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will pay attention and transform those parts of myself that are dragging along unnecessary luggage and clutching an outdated itinerary.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.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/29223627@N04/3296911506/

When something undesirable happens to me  and repeats itself in several different events, I pay attention. A theme lights up like an ember in the center of my mind and I know there is a lesson headed my way.

Last weekend I went to an event called “Sistas”, a Christian conference for women. I’ve never been to this sort of thing before. Naive and heavily pregnant me thought a crowd of thousands of women gathered to get their spiritual mojo on would result in a bunch of “pardon me” “oh no, you go first” when it was time for us to file into the auditorium on our first night.  I was shocked to discover it was more like a stampede and my belly presented itself as a vulnerable target for all of those elbows, purses, and power-packed hips. My friend grabbed my hand and pulled my bewildered self along with the group so I wouldn’t get lost.  And then I felt a shove. Behind me some large, heavily made-up women were threatening me, telling me “to get out of their way.”  

Spring is creeping over the land like a young cat. It pounces, swats, rolls around exposing its soft belly, and then it crouches. It pauses. It remains perfectly still, its eyes locked on some shadow or flickering light that has distracted it from its true purpose – to chase the daffodils out of hiding and tell Winter to back off with a well aimed swat.

In those pauses, I run around throwing catnip like it is confetti. I sing songs about tuna and fresh cream. I beg and purr. Come here Spring, come here…

I try to help Spring regain its focus. It is the least I can do.

Today, it felt like all my efforts to usher in the new season had met with success. Our deck glowed with sunlight, the weeds sprouted like they were stars in a musical, and an ambitious, energetic “to-do” list started to unroll in my mind. A To-Do list that *might* be super-charged by hormones. Last week the ‘mellow’ that Joaquin has been leaking into my system mixed itself with a new infusion of motivation. I am a woman with plans ( and an extra hour of work time now that the kids’ daycare hours have finally been extended) .

So, buzzing with all of this promise that Spring has finally agreed to hang around, I dragged my books outside. I pulled the mat covering our surfboards onto the deck and flopped down…at which point I remembered that I’m 25 weeks pregnant and flopping down on my belly isn’t a good idea. It was a rude awakening.

I’ve begun walking around with my hands on my belly whenever they are not needed for other activities. I do this for two reasons: 1) I love feeling Joaquin move around and, 2) it is a reminder not to do stupid things. Even on my third pregnancy, I still need constant supervision to protect me from my own great ideas. Example of a ‘great’ idea: climbing up on a swivel chair to reach an object on the top shelf – the fact that I have lived this long validates the saying that God protects the innocent and the foolish.

With the novel coming together, the thesis beginning to take shape, another short story submitted to a competition, our house really beginning to feel like a home, and other important things, it is no surprise that all this easy-cruising would hit a speed bump. What is the number one rule of a good story? The protagonist has to be challenged. As in something has to happen to test us.

Dan’s new job has been in a state of instability for the last 3 months. It would take too long to summarize, but it has been a roller-coaster ride for the past six months or so. He has been on a temporary contract since the company he worked for was taken over by another company and the new, permanent contracts *were* due to come out this month. After everything that has gone on, we have known better than to assume anything, so we have been waiting. Today, he explained what is going to happen and it basically means that we have no idea if Dan will have his same position in a month. We have been slowly getting used to the idea of finally being on an adult income. I was just starting to feel confident that by the end of this month, Dan would be secure in his job. Now? Not so sure. At all.

But as I made the 3 mile trek home from daycare, pushing my children in the jogger and discussing things with them like how Sol is convinced that a Daddy can have babies, only they are little babies, and once they have these little babies, the Daddy becomes a ‘Grandpa’…

( me: “Oh really? Who told you this?”

Sol: “Nobody told me, I just know these things. Witches come visit our house at night and they put magic in your belly and that is how you get a baby!”

Me: “What? I can’t hear you…this traffic is sooo noisey! Maybe we should wait ten years to try this conversation again, okay?”)

…I confronted the worse case scenario: at the end of this month, Dan may no longer have his job. I began to count our blessings. I reflected on how far we have come, all that we have been given. There is very little in our life that I can trace back to being  a result of my/our own efforts – all of the best things have been a magic recipe of one part action on our part, three part unexpected blessing from others.

So when Dan came home tonight and said, “So, are you worrying about the job?”

I smiled and said, “No, I worked it out on the way home. We’re going to be just fine. We’ve made it work before, we’ll make it work again. Either way, we really can’t lose.”

Dan looked at me and said, “Wow, what’s gotten into you?”

Me, “I blame it on this third child of ours. There is something about him.”

And it is true, but it is more than that. It is the whole picture; there is something about our lives and the season ahead. It is present in every moment, waiting for recognition. It is the young cat waiting to pounce. It is in the playful shadows and the distracting light.

