Sometimes I think all the noise and annoyances of parenthood, the fatigue, the daily chores, the small and large battles of wills, are put into place for our own good. They are the buffers. If I am honest, I think that if my moments as a mother were not coated in a certain amount of bitter, the sweet would kill me.

 As I curled up in bed with my daughter tonight, her hand reaching out to me in the dark, she started making a clicking sound with her mouth. I thought it was her teeth grinding – she does this when she sleeps and it causes my skin to crawl.

“Zaviera,” I said, “Is there something in your mouth?” 

She smiled and pulled out a tiny plastic daisy that had fallen off one of her hair bands. She handed it to me.

“My flower,” she said. I held the daisy and thought about how my daughter had been happily rolling a flower around between her teeth.  When I was a child I used to daydream about a field of flowers that I could rest in. In that field the world was perfect. It contained a peace that I associate with the presence of God. Daily I watch my daughter walk through a world that is still a safe field. Her mind is full of flowers that she plucks and pulls apart. She scatters them without worry. She places them in her mouth and clicks them against her teeth. Every day she brings one home to me and I hold it for a moment trying not to think about it wilting and how quickly the moments slip by.  

I was not prepared for parenthood. I really wasn’t. Before I became a parent I spent years trying to find my way back to the childhood wonder we all lose to one degree or another as we emerge into adulthood. I thought that there had to be some sort of balancing act that allowed us to function as responsible adults without losing our joy.

I imagine we have all heard a parent say, “My child has helped me to rediscover the world.” Or, “I’ve been a given a second childhood with my children.”

And it is true. I have found the balance of joy and responsibility hidden in the one place I thought it impossible - motherhood.  But what I didn’t realize is that finding that balance meant living with an exquisite pain. Each moment they bring me is a birth and a death. As I love my children I have to continually let them go and it is difficult beyond words.

As I sit here, with Joaquin sleeping next to me, I know that tomorrow I will grow impatient. The noise will get to me. Joaquin will have gas, his cries will spiral down through my bones. Sol and Zaviera will pull on my ears with their jangling demands. I will take a deep breath and say, “I can’t hear you when you use a whiny voice.” The moments will domino into one another. Beauty, chaos, beauty, chaos, beauty, chaos…

Zaviera will say something that amuses me so much that the only way to get it out of my system is to do a little dance. I will find myself smelling Joaquin’s baby skin and tickling his forehead to make him smile. Sol will herd our crazy little tribe with a sense of order that sometimes makes me wonder just how old his soul really is. Dan will sing off-key. At a certain point, most likely when the heat of the day makes our small home even smaller, I will retreat back into the bedroom to write. I will take my mind to a different reality. I will distract myself with the things that need to be done to support our future, to nurture our present. At some point I will declare to my husband, “Thank god for daycare!” He will respond by nodding and sighing as another disaster erupts in the living room. I will put away the computer and go make another cup of coffee to get through the hours until bedtime.

And beneath it all, my heart will be hurting with how close to heaven my children continue to bring me.

Anyone who has spent time around Sol will nod in recognition when I use the word ‘intense’ to describe him. We have joked with most of our friends about Sol’s sense of order, his lawfulness, his focus, his anxiety, his literal interpretation of the world and his formidable memory. It has been challenging at times but we have always seen these qualities as his gift, the beginning of his purpose in the world. As Sol has grown older, his language skills increased, his social patterns becoming more apparent, the amount of effort it takes to translate certain aspects of experience for Sol has become clear to us. At times the relentlessness of his questions, his need for all things to be ‘even’, the angry anxiety that erupts when things transition too quickly or something confuses him, and what I can only express as a feeling of bottomless need that surfaces in him, can be exhausting. In that exhaustion, the feeling that I have failed him haunts me and drives me to recharge, begin again, try to understand and meet his needs.

Sol becomes easily confused by humor. He doesn’t read body language the way that Zaviera does. She might not understand everything you are saying but she summarizes by taking in the context and delivery. She can ‘read’ the emotional language of the people around her. Sol is unable to do this. He needs you to explain to him in very literal terms what is happening and why. If you are laughing he needs to understand why it is you’re laughing. He needs you to tell him a joke is funny. That sense of bottomless need that breaks my heart arises when he senses he is not getting ’something’ that everyone else is sharing in. His way of making sure that he is included is through anxiously demanding in a very literal way that he gets what everyone else is getting.  An example is that if we say something playful and nonsensical to Zaviera and she laughs, he doesn’t understand why she is laughing or why we said what we said, and because of this, he feels left out. He needs us to go through the same motions with him, repeat the phase, imitate the laughter, for him to feel included and secure. He doesn’t genuinely get the joke but things are even, he is being included.

