Eye of the Storm

A couple of years ago, in an autumnal yoga class, my instructor explained to everyone the concept of "Vata". Vata can describe a season or a personality. When used to describe the natural world, it refers to a time of year when Nature is chaotic: windy, helter-skelter days; highs and sudden lows; rain and sunshine, all at once. She said often when Mother Nature is exhibiting herself in this manner, She can affect each of our daily lives in much the same way and my instructor stressed the importance of finding something steady upon which to focus amidst such chaos and upheaval.

Lately, my life has felt topsy-turvy. My home is in renovation bedlam and my heart's flying around in the sky like a kite, flip-flopping up and down and all around, straining against the hand that keeps hold of its string, envious of the stars and desirous of flight. Today was a particularly blustery day. Even Pooh would have agreed. The temperature dipped to 8 degrees and tomorrow will reach a high of 17. The full moon last night doesn't help to ease the turbulence any. But my Sea of Tranquility was bundled in his teddy-bear bunting bag, beaming up at me. His eyes, like his name, reflect the stillness of water, and its great depth.

My baby boy is a Zen Master. He only cries if he's hungry or if he's a bit gassy. He won't even cry if he's pooped his pants! Instead, he simply sits there smiling, relieved that he's relieved himself. Everywhere we go, everyone remarks on how stoic he is, how calm, how content. I am amazed at my own luck. In his brown hooded fleece, he resembles all the more a wee buddhist monk. I realize how blessed this makes me, especially as a single parent. How would I have handled a colichy baby, I wonder? I feel for the mothers of such babes out there in the world. Especially during the time of Vata.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not startled easily. Not anymore. I've learned to breathe through stress, to steer my way through whitewater waves of pandemonium without capsizing. Nothing really phases me at this stage of my life. I know I wanted to be a younger mother. Heaven knows I tried and tried and tried. Whatever I lack in energy as a mother over 40, I know I make up for in vast, neverending fields of patience. Maybe he gets his serenity from me, though I definitely had a Vata personality when I was younger. The years have helped me find some balance. And, literally, yoga has helped me find it. Right now feels like the best time in my life to be a new mum.

I am focusing these days on getting into shape. I feel like I owe it to him as an older mum. To be around for as long as I can and to be as young as I can be for him. He will be five months old already next week. I am agog at how quickly the time has passed since he passed through me: the journey of pregnancy, his birth. There is no slowing Time. And there is no controlling Vata. We just have to weather this weather. When I hold him, I am suddenly thrown into the eye of the storm. Life swirls in a funnel around me. I am Dorothy flying through the air, watching cows and furniture sweep by us. But I am still. His breathing slows mine. His eyes arrest me. His shy smile soothes. He is my Toto when the world feels strange. Let this house of chaos fall on some other striped-stockinged lass! He and I will survive whatever Life throws at us. (And there are plenty of cows near at hand!)

As I write this, he sleeps peacefully in his crib. I am listening to Karen O and the Kids sing Worried Shoes before I head to bed. It's a song by which, lately, I sing him to sleep. The cinematic version of Where the Wild Things Are comes out in 9 days and this song is on its soundtrack. It was written by a musician named Daniel Johnston, battling his own personal version of Vata in his life: bipolar disorder.

As calm, cool and collected as my son is, I know he will be a wild thing. He has a wildness in him, but it's not a part of his demeanour. Just his soul. There is something about him that will remain uncaptured by anyone. Even me. Kind of like how a mountain range looks different in a photograph. I love this song. Long ago, I used to be a worrywart. I think I worried my way through my teens and twenties. But even as my heart flutters and dips in this riotous wind and I turn to absorb the current disarray of my home's recent facelift, I sigh. I take off my worried shoes and stretch my toes, put up my legs.

It feels divine.

I took my lucky break and I broke it in two.
Put on my worried shoes.
My worried shoes.
Took me so many miles and they never wore out.
My worried shoes.
My worried shoes.
ooooooo.
My worried shoes.

I made a mistake that I never forgot.
Tied knots in the laces of my worried shoes.
Every step that I take is another mistake.
I march further and further away in my worried shoes.
ooooooo. ooooooo.
My worried shoes.

My shoes took me down the crooked path.
Away from all welcome mats.
My worried shoes.
I looked all around and saw the sun shining down.
Took off my worried shoes.
My worried shoes.
ooooooo. ooooooo. ooooooo.
My worried shoes.

