Because I Haven't Journaled Enough

I sort of accidentally quit journaling.  And I miss the process of writing down my thoughts, but I also miss all that spare time I had to write down my thoughts.  The days seem to be so full from morning until night, with the morning routine and work and a lunch break and work and Young Women’s activities or baking or spending time with friends or spending time with Ray.  The truth is not that I have less time, but that I have changed my priorities.

With a baby on the way, those priorities are about to be tossed in the air to land, hard, on the ground and be picked up in the pieces that truly are most important.  And I fear that journaling won’t be part of that picking up either.  So here I sit, at work, parsing through my thoughts from the past six months of being pregnant.

Six months?  Can that be true?  We got our positive pregnancy test on June 6^th (no, I don’t remember – I had to look it up; heaven bless my phone apps.)  That’s four and a half months from June 6^th to October 25^th.  I get to add a month to those numbers since pregnancy “begins” before this sweet baby was conceived.  And so, yes, we’re knocking on six months’ door.  That gives me three and a half months to prepare for baby’s arrival.  Sixteen weeks and one day if you want to be exact; though if you really want to be exact, probably at least fifteen weeks and possibly up to seventeen and a half weeks, give or take a margin of error of a few days.  Why do we have due dates?  That’s a quick way to mess with any expecting parent’s head.

I felt this little growing nubbin move for the first time sometime in August (it must have been the 12^th – I looked it up) when I was on a youth conference trip.  I was lying flat on my back across the hard bench of a picnic table, shaded from the hot sun by a tied-down parachute roof lazily flapping in occasional breezes.  I breathed slowly and deeply, meditating out to the sounds of teenagers playing Gadianton Robbers, a Mormonized version of the card game Mafia.  My mind drifted to my belly, stretched over my uterus where I knew there was a growing fetus inside.  And was it my imagination, or did I feel the slightest and gentlest bump of movement inside?  Google does say you can feel movement as early as thirteen weeks along, but what are the chances?  I guess this is to say, I THINK I felt this little growing nubbin move for the first time that August 12^th.

All other subtle popping and bumping movements in my stomach after that point, a few weeks after and rarely at that, were deemed ‘possibly the baby.’  At some point between a few weeks after August 12^th and a few weeks before now, I began to know those movements quite clearly and distinctly.  My little baby nubbin was moving and kicking and healthy and, I hope, happy.  There’s a funny thing about being pregnant – the “guarantee” of healthy baby when you feel those bumps and thuds is actually no guarantee at all, because any budding mother can make up horror stories about how maybe the baby is having seizures or is jolting from fear or absorbed too much sugar from the cupcake she just ate and is now in sugar shock.

That’s something they don’t tell you – or maybe they do and you don’t listen.  The hours before you go in to hear your baby’s heartbeat, you know the heart has slowed or stopped.  The hours before you go in to see an ultrasound, you know your baby has stopped growing or is missing a limb.  The other day, I had a nightmarish thought of my baby being born without a face, and then I happened to read a story on the internet (seriously, it just popped up in my feed without me looking) about a baby born without a face. You become obsessed with unhealthy research into abortions or horrifying birth stories or every odd symptom you feel (I mean, I obviously and absolutely had Cholestasis for a few weeks, despite what my doctor said, until I found out my sister got itchy feet during her pregnancy, too.)

But something else they don’t tell you – or maybe they do – is how much dreaming and planning you can do in the space of an hour and a day and a week.  When we found out we were having a girl, and I could begin to put a name to the dream toddler running around in my brain, so many possible futures began to unfold before me.  Futures filled with hockey games or pretty dresses or reading books or introducing her to my favorite music or watching her learn letters and numbers or just putting her to sleep.  It doesn’t matter if or when any of those futures happen, but it does matter that I can begin to see them and to hope so much for her.  We’ve already imagined the arguments we’ll make when anyone tries to push our little girl into little girl stereotypes, and we’ve already pushed our little girl into stereotypes.  And I can’t wait to see what futures she decides for herself despite, and hopefully a little bit because of, our pushing.

How do you raise an entire person?  How do you assign a name to this creature, this person who will make her own decisions and find her own place and be only who she wants to be?  Parents have this incredible task of pretending to know anything at all about exactly how a person should become the person they will become.  I almost wish I had become a parent ten years ago when I began to believe that I knew pretty much how people should be.  Now, at thirty years old and with so many experiences and assurances and questions and unfulfilled dreams and fulfilled dreams, the world seems to have more blurred lines than clear lines.  Because even those clear lines, the things I know with all of my heart, can be questioned and torn apart and stamped on or set to fly by someone else who knows a thing with all of their heart.

I just hope my heart will be enough for my little girl up until she can know a thing with all of her heart, and hopefully not begrudge me too much for giving her my heart with all of its blurred lines.  I hope she will discover those blurred lines in her heart herself and grasp to the things that make the most sense despite the blurriness.  I hope that one day, she will get the experience I have now, to think about all the futures before her and the pasts behind her, and decide to give her heart, too, however that ends up looking.

And you know, maybe that’s the real reason that most of the human race feels the unquestioned need and desire to have children.  Maybe we just need to be able to give our heart to someone who will take every bit of it, even if only just until they can find their own.