Somewhere along the way, the reality that Sol might have Asperger Syndrome began to surface. It came up through friends who are familiar with the condition, my father who is a psychologist, and Sol’s patterns becoming more apparent. We would often wonder if he had inherited some of his Grandfather Clarke’s genetics because Dan’s father displayed the traits of someone with AS but was never formally diagnosed. Watching a character like Monk on television we would find ourselves laughing, saying things like, “That is SO Sol.” We used words like “obsessive” with a deep affection, and, at times, I admit, weariness. But we have never felt like there was something wrong with Sol, only that he was a challenge with great reward. But lately, the reality of all of this has landed home. We are going to Sol’s preschool check-up and will discuss it to see about having him evaluated. Whether or not he receives an official diagnosis doesn’t bother me. In fact, I don’t want him labeled unless it is going to help his needs be met in the world. What is important to me is that those closest to him understand and help him.

This morning Dan and I read through a book on Asperger’s Syndrome and found ourselves nodding and laughing with relief: Yes! That is exactly what he does!

We also found ourselves feeling a sense of pride that we had been meeting his needs and becoming aware of the particular way he operates without having a label or guide for what were doing.  I am often weary of labels. They serve as keys that can unlock a door and provide freedom but they can also imprison. In this case, the label serves to unlock a door for us and for Sol’s future. I have a stack of books that my mother sent on dealing with Aspergers and all postnatal hormones aside, it makes me want to cry. With relief. There is a freedom in my chest, around my heart, a space that has opened up in realizing that there is help in understanding how to meet Sol in all of his searing brilliance. Since his birth, we have struggled at times with feeling like we were failing to connect with him and guilt that it felt so much easier to connect with Zaviera. Now it feels as though we have been handed the material to complete the bridge we have been working to build day by day from instinct, perseverance, and love.

I’ve always wondered about the significance of Sol’s name.  Dan has had the final say in naming all of our children because he has a strength in trusting his gut feelings. Lately it has occurred to me that Sol, the sun, is the perfect name for our firstborn. There is a light to him that divides the gray areas, casting shadows out from hiding. He burns in his intensity but he also nurtures and warms in his sensitivity, his desire to love and be loved, to be accepted. His innate integrity, his desire to understand the world, often reduces us to tears. We are honored to be his parents.

I blinked and the pregnancy was over. I blinked again and suddenly there was a soft, nuzzling baby curled up on my chest.  I look over at Joaquin sleeping on the bed, his knees tucked under his belly, his butt up in the air, his breathing steady, and I think it might be possible that this moment is a very lucid dream. It has been three weeks since his entrance into the family. Three weeks feels like yesterday but now that he is here, I know that he has been with me all along. I can’t imagine myself without him.

I fall asleep with his warm weight on my chest and forgotten memories from my childhood move towards me. Memories of what it was like to be alive in a world undefined, where anything was possible. He is a magnet for the scattered parts of my experience, the parts that have slowly returned to me with each child. Joaquin gathers the last remaining pieces and the world becomes sharper in its beauty, its peace more evident.  My desire to adventure into dark forests and to dive into the deep end of the ocean returns.  In the warm milk smell of his body he has returned a generosity of spirit towards life.

I didn’t expect this.

I thought after the first two children I would be prepared for the way the birth of a child expands your heart, rewires your understanding of self and the world. I wasn’t prepared. I didn’t think I could love any more. I thought Joaquin would slip into the space created by Sol and Zaviera, not creating any more of his own. Because really, how much more can a woman’s heart expand?

This blog was supposed to be about the day of his delivery. I was going to write about the way I woke up to a morning where everything was still and in that stillness a tide of bird song rose and retreated over and over.  I sat on the deck and wrote out my hopes and fears about Joaquin’s arrival. I got dressed. I made jokes. I tried not to think too much about the surgery.