Music: Worried Shoes, Daniel Johnston

Taking Flight

Tuesday night I drive from my parents through the winding, rural roads. Back home. And it seems like every bird that ever flew an Ontario sky is heading out during that drive. It was coming on eight o'clock and the sun was beginning to set. Made me weep openly to see them all. He was asleep in the car seat in back. Just turned four months old last Sunday. The drive makes me recall the night my twin sister drove us home from the hospital after the week that seemed like a year in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

Home. Migration always makes me wonder: are they going home or leaving home? I like to think that the birds I'm watching take flight are leaving home. That this part of Southwestern Ontario is where they call Home. I take comfort in the knowledge that they'll come back.

I love the way Canadian Geese line up in their own personal arrow formations, their wings in wondrous, dark contrast to the pink that kisses the few, scattered clouds. It makes me turn off the iPod in my Subaru and roll down the window to hear them. Among my favourite sounds. And one of my cherished sights is the way starlings all swoop together as they leave. A group ahead of me takes the shape of a fish and floats over the cornfields that dip off to my right. All in perfect unison. Like synchronized swimmers. Diving and surfacing together. How do they do that? Kind of mesmerizing. Bad for driving.

When I was pregnant with him, I caught this astounding documentary at the Princess Cinema in Waterloo called Winged Migration. It was right around the time I'd begun to feel my own first flutterings of him and pretty breathtaking to witness. Birds seem to have some tie to my little man. Starting with that robin's nest above the side door of my farmhouse to the little mobile of three woolen owls who hover over his crib, representing the spirits of the siblings he might have had, the babies I miscarried in 1998, 2003 and last September, his own fraternal twin. They watch over him. It was an owl's "who-hoo-hoo-hooooo-hooooo" which greeted me my very first night in this farmhouse, just outside my bedroom window. In Celtic mythology, birds are considered messengers. It's very important to listen to what they're trying to tell you. Like that bird who guides the children in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe through the forest to the safety of Mr. Tumnus' home.

The pines behind my home stretch up into the darkening sky and I bring him out onto the back deck. The constant, clamouring chatter of starlings surrounds us. I smile down at him in his seat and his hair captures a glint of sunset as my clap shocks the starlings into flight, halting their song; they simultaneously take wing together, dipping and darting across the back field, leaving my home. And theirs.

This month, I am heavy in preparation for selling this farmhouse. We stayed at my parents the past week so the rooms could be painted with soft, muted colours. Names like Earth Smoke, Smoked Trout, Soft Earth, Manitou, Tent, Tofino. We will be leaving this place. His first real home, and mine. I bite my lip. I've no idea if she will even sell before the snow flies. If not, I'll batten down the hatches and hibernate one more winter here and hope to move come spring. I've been here nine years and maybe it's time now. I admit the care of these 1.3 acres on my own for almost three years has been a bit of a challenge and will only prove moreso as he grows and demands more and more of my time and attention (though he gets pretty much all of it already). He needs, I think, a town versus this remote spot. I hate leaving here. It's one of a number of things breaking my heart right now. But I know a move will be better for him. I hope it will be better for me. Either way, it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. What's that saying? A rich child sits in a poor mother's lap. Realistically, I know we will both benefit from moving to an actual neighbourhood. With a shorter driveway. Better resources. With other children. Other families. Other parents. Other single parents, perhaps! I look forward to the idea of bicycling or walking to work. The main country road into town can get a bit dicey come the winter time. Life has brought so many changes since deciding to leave my common-law marriage almost three years ago now. And change is good, I remind myself. He is here with me now. It's a good time for this particular change to come...

But I will miss all these birds taking wing across the farmfields. The robins nesting in my doorway and blue spruce. The killdeer in my driveway. The starlings. Barn swallows. The blue herons flying with their long legs outstretched behind them over the back creek. Their nests on the third line way, high up in the trees. The hummingbirds at my front window and backgarden. That hawk my eyes always seek in one, special tree during my morning and evening commute each winter. The Canadian geese who land each Spring when the back field floods. One year, a few years back, a lone, white swan joined them there. When I was a little girl, I would read and re-read E.B. White's Trumpeter Swan. These days, I am re-savouring his (and Strunk's) The Elements of Style while attempting query letters to various editors of magazines. Another book on birds comes to mind: Too Many Blackbirds by my old American Lit professor, Dr. Ken Ledbetter. He died much too young back in 1993. A favourite memory is of his class the morning he informed everyone how to properly address a ghost upon encountering one. You must first ask politely, "Are you a good ghost or a bad ghost?" This proved helpful advice here in this farmhouse built in 1848. It is not without its own many and varied spirits.