Inside of me, the daffodils are pushing up through the dark earth of winter and I am ready to play.

Pinocchio by Julia Valeeva

I have had this blog sitting in the back of my brain for the past week. Originally the title “In the Belly of the Whale” came to me as I was sitting in the bath on my birthday. I don’t know if the reference was inspired by the sight of my naked self or if it came from my son bounding into the bathroom, telling me to close my eyes so that he could present me with my gift. There was something in the excitement on his face that made a voice in my head whisper, “Day by day you are being transformed from something wooden into something real by your children.”

After the bath, I waddled out into the kitchen and declared to my husband, “I am a real mom!”

A statement that may seem obvious but for me the process of motherhood has been a slow softening of the hard, splintered parts of myself, the way I have been untangling the invisible strings that conducted me through the world. As I sit here typing, Joaquin flips around inside of me and I pause, waiting for the next movement. My favorite part of being pregnant is feeling my child shift inside of me. Sometimes it feels like free-falling, as if there is a space inside of my body where a new world exists. I rest with my hand on my belly, waiting for the kicks, the flutters. Even on my third child, it is hard to grasp that there is a small human being fully formed inside of me.

I am so curious to meet this little boy. His presence has spread through my body a  lulling calm, something I didn’t experience in my previous pregnancies. Dan and I have reflected on where we were at when I was pregnant with Sol, what our dreams were when I was pregnant with Zaviera. Their personalities, in one way or another, echo the themes of those stages in our lives. They were forming us as we were forming them.

With this final pregnancy I am moving at a different speed than I expected. Day by day, I find myself stopping my old tangled ways and softening. I am not telling myself  bullying lies nearly as much as I used to. I worry less about whether or not I will succeed at the goals set before me, and more about whether or not the fulfillment of those goals will bring more spirit to the heart of my family. In writing this novel, in finishing this thesis, will I emerge a better human being?

So when I think of the belly of the whale and the tasks ahead of me, I find myself shifting from Pinocchio to that scene in Finding Nemo, when the whale tells Dory and Marlin to let go so that they can be flushed out to sea. These days I find myself often swimming along like Dory. Happily, hormonally, absent-minded, chanting “Just keep swimming, swimming…uh wait…where am I?” And then every few days I have a Marlin-style freak out, worrying that I am growing lazy, that I will get nothing done, that if I am not tightly wound and trying to figure things out, if I trust the whale and “let go”, I will get eaten. I will never find the thing I have lost.

When that part of my mind cries out with all of Marlin’s anxiety: “How do you know that nothing bad won’t happen?” 

I pause for a moment, feeling the rushing unknown pulling me downwards. Joaquin flips inside of me. Sol begins to tell me a story. Zaviera dances through the room. My husband strokes a strand of hair out of my eyes.

And like Dory, I answer, “I don’t.”

And then I let go.

The day is a quiet gray. The washing machine hums and clucks. Rain trails down the windows, connecting from drop to drop. Zaviera sleeps on the couch, her arms flung up above her head like she is dreaming beneath the sun’s heat. At her age, Sol still occasionally needed his arms swaddled tightly around his body, the blankets tucked in, his world contained, reassured. Zaviera has always surrendered to sleep as though exposing her soft underbelly is her purpose for being born. It is a warm, strong limbed faith she contains beneath her skin. A faith that often reaches into me and holds me captive. There are moments when I am happy to exist only as a witness to her wild embodiment.

Zaviera has been sick for a week. The vomit-out-both-ends-with-with-a-temp-of103.7 type of sick. When the virus has not been shaking her around in its maw, making her cry out in shock and betrayal, she has been rolling around in the special priviliges of being the Sick One. Today we climbed into the bath with one another and as she doted over me, her big Mommy Doll, I realized how many moments in a day slip beneath me. My children are running water. They are the tides and the undertow, the cresting waves and the horizon at sunset. I often find myself struggling in the impact zone of the noise and demands, my limbs exhausted, my mind full of roaring. I work my way against the currents, out to the peak, to wait for one of those waves where I meet my children, cresting in their presence before I am plunged back down, holding my breath, hoping I don’t drown.

Last night I crept into their bedrooms and watched them sleep. I asked for forgiveness for the moments of impatience and exhaustion. I asked to be absolved from regret. I asked that my children know, as one sleeps with his lips soft, his fists clenched, and the other with her arms flung over her head as though she is falling from a great height, that they understand how much I love them.

There are moments when I make it out past the crashing and churning, when I wait for the next wave of their beauty to come rolling towards me, when I dream of having underwater lungs. I dream of being able to slip beneath the surface and breathe in the love that I often fear will drown me if I don’t keep swimming.