I wanted to write about the way Dan entertained me in the pre-op waiting room by dancing across the floor in his scrubs. The way it took fifteen minutes to insert the spinal because the man handling the needle was being mentored, the mentoring doctor speaking in a low voice behind me, “No. Wait. Stop. Pull the needle out. Angle it. Deeper. Okay, try again. No. Stop. Good.” I had to close my eyes and visualize myself paddling into waves down in Baja Mexico at a point break named Nine Palms. It was where I started to really ride waves.

I had imagined a blog complete with pictures. Especially of the hospital midwife who had to stand-in for my midwife. She appeared to be Aughra’s (from the Dark Crystal) younger sister (Aughra being the better looking one of the two!). Even as this creature bossed her way around the OR, and tried to engage me in conversation while she inserted the catheter, my sense of peace was not disturbed. I closed my eyes and continued to surf. This blog could go on and on. But when I began to write, it did not begin where I expected it to.

My father sent me an article a few years ago about how scientists have discovered that during pregnancy and birth, cells from the baby migrate into the woman’s body, searching out areas that need healing. The cells of the child integrate into the mother’s body so that on a very real level a mother is always connected to her children. The cells heal the mother and regenerate the parts of her that need it. They become part of the woman so that she is no longer entirely herself. When I look back at the previous births and the changes that they have brought I have no doubt of this – not just on a physical level but a spiritual one.

We chose to open the door to Joaquin on a leap of faith. It was a big one for us. We had just reached a point of stability in our lives on multiple levels after some hard years of battling with my health but we didn’t feel like our lives were complete, there was another child waiting in the wings to be invited onto the stage. We had been carrying around Joaquin’s name for four years, ever since the miscarriage after Sol was born. We felt like the name had been given to us for a reason. From the beginning, Ihad always imagined having two sons.

Despite my fears, my greater fear was that I would always regret not finding out if there was in fact a third child. I would regret not finding out who she or he was. So, we stepped off the edge and surrendered to the outcome. Joaquin was conceived effortlessly in the first month we extended the invitation.

 Last night as Joaquin held my eyes with his and smiled at me, I understood that this is what waits for us on the other side of stepping through our fear of the unknown and trusting our journey: a peace that surpasses all understanding and a joy that can only mean the presence of god.  After years of my own efforts to find my way in this world, it has been my children that have led me to the path that was mine all along. They were the ones able to reach those places that needed healing so that I could rediscover what it means to live.

I never expected it, but there it is.

Welcome Joaquin. The great adventure has begun.

before our first round of meetings with agents in NYC

About a month ago, Jordan Rosenfeld (author of my favorite writing/craft book: Make a Scene) and I were discussing our experiences of pursuing dreams. We both agreed that while yes, we had to show up on the path and begin walking forward, the journey has never been a solitary one. When I look back at all of the greatest things that have happened to me, they have been a result of others choosing to believe in me. Those gestures of belief were sometimes as simple as sincere words spoken at the right moment. Other times they have come along as something larger, often an opportunity that I had no way of envisioning before it was given to me. The key ingredient in these gestures being that they were unexpected gifts. I never felt as though I had earned them or could take credit for their arrival. For me, these are the true rewards of stepping out in faith or striving towards a goal. It is not so much what I can take responsibility for achieving myself, but the people who have become apart of my life along the way and the things they have taught me about life.

For both Jordan and myself, one of these gift-givers has been Maria Schneider. She has acted as a champion in both of our endeavors as writers. I met Maria for the first time during the Writer’s Digest trip after winning the 76th Annual Competition. It was a turning point in my life and I was buzzing with the terror that I might do something wrong and pop this bubble that had lifted me up like some fairytale. After years of barely being able to look my dream of being a writer in the eye, it was suddenly grasping me by the hand and saying, “Well, you’ve been wishing for me. Here I am!”

Maria put me at ease instantly.  She was down-to-earth, witty, professional, generous and basically, the kind of woman I would love to be. As we scurried from meeting to meeting, Maria’s support meant that I was able to breathe between elevator pitches, intense discussions of the reality of the publishing business and back and forth dialogue challenging everything about the novel I was presenting from title to premise. I think without her easy presence and reassurance I would have been like a squirrel jacked-up on espresso in danger of dying from nervous exhaustion.