I know the very cherished memories I will hold, from the cedar hedges to the smell of the woodstove, the sight of a 160-year old apple tree in blossom, the witnessing of the Aurora Borealis while standing in my front yard to the shooting stars of the Perseids each August seated on a Muskoka Chair out back: such rich and vibrant images will stay with me all my days once I leave here. That will be some good haunting.

I am writing this in the middle of the night. It's 3:30 a.m.. Stolen moments. Rising from my bed where I've just fed him, his arms are outstretched as though he is flying through his own dreams. I think about migration and about what makes a home. My own parents leaving their home in Ireland and emigrating to Canada. Myself making a new home with him somewhere else. Waterloo-Wellington County has been my home for so damn long, a large part of me wishes we were starting over somewhere farther away. Nunavut. Nova Scotia. New Zealand. There's a whole planet out there yet to discover together. But I know that this is home for me. The mennonite farms. All the local farm markets, small town and music festivals. And my own little sonshine. Whereever he is will define home for me.

For now, I watch the birds rise up to guide my way towards another beginning somewhere new and familiar at the same time. What comes to mind is my eldest sister's beautiful vinyl recording by Judy Collins of that old Sandy Denny song, Who Knows Where the Time Goes? It was composed the year I was born when she was only twenty. Wow. Forty-two years have come and gone. And these last nine years have flown themselves. The last four months especially. Did she ever get those lyrics right! They make me smile and tear up at the same time. But then, the Autumn, as it approaches this coming week, always makes me do that. It's my favourite time of year. And I cling to one, specific lyric that strengthens the journey I'm making and my own resolve: I have no fear of time.

Across the purple sky, all the birds are leaving
But how can they know it's time for them to go?
Before the winter fire, I will still be dreaming
I have no thought of time

For who knows where the time goes?
Who knows where the time goes?

Sad, deserted shore, your fickle friends are leaving
Ah, but then you know it's time for them to go
But I will still be here, I have no thought of leaving
I do not count the time

For who knows where the time goes?
Who knows where the time goes?

And I am not alone while my love is near me
I know it will be so until it's time to go
So come you storms of winter and then the birds in spring again
I have no fear of time

For who knows how my love grows?
And who knows where the time goes?

Music: Who Knows Where the Time Goes, Sandy Denny

Fireworks

Here’s what I’ve learned:
Things don’t always go as planned.

You dream of a homebirth. Of candles. Of soft music. The presence of strong, empowering women helping you through this, your first labour.

You surround yourself with them: there’s your midwife, your twin sister as your birth partner (the kind of strong woman who’s been through two homebirths already herself), your mum is there in the picture you’re making and she’s smiling, anxious but beaming. You are lucky enough to have your massage therapist offer to attend just for the experience of helping a woman through labour. You have four goddesses aiding you, touching you, whispering their love and encouragement while you descend into your belly and what lies there...

These beautiful faces surround you and walk you from room to room. They help you breathe through contractions that begin to grow closer together. That begin to grow more intense.

And then your water breaks and there’s meconium in it.
Here’s where things change from this pretty picture you’ve made…

There is zero hesitation on your part to transfer to hospital. Zero. Absolutely zilch.

Your sister battles traffic like she’s Mcgyver. Your massage therapist helps you through the stages of 6 cm dilation weaving through Wellington county in the back seat of a Toyota Tercel. She takes a photo of the license plate of the asshole who refuses to let us pass as we speed to the hospital. You watch the clouds, biting your lip and try to count them as you breathe through the sensation of having your uterus squeezed through a wringer.

Your thoughts are only on this baby within you and the journey she or he is making with you. To you. And your thoughts turn to meconium. You try to repress those ones though. They’re not helping your current sitch.

I want to talk about bravery. Courage. I’ve never seen so much of it in such a small, beautiful package. You are now 7cm dilated and been labouring for 16 hours and the pushing reflex has begun a little too early and you’re being told not to push. Don’t push. DON'T push. Don’t fucking PUUUUUSSSSSSSSHHHHHH.

It seems so small. Negligible. Three tiny centimetres of dilation separate this baby from me and my arms. It’s then I realize I don’t have the energy or stamina to handle what’s coming ‘cause what is coming is the most intense phase of labour: TRANSITION. I cave to an epidural. Naturally pitocin follows. And then the heart rate of this little package inside me begins to slow. It fluctuates, drops, then stabilizes. They flip me over back and forth like I’m a dolphin to get it back to normal. I’m thinking about waves. About each contraction as a wave. As water. Approaching the shore and then sliding away from it.

