very laid back and unconcerned about the whole thing to feeling stressed and pressured (by myself) to take the medical route and get testing done to find out if it is benign or possibly not benign.  The chances of it being possibly not are so slight and rare that I am naturally pulled to a place of peace for the most part; a place where I trust my mother instinct that tells me Baby is perfect. 

Apparently like 1% of babies in the womb have arrhythmia’s but out of those something like 97% are totally benign (these are not exact numbers, but never count on me to be exact) and the skipped beat is a natural little glitch that corrects itself by birth, sometimes just after birth, and sometimes a person can live a whole life with one and have no additional heart issues. 

Of course there is the choice to get tested, and the question kept arising….what if? And that question led to are you crazy for not just wanting to find out?  Even if you have a better chance of winning the lottery than for this baby to have a heart condition? I was always under the impression that my inner knowledge about creation/gestation and this process was more accurate than any monitor could ever tell me.  As a matter of fact, the reason I have always stayed away from any kind of ultrasound (even thought I did get my first ultrasound ever with this baby at 14 weeks for some kind of due date clue) or testing is from a deep knowing of myself: I fear that monitors might take from me my flame of wisdom to a dwindled down pile of gray ash. Medical technology is good, but for the sick and dying, not for my personal healthy, normal pregnant self .  But to turn my back on it now?  What if I just don’t know if this is a healthy and normal pregnancy?  What if my intuition has failed me? What if I am wrong and I am a fool for not taking the step for intervention? What  if something is wrong and I make the wrong choice and I am a horrible mother and person?

Because of the choices I am presented with and the questions that came out of the choices, B and I had the brief thought we would just go and do the testing, which would entail traveling down to the Seattle area to see a cardiologist and get the echocardiogram (the test that is usually done in these situations) to let our minds rest ease when someone would tell us all is well..  We joked that it would get us down to the city; use it as an excuse to make an overnight trip of it; exploring and slurping up a metro-center we know little about.  It would be a celebration because we were sure we would be told all is well and baby’s heart is in perfectly working condition.  If we did the test, there could be three things the cardiologist might tell us: 1). Everything is totally fine and normal. 2). There could be something wrong and baby will need to see a specialist immediately after birth, which could mean having hospital birth with a cardiologist on call in the Seattle area. 3.) Urgent: We need to get this baby out right now this second (via surgery).  The latter two things being said very, very rarely.  Almost never.

I looked in my midwives eyes when we listened to baby’s heart thump through the waves of the Doppler at the next appointment.  Her eyes were watery blue and placid.  She was so laid back about it, explaining she may have seen 100 women in her experience as midwife whose babies had this kind of arrhythmia and out of 100 she doesn’t remember any of them being a concern.  She felt that my baby’s heart is strong and steady.  But also, she wanted us to do what we felt right doing.  We told her we’d think about it some more.

Then I turned to my dear L, who heard in my voice my wavering back and forth between feeling fine and ready to crack and loose it over this situation.  I expressed my concern with going down that path, that slippery slope of medical intervention when there doesn’t really seem to be a dire need for it. My concern was what if some inadequate doctor thought something was wrong and we underwent surgery only to find out baby was fine?  She reminded me that Cardiologists are not in the business of scaring women into Cesareans; they are heart specialists and maybe hearing someone tell me that all is fine with baby would put all my worries to rest.  I liked hearing this from her.  She validated the side of me that wanted ‘to know’ in a scientific, printed out on a piece of paper and signed sort of way.  She made me feel okay about the part of me that wanted to run to a doctor even though I know there are no such things as guarantees.

I also spoke with my old friend B, midwife apprentice and all around magical being.  She assured me that it happens all the time and that there is even a chance that my lattes and chocolate obsession could be part of the whole thing.  We laughed that my two shots of espresso and bite (okay fine, BIG bite) of dark chocolate a day could be re-wiring little one’s heart. I’m jolting the baby all up.   We both agreed with two other little one around, my small amount of caffeine was what I needed not to pass out behind the wheel.  But maybe if I took a break for a couple days and then listened it would sound different. Regardless, I felt so at peace hearing her say this.