I become attached to certain people very quickly and Maria is one of those people. When I found out that she was leaving her position as editor for Writer’s Digest, I went into a state of mourning. For me, she was the Patron Saint of Humanity standing guard for all writers. I was relieved when she launched her website for writers EditorUnleashed.com.  When she offered me the opportunity to blog for the site, I was honored. But it has been more than just the platform she has given me or the words of encouragement, Maria has been teaching me about the spirit of staying true to myself as a writer and a woman. She is a person with vision and courage and spirit. She is not afraid to give the odds the finger. In the face of so much naysaying and striving for security in a competitive industry, Maria is a champion for all those who refuse to have their vision confined. In knowing her, I believe I have grown in my own courage.

It is so easy to go along in life not letting those around you know how they have changed who you are. I am grateful for this opportunity to be able to thank Maria for her presence in this world.

Dancing at the edge

For years, I have time and time again given a nod to the wisdom of the saying ‘life is a journey not a destination’. A nod that translated into something like this:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I totally get that. I mean, I really, really want to experience that. Which is why I am running so fast to get to my destination. So I can relax and enjoy the journey.

In my own dyslexic fashion I truly believed that striving towards some future goal was going to bring greater security to my present moment so that I could relax and enjoy the ride. Periodically life has held me still long enough, captivated me in some way that allowed me to stop, take a breath, and sink into my life – the past and the future collapsing into a moment of watching my children chase their shadows or feeling the sand shift beneath my feet in the shore break. In those moments, I would rest. I would get ‘it’ -  the understanding that life was unfolding exactly as it should.

Then the moment would pass.

I would declare,  “Well that was a great and rejuvenating moment of inspiration. But now it is back to work with me. After all, there are things to be done to make sure that the future contains more of these great moments!”

Tonight I have been reflecting on how the deepest shifts in my way of being in the world sneak up on me. They never arrive from my own efforts. And believe me, I have always  been a sucker for thinking that I might impress life with my industry. In the past, I have even tried the opposite approach. I tried to attract peace by emptying myself of all passions. I tried to earn grace by meditating for hours, stripping my life of all of the things no Spanish-blooded woman should ever deny herself. Things like liquid eyeliner, listening to eighties compilation CDs, playing video games, going dancing, or drinking bowl-sized mugs of coffee and cream every morning.

These days I often resort to wild tap-dancing and doing all of my own stunts. I fling open the door on my fears and sing at the top of my lungs to try to scare them off. All in the hope that life will pay attention and transform those parts of myself that are dragging along unnecessary luggage and clutching an outdated itinerary.

But lately, tap-dancing has been difficult. I prefer to nap.

Doing my own stunts doesn’t work when I am 36 weeks pregnant.

Worrying about failing the opportunities that have been presented to me (such as finishing my masters) has given way to fear of missing a moment with my children. Instead of locking myself away in my room to try to get as much work done as possible, I have wanted to sit and listen to Sol tell me about the creation of ’sand dudes’ (sand dunes) and to show me how fast his ‘ginger turtle’ (ninja turtle) shoes can make him run. When I have hit a wall with the novel, instead of hitting my head against it, I have gone to the beach to dig a hole in the sand, let my belly rest, and watched my children become friends. At night, I curl up on the couch with my husband, lulled like a lizard in the sun by the way he will stroke my feet for two hours straight if I don’t get up and move. I scribble a few notes before falling asleep. The novel comes together line by line and somehow I am beginning to trust that is exactly the way it should be.

For about two weeks I was having nightmares about sharks chasing me out of the ocean. Either that, or I would be standing on the shore watching the surfers convinced that if I paddled out I would drown. In those nightmares I gave up. I said, “The sharks will eat me. I will be attacked, it is inevitable. I don’t have what it takes, I will drown.”

In my dreams, I surrendered to defeat. I allowed myself to be bullied by my fears.

Each time I woke up from one of those dreams, I sat up in bed and declared:

Screw that! I’d rather lose my leg to a shark or swallow a gallon of saltwater. I am not sitting on the shore.

No matter how many sharks there are in the water, no matter how many times the waves will hold me down, I can not give up. So why worry? There is no point in looking down at the shadows moving beneath my feet when there are waves lifting up on the horizon. Worrying about how long a wave will hold me down will not bring me to the surface any faster. And, I am not sitting on the shore. I belong out there, riding above the shadows. I belong beneath the waves holding my breath.