And I’m thinking about you. Only you.

Your heart rate drops and I begin to hum “dream a little dream” and watch it stabilize. I’m talking to you the entire time. I am whispering to you while 10 people wander around me: my homebirth team, doctors, nurses, anesthesiologists. I’m oblivious to anyone in the room but you – yeah, you there in my belly. You are my entire focus. You are the only one that matters.

The doctor suggests forceps and I just want to end the stress on my baby. To no longer have this little heart rate drop. Come out to me baby. Come out to my arms. The doc pulls and I push. I PUUUUSSSSSSSSHHHH.

My sister gives me the running commentary like she’s Ron Maclean: There’s the HEAD!!! The HEAD is OUT!!! Here comes the shoulder. Now the other shoulder...

And here’s where I give my final push and the absolute love of my life slithers from between my legs. They’re holding you upside down because of the meconium scare. The first thing I see is that you are a boy.

I have just given birth to my son. People are talking all around. I can’t hear them. My son. My son. My son. I have a son. I have a boy. A son. He’s mine. He’s all mine.

I have to wait to hold you. They suction your trachea and give me five minutes with you skin to skin. You are almost 10 minutes old when they place you against my breast.

So THIS is what Joy feels like. Shit, I wasn’t ready for it. I didn’t realize it was THIS all-encompassing. I feel humbled. Blown away. Breathless. I feel exhilarated and frightened. I remember this sensation while lost in the fog on the coast of the Dingle Peninsula 18 years ago. I feel a terrifying LOVE. Deeper than I’ve ever felt. WOW. Wowowowowowow. A terrible beauty is born....

We spend almost a week in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit of the local hospital. I move through this week sleep-deprived, like a zombie. Everything I do, say, breathe is done for you. I make pacts with gods I didn’t know I believed in. I double pinky promise everything so you’ll be okay. We are surrounded by preemies barely clinging to life, screaming their lungs out and you and I cling to each other like rafts in this ocean we're swimming right now. I feel lucky. You are full term. I feel so luckyluckylucky. I repeat it like this refrain is a bouy to embrace in this lake of doubt, confusion, fear. The boy in my arms. I listen to conflicting opinions as to what constitutes progress and I nearly go insane wondering which one will be the one that releases us to just go home. Just you and me. Home together. Safe. Away from all this. Away from these leads on your body. Away from this monitor. Away from that IV tube in your tiny, fragile head. Away from that damned nasogastric tube stuck down your tiny little nose that everyone says is my nose.



          So yeah. Let me talk about bravery. Courage in the form of a 7 pound, 13 ounce little boy. You move through it all with wonder. With quiet strength. With this stoic expression. With rarely a cry from your beautiful, pursed lips. You have a cowlick swirl on the top of your head reminiscent of Vincent’s “Starry Night” and I think back to that meteor shower that sent you flying through the night sky to me. The peak night of the Perseids last August. The night I began to bleed the cycle that would bring you to me. The night I sat out on my muskoka in the backyard and wished on about a million shooting stars that I could gaze into the dark pools that look up into mine now.

Last night was Victoria Day. I sit on the fourth floor by the hospital window in the dark with you sucking at my breast and the night sky is lighting up again. I can hear the boom of fireworks in the distance. But see, I get confused. ‘Cause I can't tell if they are shooting off inside me. In the core of my heart as I hold you instead of simply showering over Victoria Park a few blocks away. I’m banking on the first scenario.

It was 11 years ago today that I lost my first baby via miscarriage and, as we are finally released from hospital, I step across the threshold of my farmhouse tonight holding you, my son, in my arms and I look back at this journey I’ve made. The journey of 11 years. The journey of 9 months. The journey of a 21 hour labour. The journey of the last week. Your beautiful, devoted, selfless aunt drives us home through the country and I feel like I’ve been gone forever. The world looks different. Everything is so green. Was it this green last week? Was the sunset this beautiful? Were the clouds this white and fluffy and perfect? I don’t think so.

The world has changed. My world feels as new as yours.

I look at you now lying in your bassinette. You are swaddled and cozy. Three little owls, your spirit siblings, the ones I lost before you, float over where you sleep and keep a watchful eye. We are home. It’s just you and me now. BOOM. Those fireworks are still exploding in my heart.