And I turned to M, my midwife for Sula and my care giver for the first 20 weeks of this one’s inner life.  She suggested I get a fetascope from A, my midwife.   She thought we could spend everyday listening and getting to know baby through its heartbeat, listening to its subtle and obvious patterns. To get to know what was going on inside my, inside baby, inside it all.  And I can read between the lines well with M; as I am sure we both believe the heart speaks in a deeper language then just electrical beats, the heart pounds the ancient knowledge of the soul. The heart, at one time was considered the organ of thinking by ancients; the heart is all-knowing.  Listening to that beat, quietly, would tell me much about my baby.  She spoke from her intuitive being when she told me she really felt Dove was just fine.  And then of course, I turned to my mother, and in the end, the worry-wart of all worriers said:

Why go down that road?  Everything is just fine. Your baby is fine.

Simply put by the woman who gave birth to me and six others without any complications.

And so each night by the fire we place the fetascope on the belly.  We search around baby’s little limbs, butt, back, and head, gentle pushing the ‘scope in place until we hear it speak to us:

Thumthumthumthumthumthumthumthumthumthumthum[space]

Thumthumthumthumthumthumthumthumthumthumthum[space]

Thumthumthumthumthum[space]

Thumthumthum[space]

Space.  It has been such a theme in my life.  And when I think of it in terms of what I long for or what inspires me, what brings me to myself, I seem stop worrying that it exists in the heart beat of my baby.  The absence of anything, the Nothingness between Everything, that little pause, the open, endless, stillness; where nothing  reveals All.  Instead of something being wrong, I can’t help but question if I am being given a gift through that missing beat? How carefully can I listen to that split moment of silence in time and what will I hear?

I am always the most taken in the moments of Space.  When B has me listen to a new rhythms or songs he’s created, primal sounds usually thick in the reverb, heavy on echoes and saturated with dub, I am pulled deepest in the song during the empty parts, between endless echo and the next drop, there is always a moment when the music ceases to exist.  It is there, at that spacey spot,  I feel it’s magic.  Or in a poem or prose, read aloud, the moment the reader pauses, I am grounded, feeling the words vibrate, resonate inside me and here is where I feel the writing wisdoms.  And it’s not in the thickest part of the forest where I feel the divine presence of the gods, it is when I step out of the pines, and see the sky, feel the open air, and come across the meadow.  This is where my soul sings with thanks with what I learned in the dark walk at the bottom of thick and towering trees.

When I breath deeply in attempts to meditate it’s not the in or the out breath that brings me the peace, it’s the small space at the bottom and top of each in and exhale that I find a glimpse of myself; a moment of self- realization.  In my yoga practice, it’s never in the pose that I reap the benefits of the stretch, it’s in the stillness, the release that happens just afterwards.  It’s in that space I discover the healing.

I don’t doubt for a moment there is not a deeper meaning here, a lesson for me to learn and to grow from. This baby has been nothing less than guru and god to me.  For him/her to ask me: mama, listen carefully,  to this beat, or perhaps the space of the ‘no beat’,  is to learn more about myself, about the baby,  about the universe in which spirals in and around both of us.  Or perhaps baby just demands me and B to sit still each night with hands on baby, quiet, paying attention which always winds up turning to into a deep conversation about the love we have for baby, about what it will be like when we get to curl against it’s flesh each night.  The whirl of the day with our wild girls sometimes keeps us from adoring baby up-close and personal…and from the words of M, this baby wants to be adored.

And so we adore.  We adore the two hearts that live inside me right now.   We adore the hearts that surround us.  We adore the Heart of the World, the beats and arrhythmia’s that happen to each of us on a daily basis.  Don’t we all expect to hear or see or be something that seems to always be there and sometimes it’s just not there? It’s gone.  We can look and search and poke and prod and try to figure out why it’s gone.  We can work harder to achieve it or win it back. We can artificially insert it.  We can fill our life with things to do or just plain things to fill up the space that seems so empty all of a sudden.  We can wallow in it and sob about it and be angry at it. We can fight the emptiness.  But maybe in the end, the absence, if we let it happen, listen to it, honor it, it becomes exactly what we have always been searching for.