As the days bring us to Joaquin’s birth seem to slip out from beneath me like the tide I realize that there are so many things I could fear but somehow I can’t summon the conviction. I can only summon the gratitude that I am on this journey.

 

 

 

dreaming of our boy

We are so curious to meet this Mr. Joaquin. The other day, a friend pointed out to me that I have been remarkably calm during this pregnancy and it is true. Call it denial or being deluded by hormones, but this kid brewing inside of me has polluted my body with ‘mellow’. Even now, I should be frantically working on the novel and catching up on my NaNoWriMo word count, but I just don’t have the usual buzzing ‘go forth and conquer’ that often fuels me. I want to go dig a belly hole in the sand, listen to the waves, and dream of surfing with my kids. My greatest longing right now is to feel unencumbered by all of this weight and baby-carrying pain. I am looking forward to holding Joaquin. I am not overly worried about the sleepless nights. Call it surrender to the inevitable.

In two hours we head to the hospital to schedule the c-section. With the previous two pregnancies, I had emergency c-sections so the idea of actually scheduling the birth of my child is a little bizarre to me. I am trying to imagine waking up one morning and thinking, “Today is the day!” The problem is, if I think about it too long I begin to remember the other parts, the c-section woman’s version of labor anxiety.

I learned with Zaviera’s birth that I can be intellectually prepared for being wheeled into the operating room, a model of cool, calm and collected, but then my body cues into its surroundings. The sterility, the drapes everywhere, the shiny, flashing instruments with their sharp edges. My body has always known that the brain is easily deceived and starts protesting.

“Wait-a-minute-here-what-is-this-insanity?!  They are going to cut us open? We did not agree to this! Run Alegra, run!”

I think the doctors are prepared for this and put a little extra ‘mix’ into the epidural because with Zaviera’s birth, once I could no longer feel my body from the chest down, I got busy insulting the surgeon’s favorite sport. I even refused her warning that “maybe you should reconsider your stance on cricket since I am about to deliver your baby!”

I laughed and declared, “No way! Everyone deserves to hate something without good cause or apology. Cricket sucks.”

That epidural juice even allowed me to be brave for Dan when we both realized the surgical ‘curtain’ they were putting up was no bigger than a pillow case. All Dan had to do was glance the wrong way and he would see what they were up to. This is just one of the small differences between the Kiwi mentality and the USA way of doing things. When I had Sol in the USA, the surgical curtain they used would have required Dan standing up and making a serious effort to check out the goings-ons on the other side. Something he had no intention of doing.

I am still waiting for a good burst of nesting instinct to kick in. It seems to be coming to me in constant dribbles with none of the grand drama of past experiences. I have not landscaped or organized the entire house in systems that make sense only to me. Last night Dan caught me cleaning something with a toothbrush and pottering around the small mounds of things I intend to sort through.

“Are you getting nestish?”

“No,” I said, “this is boring, procrastination behavior. I want one of those burst of twenty-four hour this-woman-can-not-be-stopped experiences. I want you to wake up at 3 a.m. to find the ceilings repainted and there I am typing away madly on my laptop. I want to write 5 chapters in one night and sterilize every corner of this house!”

I don’t think it is going to happen. I think Joaquin might be making his entrance into this world on a wave of calm. He might just be the cruisy little surfer dude.

I guess I better get back to NaNoWriMo…

…but the sun is out and the ocean is so blue.

During my research for the novel I came across a few interesting beliefs about pregnant women. Don’t ask me the Who or When or Where of these beliefs because I’m lucky if I’ve retained anything at all in my sieve of a mind. Thirty plus research books I have dumped into my brain and I would be lucky to recite something like this:

Yeah, well, these people? They uh, like, feared pregnant women. But like in a good way. Because pregnant women have, like, one foot in this world, one foot in the grave. So it kinda like makes them powerful and stuff.

Pregnant women were considered spiritually powerful and I think ‘unstable’ was another popular word.  Not only are they placed in a state of physical precariousness, their bodies doing all kinds of crazy things to make room for the development of this new life, but there has also been the belief (one that I share) that their minds and spirits go through a similar process. I think the source I came across described it as a ‘psychic instability.’  Basically, as their bodies stretch, so do their psyches.

