It Begins

The teacher training I've been helping to teach finishes tomorrow. Yesterday we got out a little early and I had time to take a long walk in the park overlooking the ocean. My head started to clear for the first time in a few weeks---I felt the space that's coming, for a few months anyway.

I told myself before the training started that when it ended it would be April, and time to start getting seriously ready for Baby. I am clueless as to what gear I need, there's a nursery to paint and decorate, a house to finish furnishing.... I guess those are the big things. In the material world anyway. April is tomorrow.

My heart has been getting ready for this baby for a long time. Yesterday on the walk something started to happen. This snowball (a happy one) effect of seeing myself everywhere with my child: at the Festival of Books, at the Museum of Jurassic Technology, in a yard we don't have yet with a puppy we don't have yet, at my dad's house playing with the llama, saying bye to Sky and the bambino as I go to a rehearsal and being at that rehearsal lighthearted and easy because of the morning I spent with that little one. Suddenly I am seeing myself going through the world with this extension of my heart, as someone famous said once---like my heart is walking around outside of me.

I kept daydreaming. Then I began to feel those things I've read that parents feel but only knew in theory what they meant. I began to want my child to have so much more than I've ever had. And I've had a beautiful life. To passionately, deeply and completely want this baby to have all the courage, faith, and opportunities to be who she or he is here to be. Suddenly I started to have a sense that my life isn't going to be the most important thing to me anymore. There is so much I still want to do, and so many dreams I have for me, yet within that I'm starting to feel that mothering this person is the most significant thing I will ever do. I am starting to feel the lengths I am willing to go to in order to do that. And I don't even know what "that" is yet! or what those "lengths" are.

I was walking under some trees with interesting hollow pod-things hanging off them, and my heart was beating fast because I was dreaming of this. Dreaming of my desire to facilitate this new person's path.

About 4 months to go and I am feeling things I've never felt before. This is only the beginning, isn't it? Moms, chime in.

Kristina sent me these 2. With a note saying Sky and I need something like this.

I think she's right. For me to look at when the baby isn't a baby and is gone at a sleep-over. Or for the baby to look at if she/he ever doubts how much we're already in love with it.

first photo from here; second one here

(I really don't like calling the baby IT. But the double pronoun thing can go on too long.)