Thank you Baby.

I’ll be taking a walk with the girls; I can feel the crisp white air against my checks.  I can finger and squeeze the cold little hands that grip both of mine as we climb the hill behind our house.  I can see the sky weave in and out from blue to steel to white back to blue. I watch the eagle soar below the clouds, and then watch another do the same.  I can feel slightly in awe that I just saw two bald eagles, but at the same time non-attached.  I can sit down with the girls and press my hands against the crunchy moss, feeling the wonder of the frost against the soft of the earth.  And I can hear them chattering around me.  But it’s all a pleasant blur of loving sound in the background until finally Mia screams at me, MAMA!!!  I WANT THE WATER BOTTLE NOW. NOW!  My first reaction is to lecture, that is not the polite way to ask for things, Mia.  You know that.  Then I realize she probably did ask me politely the first couple times.  Something tells me her request where part of the chorus of sounds all around me, sounds that just become soundtrack for each moment.  I just had no ability to respond to them.  My senses are glazed over like glacier from mountain to river; I am frozen in some other plane.

I guess it’s about the right time.  I am 35 weeks pregnant now, give or take, and a thick and protective coating has formed around me.  I no longer live totally here, present, aware of what happens around me.  I live inside this shell.  Waiting for the final crack.  The unveiling.  The birth of my baby, of me, of my whole family.  I do all this work, removed and secluded, yet life seems to continue around me.

I am in the chrysalis.  And simultaneously I honor this cave-like withdrawal and fight it with all my might.  There are still so many things to do; make truffles and peppermint bark, send out packages, shower my circles with love for the holidays; so many projects I want to do with the kids: the solstice wreath, their altar, building a labyrinth in the yard and making sure to gather on the 21^st;  and then all the little things to get ready for baby: make a mobile, decal the wall with blackbirds flying, washing all the cloth diapers, cleaning, rearranging, smudging this whole place, making meals and freezing them.   It’s like this driving force of energy pulls around me, trying to get me to commit in every direction, the words inside my head nag, nest, nest, nest.  But the shell, it keeps me from doing much of anything.  My heart draws a picture of nesting in a different way: sit down, warm by the fire, hold your belly, breath, chant, cuddle, go for slow walks, make tea…everything else will just fall in place. 

I am starting to come to terms with the work I do inside this chrysalis is the real work for this birth, the silent, subtle (yet humungous) work of the inner-world.  And that is where I have been living, in that world, doing work I am unable to describe.  All I can say is that it’s not heady work. I’m not living in my head, thinking about past or future stories.  I am not judging where I have or haven’t been or what I must or mustn’t so.  I am not even thinking about the birth, really.  I am in some kind of absence of space, but one that is so sweet and satisfying; I find it hard to pull myself up and out of it.  It is my own bubble.  And even if someone else (or myself) tries to pop it and pull me back into this world, my whole being refuses to oblige.  Sure, I will get the water for the girls, throw in a load of laundry, listen to B talk about this or that, read my kids books,  but I am only half there.  For a second I feel guilty and sad about this, like I am neglecting my life, but I know this is the work of preparing for the journey of this birth.  I know its important work; work that rarely gets honored and encouraged or supported in this culture.  How many women even get to stop working during this time?  How many women get to take time off being a full-time mom while the end of their gestation takes place?  I am fortunate in this sense; I don’t work outside the home and right now B is with me, at home, doing all those little things for the girls that I am taking a slight sabbatical from.   But in the end (or the beginning of it) this work that I do now, will bring a baby in my arms, and it will bring me once again to the role of Mother.

It’s hard to believe its right around the corner.

It’s hard to believe that the little feet that jab at my ribs and those hands that stretch and poke at my bladder will be in my bed with me, where I will kiss them, smell them and worship the delicate grandness of them.  Hands and feet of my newborn tell me I am not mortal, I am indeed Creatrix, I am indeed my own God(dess) and I am blessed to be in the presence of the same.