You can log on any website devoted to pregnancy and find sections about lucid dreams, raging emotional responses, strange ‘nesting’ behaviors, and the wild thought processes that go on with women while they are pregnant. (Of course, since I have just made a descriptive list of myself on a normal, non-pregnant day, I would like to point out that in contrast I actually behave very sanely while pregnant. Really, I am a very boring pregnant woman.) What strikes me about this is the reality that at no other *natural* time does a human being contain another human being in her body. A pregnant woman is really two people. Right now, there are two hearts beating in my body. On an hourly basis I am surprised by a foot or elbow or hand poking out of the side of my belly. When I rest on my side with my hand on my belly, I can almost grasp Joaquin’s legs or arms. Even on the third pregnancy I find myself surprised by it; fascinated and obsessed by the strangeness of the experience. How can it not place a person in an extraordinary state of being in the world? Of course we have strange dreams and raging emotions!

I look at it like this: For a period of roughly nine months, women are host to another universe. For another six months or more, that universe, even though it is now outside of the mother’s body, does not recognize that it is a separate entity. A baby believes she is  part of her mother for the first months of her life. And, I believe a woman’s body/mind becomes rewired to remain connected to that baby.  Prior to Sol, I could sleep through my husband’s snoring. Now, I wear earplugs and still wake in the middle of the night from a dream about my children crying before they cry. I can hear their upset through the walls when everyone else in the room can only hear the television. My old ’solo’ nervous system became several times upgraded to ‘maternal level 2′. Now, I am working on ‘maternal level 3.’

A few days ago, my good friend Vanessa — who shared the same due date with me –went into labor and gave birth to her boy at 31 weeks. As far as I know, there was no warning; the pregnancy was normal, progressing as it should. It reminded me of one of the most fundamental ways I believe becoming a parent transforms a person. Never mind surfing big waves to place me in the rawness of each moment, being pregnant or having children is a day to day wake-up call that plans are only plans. There is no such thing as security — anything can happen at any time. Vanessa’s experience  stopped me in my tracks and reminded me that as I navigate the anxieties of big and little daily decisions, that everything in my life is:

Deo volente

God willing

God willing that we are granted this day, this moment. It can be so easy to get caught up in believing that as I make plans — such as worrying about covering tuition fees for my children for the next 15 plus years — I am worrying about predictable bogeyman. When really, I am blessed if my children make it home from daycare and we are a complete family for another evening.

When I became a parent, my entire being became divided and distributed into my children and I realize every day how fragile life is, how much is at stake, how little I can control any of it. This is the beauty of how parenthood has us walking with one foot planted firmly in the world, and in one in the grave. It is the power of having my universe extended into that of my children.

We make our plans. We dream. We prepare. We worry. We celebrate.

We whisper “Deo volente” as we climb up to the top of the playground after our children.  We let go of our fear and throw our hands up to the sky. We  step back and let our children believe that they can stand on top of the world without falling.

God willing that we stumble into these moments of joy.

Deo volente that the ground beneath us is soft should we fall.

flickr photo by Massi G

The other day Dan and I were watching an episode of CSI while I was getting my cardio done for the day. This is my secret to being disciplined with my fitness: I watch t.v. Plus, don’t grumble at me, but I like to exercise. My mind feels like a swarm of ants stuck in glue if I don’t get my blood circulating every day.

Anyway, we are watching CSI and one of the characters delivers this little nugget of wisdom (in reference to some enormous task like sifting through ten tons of garbage for a hair that will contain the DNA they need in order to provide evidence to convict a horrible murderer and of course they only have 43 minutes to achieve this task), “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time…”

I am sure this is stolen from some Zen saying but I am too lazy to google, I’d rather just grab the elephant analogy and run with it. I stopped mid-stride on the elliptical trainer that I have named ‘Cricket’ to weather a Braxton-Hicks contraction and declare, “That is it! I need to eat this elephant one bite at a time…only I have two elephants to eat and there isn’t much room in my belly these days, so really the only way to manage this is alternating bites! Small bites! With lots of salt and washed down with coffee!” I pretty much used up my exclamation marks for the day with that little realization.

Dan looked at me straddled on the elliptical, holding my belly and then nodded in the way all men married to crazy women have learned to nod. “Yeah, elephants,” he said, as if he were in total agreement.