Goddamn I love you. My starry, starry knight.


Photography: Courtesy of my twin sister
Music: Starry, Starry Night, Don Maclean

Nesting

She came back to her nest today. Her mate was with her. (I envied her that.) I was heading out the side door on my way to prenatal class and they both flew over my head to the maple tree until I was gone. My due date is exactly one month away. Tears fill my eyes to see her finally. Last spring, she had five little robins. They all lived. I’d climbed a ladder to take a peek and my shadow made their little heads pop up and their beaks open, expecting food.

It was July when she returned to nest a second time. She hasn’t done that every year, but last year she did. She laid only two eggs then. One I’d found by the beginning of August on the stones, broken into bits in front of the door. The other remained in the nest, blue and perfect, though clearly not alive since she’d abandoned the nest altogether. I took the remaining egg indoors. This was around the time I began injecting my belly with infertility drugs. That robin egg became my little talisman. It sits on an antique hutch in another abandoned nest I’d found on the driveway. Neither of her two eggs survived, but when I look back now, what happened proved so ominous. In Celtic mythology, birds act as messengers. One egg had broken and the other had remained whole. This happened the month before I conceived twins through IVF. By the 12th week ultrasound, I would lose one baby. One baby would remain intact. So I have a thing about this robin. I feel a strange bond with her. It’s so good to see her back nesting again while I prepare my own. We are in synch.

I love that her nest sits on the beam outside the room that you and I will share; the room where I intend to birth you. When she’s nested the last four years in this same spot above my side door, she flies over my head each morning I leave my old farmhouse. She’s been kind enough never to shit on my head while doing this. It’s a brief flit to the maple tree and then back to the nest once I’m in my car. Eventually, by the end of each spring, she gets used to me and flies a shorter distance to the post sometimes, secure in the knowledge that I will leave her and her eggs alone. I gain her trust gradually.

The Weepies sing as I write this. I am thinking about the peak night of the Perseids last August. All those falling stars as I sent prayers up to the heavens for you. My body is wide to hold all the promise of blue-velvet dark and stars. You are that promise. In a month, perhaps less, but no more than 6 weeks from now, I will finally be holding you in my arms. My soul will weep and sing at the sight of you being pulled from between my legs. My heart will burst like fireworks all over the bloodied sheets beside this window below her nest. You will take your first breath and take away mine. The pulse of the cord will slow as your heart beats on its own and mine skips. I will be gazing into your eyes in disbelief, awe, gratitude, Unconditional Love, as you suck at my own red breast. I swear I’ll try to prevent tears falling from my dark lashes upon your sweet little face, your own dark locks, but I can’t make any promises, kay?

Here’s one promise I will keep: when those little robins break open from their greenish-blue eggs, I will swaddle you and climb two steps on my ladder when you are a month or so old and I’ll hold you up so our shadows will prompt their tiny, feathery heads to pop up and they will each open their mouths to sing you a proper welcome, my baby, to the planet.

For now, Mama Robin and I prepare our nests. We clean the dirt out. We put fresh straw and twigs in. We sing. We begin to hunker down. We watch the sky for falling stars. We count the days. And we await patiently the Joy that flies toward us…

Maternity Photography: Mattitude Photography

Music: Stars, The Weepies

Snowflake

The sky was so grey this morning. Then came the first, real downpour this spring; sounded like an army of watery soldiers marching across my tin roof. I paused, transfixed amidst the disarray of the studio space under renovation, imagining the crib against the wall, listening. The deluge made me want to strip my clothes off, layer by layer, and go stand in it so my skin could recall the last time it was touched.

Just now the sun came out and it was the first time baby moved inside me all day. I was watering my plants as the last of the snow melts outside my side door. The windows needed this cleansing. I moved closer to the pane, wondering when the robin will return to where she’s nested above my side door these last four years.

Looking through the glass sparked a flashback to that second night I stayed with you last December. Remember the size of the snowflakes? Like golfballs drifting down. I’d had a bath in the early evening and was lying with my feet up on your sofa, my iPod echoing in the semi-darkness, when you returned to the apartment. The first thing you did was cross the room to open the blinds. You called me over to the window then and we stood looking up to the sky and onto the street, following their descent amidst the traffic. Your hands were deep in your pockets and my heart was high in my throat. They were so goddamn breathtaking and, recalling another wintry night far in the past, I fought a sudden rise of tears, my eyelashes blinking them back.

