Mal Tries: Motherhood

life comes at ya fast

my daughter, Hazel, was born several weeks early on January 30th at 7:04PM. motherhood is already pushing me to release perfectionism, thus this poorly edited, fresh-from-the-back-of-my-journal post, written two days before my water broke all over the bathroom floor…

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I’ve been thinking about a vision I conjured up during a meditation several years ago, deep Covid, lying on the floor of the living room, east Tennessee. I can’t remember the prompt or the app, Calm maybe. It was something about visualizing a future with yourself in it, something simple that had the right colors in it. It seemed hard to imagine a future for myself then. It’s hard still. I sighed, but kept my eyes closed, and it came to me quickly: hazy blue and rainy. I was shocked. At that time, May 2020, imagining to the end of the week felt impossible. I’ll cook, we’ll drink the Sangria we made in the Brita pitcher, Grant will take the dog for a long walk, I’ll do burpees in the living room, we’ll finish another season of ‘The Great British Baking Show,’ and that’ll get us to…Tuesday.

But there I was, eleven minutes into a twenty minute way to pass the time that wasn’t smoking, seeing it: a future. I sat at a dark brown desk in a room bathed in morning light, with a breeze fluttering through a gauzy curtain. Grant walked in with a little girl. They wore rain boots muddied from the garden. She ran to me. We embraced.

Simple.

Devastating.

When my husband and I fell in love we agreed: no kids (with the caveat that we reserved the right to change our minds.) Had I changed mine without knowing it? Did I even get a say? Where within my subconscious had this come from? I was twenty-six, newlywed, and navigating a global pandemic in a small town I’d moved to just nine months before. It was not the time to think about procreating.

Blinking on the pilling carpet, I tried to make sense of how quickly I’d called to mind this specific future, and the silvery thread of joy it sent down my spine.

I’m nine months pregnant now. It’s a girl. There isn’t a garden or frankly, even curtains yet, but she was older and wore shoes, so there’s time.

The pregnancy came as a shock. It wasn’t the plan.

I didn’t remember the vision till days ago, driving through January drizzle, thinking about English gardens, getting kicked from inside of my own body.

I’ve waited so long to write to you because there is so much to say. My last post is from June. I didn’t know it yet, but I was already three weeks pregnant. I was overwhelmed then by the task of writing, of telling you about all the shifts in my day-to-day, that I’d changed careers and launched a business, that I’d just wrapped four months of yoga teacher training, that I’d finally cracked the code on my childhood trauma, about sunscreen and side crow, spliffs and splinters, about the garter snakes in the grass.

The thing about pregnancy is that from the moment you find out you’re pregnant, life as you knew it is over. There’s a definitive before and after. I’ve been grieving that. I hear sometimes, after the baby comes, women miss being pregnant. Swollen and achy, it’s hard to imagine that could be true, but I guess that’s always the case. We miss what we know, what came before, what will never be again. It’s a good reminder to try to enjoy it while it’s happening, whatever it is, but goddamn if that isn’t hard when you’re trying to process having accidentally manifested a meditation while throwing up in front of the grocery store on a July afternoon in Atlanta.

So there it is, my pregnancy announcement. I’m sure there will be more to say, but if I’m learning anything through this, it’s in the power of not saying too much and of not allowing too much to be said. Of not letting my mind run away with itself— to do lists and registries, baby names and breastfeeding, worrying about the climate, about the president, about money, about who will babysit or who I’ll be, about the self to whom I’ve already said an unexpected goodbye.

I keep coming back to the blue toned room, the daisy breeze, the muddy boots, and the knowledge of two selves meeting in that room, the one I know, the one writing at the desk, and the one greeting a little girl.

my dad and I, 1993