“Two elephants. The thesis and the novel.” By now the contraction had passed and I was slowly picking up speed again. “I need to stop being overwhelmed by the size of the task and just start with small bites. You know, one bite at a time.”

I smiled sagely as my belly nudged against the elliptical monitor. By this time, the hair or piece of fuzz containing the necessary DNA sample had been located on CSI and the case was being wrapped up.

“See?” I said, “If they can find a hair in a ten-ton pile of rubbish in under 43 minutes, I can write this thesis-novel!”

“Of course you can,” Dan said, “You will.”

He is a good husband like that.

The thing is, in my nearly eight-months-pregnant state of mind, I had reached a point of overwhelm last week. With both of my previous pregnancies I was in school but only during the first half of the pregnancy and at an undergraduate level. Plus, I didn’t have two other children to take care of. By the time the nesting/resting desire of the third trimester had kicked in, I had no major responsibilities crouched on my shoulders like evil monkeys pulling my hair and chattering nonstop in my ears.

Now that I have been working away at this for nearly the length of a pregnancy, I realize that trying to divide my mind between two worlds — academic thesis and novel — is a mighty task indeed. Add into it that this year has delivered us whammy after whammy. Such as my mother being diagnosed with chronic leukemia. The underestimated influence of another little person developing in my body. Dan navigating the added stress of  being promoted to manager in a company in a state of chaos and then after all that effort, being made redundant with no more than two days notice.

Let’s just say I am really hoping 2010 gives us some rest (I hear some of you laughing and muttering “newborn, you’re gonna have a newborn” – don’t be cruel, allow me the hope of dreaming).

So in the last few weeks, I have hit a wall. A big part of me has wanted to disappear into the nesting instinct that is slowly gathering its forces. I have wanted to shelve all ambition and spend the next 6 weeks of pregnancy imagining the little boy I am about to meet, feeling him move against my hands, preparing my children for his arrival. Obsessing on all of the ‘new mom’ things that pregnant women obsess over.

But, I have some major commitments. Two elephants have been placed on silver platters before me and I know that ultimately, consuming them will feed the future of my children and my family. So, I am taking it slow and steady, one bite at a time, and keeping plenty of antacids on hand for when I bite off more than I can chew. I realize it is the best kind of stress – the stress of opportunity and growth. It is mostly my fear of failure that threatens to choke me.

A special thank you to Adam Cunningham-Reid for helping me in this enormous task by agreeing to be my ‘writing accountability partner.’ You once gave me the wise Groundhog day mantra “Baby steps, baby steps” and now you are making sure I take them!

In typical dyslexic fashion, I learned how to drop into a wave on a surfboard before I could trust myself to swim the length of a pool. It was only after I had been surfing for about five years that my friend Kapeka lured me out beyond the breakers down in Baja Mexico and taught me the basics of swimming. Between all of the paddling and praying that my surfboard leash wouldn’t break, I had developed strength that translated naturally into swimming but I didn’t know this. Before Kapeka’s lessons, if my leash had snapped, leaving me stranded in the waves without the flotation of my board, there is a good chance I would have been in big trouble. While I would not recommend this approach to anyone, the process taught me some invaluable lessons about myself. It also gave me a healthy respect for the ocean’s power.

When I watch movies that contain scenes with waves like The Perfect Storm or  Castaway, there is a hollowing out in my bones, a tightening in my muscles. My lungs gather air and my heart pounds. My body has memorized the ocean and its moods and can summon the visceral experience with very little effort. I understand why my children respond with awe and fear like it is some world-swallowing beast. Because it is. It is beautiful and somehow full of relationship yet terribly impersonal.

I have watched men punch at it in rage and there is nothing that screams ‘impotent’ more than a muscular man try to pick a fight with a wave. I have felt that same frustration, the battering to the sense of self that happens when the ocean picks you up in its teeth and shakes you around. And, I have paddled out again and again, hoping to climb onto the back of all that power. To rest on its calm surface.

In my previous blog I wrote about my dream of the flood, a wall of water moving across the earth. I didn’t make much more of it other than the fact that dreams of water always involve me confronting fears. And by the next day I could easily summarize those fears. Dan had lost his job. I was facing the stress of an unwritten thesis and novel hanging over my head and with a third baby on the way, it was a no brainer as to why I was dreaming about a wall of water threatening to drown me. Most days it feels like I am learning to surf before I can swim. It wasn’t until two days later, as I drove home trying to decide whether or not to pick up my children from daycare and head to higher ground, that the connection between my dream and the tsunami warning in New Zealand hit me.