I have finally had my falling down on the bathroom floor, cheek on the cold tile, fists clenched, begging some god, somewhere inside or out to please tell me what to do (you know, just like the woman did, the one who wrote the book I should have written?)

It was not over my marriage, though.

It was about my kid.

And I am about at the moment where I am not sure where or how I can summon the energy to get through this day, this week, this fourth year of her life.  I am mad, hurt, exhausted and abused.  Today I don’t like being a mom; don’t want to be a mom; wish I never made the choice to do so.  There. I said it. And so, saying that, I will write.  I have no choice but to write about what makes me full of  greatness,  what makes me alive.  I won’t write all the reasons I want to strangle my daughter, because all of them would be born from a source of morbid illusion and a place where my ‘story’ has gotten stuck, skipping, repeating the same bad habits and patterns.   I choose to change the theme of today, release the tension and believe in what I know to be true. Then I can step back into my role, like I slip into a bath; softly, smoothly, clearly ready to feel it’s beauty and peace and yet prepared for that occasionally scorch of hot water on the delicate skin of humanness.  

Soft moss.  For just walking on it across my front yard to gather sticks from the fallen tree to use for kindling later on.  I am grateful I got married, barefoot on a field of soft green moss.

The buzz of a dragonfly, when they wiz by my head, reminding me I am the keeper of my own time.

Slow roasted potatoes sprinkled with fresh sage and rosemary, salt and pepper.

Sounds that never fail to heal me: ferocious winds, high tides beating against rocks, fire crackling, Mia singing songs she makes from the heart, My girl dog licking away at her paw, crows and owls sounding, the beat of drum skins under my husband’s hand, the meowing of a newborn baby, the sound of the last load of clothes spinning in the dryer.  Krishna Das chanting. Big Youth deejaying. The flipping pages of my journal when I am writing in a stream. 

My  circle of women: writers, healers, sisters.

The Three Grandmothers who, in spirit, always hover above me, come to me when I call upon them, guide me thorugh the mother labirynth.

The harder our kids are to raise, the closer my man and I become; our golden chain becomes tighter and stronger; our partnership transcends rules and we walk, merged and melted, trying to just live this parenting thing with grace. When we blunder and trip and fall flat on our faces, which happens often,  I am grateful for the outstretched hand, the pull back on up.

Nettles, Red Raspberry, Yarrow, Peppermint, and Oat Straw, just to name a few.  Each day that I commit to taking these green allies, I reaffirm my body wisdom.  I choose health.  The same goes for apple cider vinegar.  It has been such a friend to me this pregnancy, this time of slow healing.

My deck of intuitive tarot cards.

This ripe and gentle pregnancy, this little person who makes my belly bump with an authority and sensuality I cannot recognize as myself, though I am know I must possess.  I walk with an empress empowerment, I feel like Queen, large and round and taking up empty space with a slinky knowingness.  Everywhere I sit feels like a thrown. I am so grateful I get to love another person in that way only a mother can. I am so grateful that in less than two months, I get to cuddle with my dove.  My dove, I thank you.

Zappos.com. I am so pleased with my two new pair of boots; one black and furry, one wine colored and sexy.  Just in time for the first sprinkle of snow.

Light snows. 

Lattes.

Beet Juice.

My mother.

Black nail polish.

Hilly neighborhoods. 

The one who seems to bring me to these places of despair, the daughter that led me to this once blank page.. Through that despair I have no other choice but to reach my arms and heart out, stretching for the other side of my story.  I can’t live on a heap on the bathroom floor.  I can’t take off and travel, sewing my seed of creativity into a global coat, but I can sit and remember what is full and great in my life. And it’s her, the one I wanted to strangle. Her idiosyncrasies and iron like will, whose behavior can sometimes be compared to big blood sucking gnats that create boils on the skin; she’s the one who guides me to this place.  This place where my story is gratitude.  For her, her rosy glowing skin against the silver of snow, I give thanks.