The snowflakes looked solid, they were that big. Their size made them appear heavy, less fragile somehow yet impossibly floating with their weight, so quietly and softly. It was like we were standing in this gigantic snowglobe: a souvenir from Vancouver. And that’s just how my heart felt. As though it had been inverted (like a silver claddagh), turned upside down and shaken into a million ice crystals dancing all around us. For sure it was falling as gently, silently, steadily as those flakes; the tiny hairs on my neck rising, anticipatory, timorously reaching out to the close proximity of your t-shirt, the skin of your arms, as I stood nervous and speechless, my mouth a little dry.

Did you know that snowflakes aren’t even white? They’re clear. Just the light, the way it hits ‘em, gets diffused by the hollows within the crystal. People talk about how perfect a snowflake is but actually its flaws cause the light to shine white and sparkle like a diamond. Its incalculable, tiny, crystalline imperfections enhance its beauty. The things I imagine doing with you, to you, are as innumerable and varied.

And it's this reverie that causes my fingers to ache with the memory of the silken smoothness of your back as they slide down the cold glass of my door, still a touch of this past winter clinging there. Hiccups begin in my pelvis. It's not a euphemism. But it feels like a little heartbeat down there, reverberating with the rhythm of your own fingers' caresses. I look at my hands. How many weeks before they draw this little one to my breast now, the pulse of the umbilical cord slowing before it's cut: less than I can count on these fingers against the pane, guaranteed. Seven weeks? Five? Eight, maybe? I remember how baby kicked when you warmed my feet with yours under the sheets that night. You don’t have to talk to me about water and longing. ‘Cause lately I feel like crystallized H₂O, like one of those snowflakes we witnessed the second-last day of December: floating around in space, not knowing exactly where I’ll land with the delicacy of all my womb carries, the frailty of my heart. I feel a little afraid of the heat of your breath fogging the window, emanating from your skin as I drift down through the sky. The stars, where I began this journey, seem so far away up above...

I wish to gather the courage to say just how I feel:
‘Cause I really don’t want to disappear. I don’t want to melt away.
Unless it’s on your bottom lip. Your tongue.
What I want is for you to come outside onto the street and open your mouth along with your heart. Open wide, ‘kay? And catch me.

Catch the one-of-a-kind, hexagonal symmetry of this love and swallow its perfection, its imperfections whole, so its light can diffuse, dispel the dark places and shine again from within…

Music: Chasing Cars, Snow Patrol;
I Remember (December), Lisa Hannigan and Damien Rice

Dream a Little Dream

Today I am finished my 7th month of pregnancy. Yesterday I stepped inside a baby store for the first time this entire pregnancy. Not just any old store that happens to sell stuff for babies along with everything else it carries, but an actual store with the sole focus of selling all things baby-related. Over the years, I can count on two fingers the number of times I have done this. In general, I have avoided these places. It was just too damn difficult to walk around in them and think that perhaps I’d never be buying anything for a child of my own.

Maybe it was the two days of sunshine in a row after such a long, cold winter but yesterday marked the day where I felt I could start to accept that my dream is finally coming true. I looked at cribs. I looked at bassinettes. I looked at strollers and baby monitors. I looked at change tables and I even touched them. I opened drawers. Imagined my child lying in the crib. Pictured the delight of lifting my baby from out of it. My own baby, at last!

Over the years, I have knit gifts for baby showers I have had to attend. I do believe homemade gifts to be the nicest. But the selfish excuse attached to this is the fact that I was loathe to enter these baby-focused stores for the regular type of gifts people purchase. The one or two attempts I made to do so had me leave the lineup, put the items back and get the hell out – it was just too much of a challenge to my courage to watch pregnant women walk around with their spouses, so excited about choosing crib bedding, to have to listen to the chatter waiting to cash out, each of them asking the others when they were due, was it their first child? To have to bite my lip listening to those women who would actually complain about all they’ve had to endure or how bored they are with the pregnancy and wishing it were over by now. During the span of six years between my two miscarriages, there were 16 babies born to either my immediate family members or close friends that lived within a half hour of me. Some on their second or third children by the time I was finally pregnant for the second time only to lose that baby at 8 weeks. Attending the showers was my singular act of sacrifice because of the love I felt towards these sisters and girlfriends themselves, but I resolved not to enter these stores again to save my life. I simply could not bring myself to do it.