As we watch the images on television of the devastation in Samoa, as the death toll rises and people we know report about friends who have lost family, I can’t help but imagine what it must have been like. I can feel the water pulling away from the reef. I can hear its roar as it returns. It is not difficult for me to summon the impact of its force. The pressure of my lungs losing air, of my body being swept from solid ground, being slammed against things, pulled apart like a rag doll.  What I can not imagine is having the ocean take my children, my loved ones, and surviving it. I can not imagine the powerlessness of having my babies torn from me. I can not imagine continuing to breathe in their absence.

It does not prevent the restless anxiety of my mind, but it reminds me how easily the most important things can be swept away. It reminds me to hold on to those things and let the other things go. My prayers are with the people  in Samoa who can now only hold those things in their hearts.

This man could actually be my father's brother...they look that alike.

Today Dan was informed that his manager’s contract will be terminated on Wednesday — as in, two days. We were prepared for the other applicant to get the job but we were not prepared for the dirty way things would go down.

I have so much faith in the goodness of my husband’s nature I assume those who spend time in his presence will be persuaded to do good by him. As in, I believe my husband could inspire acts of kindness and senseless beauty in a sociopath.

Over the last six months as Dan has weathered the uneasy transitions and politics of the managers above him, until finally the company was taken over ‘military style’ by another company, we have been preparing for the possibility that his job as manager would no longer be secure. What we were not prepared for was the underhanded way they would make his position redundant. I will just leave it at that because I don’t want to go nursing an ugly baby of a grudge with any more unnecessary words on the subject.

But before I go dropping that caterwauling infant on the floor, I would like to admit that when Dan first told me the news and the *options* the company had presented him with, he also said, “I know your Spanish blood is at boiling point right now and you want to stomp your heels and have a go at them, but we’ll wait until that settles and then decide what to do.”

I said to Dan (in my best Princess Bride voice) “I am Eros-Alegra Clarke. You have fired my husband. Now prepare to die!“

And then I revised my statement, “I am Eros-Alegra Clarke. You have fired my husband. Now I can make fun of your small squinty face and bad fashion sense without a guilty conscience!”

While our minds have been preparing for this, our hearts require a different level of reasoning. Being seven months pregnant makes my heart rather swollen, tender and generally unreasonable. Regardless of our faith that this is happening for a good reason, when we picked up our children from daycare we were both overwhelmed by their vulnerability and dependence on us and the knowledge that there are some things in the world we can not control. As we buckled them into their car seats I couldn’t stop crying. Even as my mind listed all of the blessings in our lives like a mathematical equation that equaled:

You will be okay. You will be better than okay.

I still felt as though I had let some sort of monster slip into my children’s garden. I had let them down in some unforgivable way. They depend upon us as gatekeepers of their childhood and suddenly those gates felt unhinged in a basic way. For a moment, I felt the pain of what it means as a parent to not be able to provide for your children. It was a pain I felt in my heart and my gut. My mind knows we are not in that position. My heart and gut refused to listen.

Two nights ago I had a lucid dream. A flood was coming. Standing on a hillside I could see the wall of water moving towards me, covering the earth. It was beautiful and terrifying and there was no escape. In the next minute I was running down a narrow city street, preparing for the impact, for death. As I ran, I looked up at the stone walls of an ancient city and then suddenly I found myself lifted above them, held by the limbs of a tree. The water rushed past me and I understood how perfectly, exquisitely alive I was. And so was the tree. It pulsed and hummed with an energy that radiated like light. It was protecting me.

I woke up and without thinking about the words, I wrote in my journal:

The Flood and the Tree of Life.

The dream has multiple meanings for me. It spoke to the themes in my novel and thesis, confirming that I am on the right path. But more importantly, it reminded me that the garden of my own childhood Eden, that state of grace, is still alive and well inside of me. No matter how big the wall of water threatening to wash across my world, there is something holding me.  Something so alive that in its arms, fear loses its meaning.

A big thank you to my parents for lifting me up over the years and now helping me to do the same for my children.