i am a birth junkie. as soon as i gave birth the first time, i was hooked. i read tons of books, always wanted to chat with pregnant moms (not that i come across them too often), love birth stories, etc. when we decided to try to conceive a second, i looked forward to being in it again, thinking that somehow it would be different than my first pregnancy.

and now i'm here and in a lot of ways it is different than my first pregnancy, but in a lot of ways, especially the emotional aspect, it's the same. i wouldn't say that i'm feeling depressed per se, but something feels sorta off.

when i would talk to moms-to-be while not pregnant, i would always want to hear about the truth of what they were going through, but it's really not what pregnant people talk about because it's generally not what people want to hear. people don't want to talk about the enormous change that you're undergoing - how it's changing your life and how you feel about it. people want to talk about names and sexes and ultrasounds and all the stuff that we preggos talk about. but i just feel there's something else here, underlying everything. it was there the last time and it's here again.

the truth is that i'm terrified of having two children. i'm worried about everything that could go wrong with the new baby. and i wish so badly that there was some way for our culture to recognize this enormous change that we are going through - before i'm 7 or 8 months along and am thrown a baby shower (or in some rare instances, a mother blessing ceremony of some sort).

there's something intensly intimate happening here. i look for my belly button to pop out and search for my linea negra and that feels real to me. that feels like the truth because it's about the physical evidence of my changing in a way that not fitting into my pre-pregnancy jeans is not.

i want so badly to understand how i feel about being pregnant. i have so many conflicting crazy emotions and yet i feel i have nothing to say about what i'm going through. i feel ironically paralyzed to describe or to understand or to have the language for the profound change and growth that i am undergoing. when i go out in public, or begin to think about me and my pregnancy in a public realm, i feel that it's discounted to a level of normalcy it does not deserve. i'm certain that it doesn't help that i'm a stay-at-home mom to begin with, so feel generally undervalued and invalidated as it is.

part of the emotion i cannot name or describe, that itch, that nagging in my brain, could be the baby itself - there growing inside of me, an individual. there's also a lot of it that's just about me. how i'm changing. how i'm growing. i have to encompass another person, another soul, if you will, and how does one really do that without being a god of some sort? how can i be bigger than myself? that's what this is. that's what i struggle with. learning somehow to grow outside my borders and finding myself irrevocably changed on the other side. what is that? it can only be spiritual. i am drawing up the energy of the world and it is more than me, yet i am so small. it's just too much to understand. the earth and the universe are tumbling around inside me and beyond me and somehow i swallow it and grow and grow and grow, yet can never fit everything. i am growing beyond myself somehow, yet coming back, overflowing who i am... it's like when the universe sprang out of visnu's navel. that's who i am - visnu lying on the bed of the cosmic sea...