Yet here I am, finally. I actually purchased some burping cloths. I bought little words made of twigs to hang in my baby’s room. The words speak as much to me as I hope they will to my child. Dream. Laugh. And Shh (for over the crib). I am allowing myself to believe, to accept this is finally happening. To ME. It has felt such a long journey and I realize I have been holding my breath, not really permitting myself to believe it is coming true even after I’d reached my second trimester for the first time.

My mum has kept asking me when I’m going to start knitting for my own baby. All those little baby clothes I’ve knit over the years for gifts for other people’s Bundles of Joy. I know I’m surprised, too, that I have not begun this for myself and my own child. So I go up to the closet where I've stored tiny balls of yarn for the baby blanket I’d planned six years ago now. I bought them when I purchased other yarn for the same blanket I knit for my twin sister’s second son. I knit his first and planned to knit mine after. I was still pregnant the December he was born, but lost my baby in the weeks that followed his birth so I hid the small bag of yarn and the pattern away. Everything baby-related was tucked safely away from sight in storage.

And now I am 9 weeks away from my due date. I finally dig out the bags and boxes of these items I've kept hidden for years: the baby photograph frame my mother bought me almost 11 years ago when I was first pregnant, but which I’d packed away after I miscarried at 12 weeks. The little rust-coloured knit booties I purchased secretly in the Dingle Peninsula when my ex and I traveled to Ireland in the September of 1999, almost a decade ago, for the dream of a baby again someday. The little suede moccasin-type boots I bought in the village where I live maybe 8 years ago because they were so adorable and I still hoped that I would one day have a child of my own who would don them. The little knit hat I bought at the Danforth Music Hall the night I went to see Sam Beam (Iron and Wine) in October of 2007. His sister, Sarah, had knit it and there were a basket of her items at the front where you could purchase the vinyl albums and CDs. As I unpack each item, I feel finally that I am freeing a hidden burden of sorrows in my closet. In each their tiny way, these items represent the dreaming I have held for years of a child of my own.

They speak to me from my past and I can finally concede that my dreaming wasn’t actually in vain; that all the years I thought I had given up Hope (especially once I miscarried my second pregnancy), I actually hadn’t. A small ember of Hope kept burning somewhere deep inside me that refused to extinguish. It fanned itself into a flame again and I remember the specific moment this happened. I was sitting in a small room in the fertility clinic in Hamilton in June of 2008. The clinic at which I’d been a patient for almost five years, years with my ex-husband and then, on my own. The moment that ember burst into flame was when my doctor advised me not to go through with the In Vitro Fertilization surgery I was planning. He relayed to me that he felt it would be a waste of money as my chances seemed very remote. I replied that I had to do it anyway – for my own self, for my soul, my spirit, even if it was only for some kind of closure. His words could have stamped out that ember once and for all, but they had the opposite effect. By refusing to listen to his advice, I had opened the wrought iron woodstove door on my heart and blew that tiny ember into the flame that has been burning since last August when I initiated this entire journey on my own. Be careful how close you come near me now. That fragile flame of last June has blazed into a virtual bonfire over the last 7 months beneath my right breast, my belly has become its own oven baking this bun, the warmth of which consumes my entire being.

I am two months, perhaps less than that, away from holding my baby in my arms at last. I am 42 years old. I am single. I am going to finally realize my dream of being a mum.

I am over the moon.

I admit now nothing is impossible. Dreams can come true. What seems unimaginable CAN manifest. These thoughts are a little dangerous to me these days because the flames begin to lick at other areas of my life. But I remain afraid to push my luck, really. I am feeling pretty damn blessed right now that at least this one dream of a child is coming true and I feel too afraid to dare to hope that other dreams harbored in my heart might also be fanned into flame. So I am closing the wrought iron door. I’m stepping back. I don’t want to look a gifthorse in the mouth. This is enough of a blessing for me right now. I’m afraid to get burned if I make an attempt for even more Happiness than is now growing in my belly… don’t want to jinx myself.

I will just focus on this new little love of mine coming to my arms and not be greedy for other dreams to also come true. This is a big one and, when I look at other people’s lives, at so many other women I know who’ve dreamed of it themselves but have been denied, I feel more than lucky and that Life has been more than good to me.

I know when I look into his or her eyes, the Joy I will finally know will ease my heart where any other dreaming is concerned…God, I hope so. I cannot ask for more than this blessing right now in my Life…this is a helluva massive dream to manifest already.

My baby, I cannot wait to meet you. To embrace you.

