Pregnancy is 9 months of a purgatory between a self slowly growing out of a restless youth and someone fully adult who you don’t know quite yet. Maybe 9 months is the ideal time to go through all the stages of mourning of your former self, even though she’s long gone, and prepare for this person you are about to become.
Whenever I find myself in a depressive state with remotely morbid thoughts, I find a strange calm in thinking of how so many versions of myself are long deceased — the little baby looking at the world wide eyed who I don’t remember at all, except in the form of pictures to prove she once lived, the child who wanted more than anything to fit in with others but not knowing how, the awkward preteen awakening, then teenage years of musicals and choir trips and still longing to fit in, the struggle through college years mostly alone, the years that feel not that long ago but are, the time fresh out of college alone in the Bay Area and knowing I had no choice but to make it work, the many years of being young in comparison to now, and young again — all those girls are gone. They’re only alive in my memories. The woman I am today remembers them as if they were sisters once alive in the past.
And so too will this woman I am today soon be deceased. She will like a caterpillar shed her skin and be reborn as something — someone new: a mother. She will look back at days like today and say her goodbyes to the woman who lived for moments of silence as much as those of laughter. Who spun her mind a thousand times over on all that never mattered. In three months, or less, this time the shedding of the skin will be more evident. It will be filled with screams or grunts or tears as her uterus pushes a human being out of it that is so precious and tiny and innocent: she remains in disbelief how anything that innocent could survive inside her for so long.
I’m ready to shed this skin, this me, and become whatever it is I’m to become next. She may be more tired, more worried, or perhaps more calm and at peace with the passing of time and fragility of life. She hopes that moments will feel new again, that with the newness will come a sense of purpose and adventure long lost in the sweetness of stability. Challenges will come daily and with vengeance but they will be novel and ripe to completely mess up and hopefully have the opportunity to try again many times. To try my best to make room for happiness and the embrace of failure and risk in my sweet child’s life.
Let this treacherous thirst for newness shift to support my transformation to motherhood. And let every difficult moment be embraced for its novelty, no matter how trying it may be at the given time. For the woman breathing life then too shall pass on to the next woman who takes her place to serve the needs of survival at the given time.
life with interest 