1.22.2005

having known, knowing nothing. a concern is rising in me for the months coming at me and the transformation i am making from the mother of one to the mother of two. i find myself unable to recall what it was like to mother a newborn. all i can remember is that it was hard. it is as though there is a dance i did whose steps are now buried some place in my brain that i cannot access. i reassure myself that once the time comes again, i will remember and the dance will seem a familiar one that i simply hadn't done in awhile. and of course this will not be the same as it was at all. this will all be new, for it is a new person that i am bringing into the world, not simply another aleksander. and even as i make this transition to new mother, my son is transforming before me into a child and that too is unfamiliar. once so confident as i had figured all this mothering stuff out, i am being newly challenged everyday. it is so confusing to me. he is changing and i am trying to view with some sort of knowing objectivity with which i can gauge whether behaviors are normal or unusual, and then if normal, if normal only for my child, thereby atypical for his developmental stage, or normal for most or nearly all two-year-olds. the whole process is confounding. first, how do i have a knowing objectivity? how do i release myself from my emotional involvement enough to view him, to see behaviors for what they are and not just as an annoyance to me? it is a tricky process. another dance that i am learning. and so i find myself so unprepared for juggling all these transitions at once and having an understanding of my place and my children and my family and our goals and my life. i am changing by the changes around me. i am adapting and if i think carefully about it, if i begin to consider the unknown, it becomes terrifying. it becomes a cliff whose edge i am walking and about to jump off to see if i can fly - the depths are so dizzying, how will i survive? by surviving. and yet - this is motherhood not some extreme sport! how can i simply survive it? musn't i savor it? my children will only be this young once, musn't i appreciate each inch of them, each fold of fat and every precious moment? i believe that expectation to be a little high for my taste - for my memory of the colicky, spitting up, sleepless mess that was the early months of aleksander's life. my memory of that time is not always so rosy that i can swoon at the thought of babies. and yet i do, i have. it's how i ended up on this precipice to begin with. and as scary as it seems, i do believe that i can, and will, fly.

1.16.2005

ultrasound on friday. out of the darkness and out of the blur, came the strangely familiar. at first a head and some bone and a beating heart inside it's chest, hands and feet, legs and arms, and lastly a nose and lip - complete, not broken, soft, and perfect, ripe fruit for what it is i've lacked. and then i felt so happy. there is no eloquent way of putting the elation, the relief. there is no way to say more simply, more clearly, how happy we were and are to discover our experiments have worked, that what we sought to do is being done. our child will be born whole and perfect. we are so grateful. and i am so looking forward to heal what i'd lost. i am looking forward to the opportunity to nurse. there is nothing more to say but that i am ecstatic.