I will hold you so tight and snug to me, all the more closely that it might help me let go of other dreams held within my heart. Someone once wrote me a special note about the struggle of letting go, of the kind of cry that is loneliness mixed with feelings of wanting to be alone. When you are born, I hope and pray your little eyes, your hands, your tiny feet, your giant heart will help pull me through this struggle of letting go and just be thankful for the Joy I am already blessed to feel.

Until then, kneeling amongst these little boots and balls of yarn, books and bonnets, in the sunlight of what promises to be a week long warm spell to properly welcome the Vernal Equinox on March 20 next Friday, the official beginning of Spring, I whisper a little tune that, ironically (or maybe not so ironically) was recorded by The Mamas and the Papas, as I journey through this final stage of becoming a mama myself. A song of night breezes and sunbeams and leaving worries behind…a song of stars shining brightly above. In a sad way, it’s a song of farewell, but in a happier way, it’s more than just that: it’s a song of Love. I sing it to you, my baby, as a kind of first lullaby. I sing it to my heart. I sing it as an ode to soft skin, to wolf eyes, to the aurora borealis and to the magic of cold, starry, wintry nights. To the leaping of years and of hearts. To the courage of risk leaps represent. To love that holds the depth of mermaid-ridden oceans and the majesty, power and strength of horses.

Tears of sorrow, of longing mix with those of joy, slide over my freckles as to My Soul, I sing it…

Stars shining bright above you
night breezes seem to whisper
I love you
Birds singin' in the sycamore tree
Dream a little dream of me.

Say "nighty night" and kiss me
just hold me tight and tell me
you'll miss me.
While I'm alone and blue as can be
Dream a little dream of me.

Stars fading
but I linger on dear
still craving your kiss
I'm longing to linger til dawn dear
Just saying this:

Sweet dreams til sun beams find you
sweet dreams that leave your worries behind you.
But in your dreams
whatever they be,
dream a little dream of me

Maternity Photography: Mattitude Photography
Music: Dream a Little Dream of Me, Ukelele Cover of The Mamas & the Papas

Things that Go Bump in the Night...

The morning of Thursday, December 18, I think I feel you for the first time. I am sat on my toilet looking out at the snow and the trees. My midwife told me it might feel like gas, but I sense the little bubble that has burst in the lower part of my belly is not indigestion. It feels different somehow. I sit in wonder, waiting for more reassurance. Instead, I must shower and get ready for work.

It is called the quickening. I wonder why? I feel as though I've been waiting all my life to experience this amazing sensation! Sheila Kitzinger writes in Rediscovering Birth, that, "'Quick' is old English for 'alive'" and that, "in all cultures, quickening is recognised as an important transition in the process of becoming a mother."

Saturday morning. December 20. Tomorrow is Yule or Winter Solstice and tonight I am hosting a Solstice Soiree at my home. I have an insurmountable list of things to accomplish, but I lie in bed because the bubble I felt on Thursday begins to burst more than once. This time, I am sure it is you. My heart swells and my eyes fill. I am dialing my sister's number to tell her. Everything I do that day in preparation for the celebration of the Solstice is coloured by the fact that you have finally made your very real presence known to me. The grocery aisle is as exciting as a rollercoaster ride. I lower the window on the way to the Blackberry Bog so the wintry air can bloom roses on my cheeks. I touch the Scotch pine to thank it for being my yule tree before the man who sells it to me starts to chop it down. The strong scent of its needles inside my car fills my nostrils and I breathe deeply, my soul singing in elation of this day. Talk about a tiny light beginning to grow the longest night of the year!

Two weeks have passed since first contact and now daily, I feel your little bumps and grinds inside my womb. You are growing bigger with each day. When I lie down at night, you become most active. You push and press and kick and tumble. Each time you say hello in this way, my spirit soars.

I feel as though my very heart has fallen into my belly and is floating around inside there, banging against my womb walls to redefine Joy for me. You are my heart bursting and bubbling and blooming inside this tummy. I cannot wait to hold you, to kiss you, to press you to my breast, to smell your hair, to whisper to you, to touch you and to love you unconditionally forever.

In five months, I will look into your eyes. I will nuzzle your tiny neck and kiss your delicate fingers, your button nose. For now, your kicks keep my heart skipping a beat. Goddamn, I love you, my little star. You are all I am living and breathing for. You are whom I've been waiting for all my life. It won't be long now. At 22 weeks, I am more than halfway there. This has been one long journey and you feel closer than ever with each kick. I don't need to sleep to feel I am dreaming, that this long dream I've dreamt is finally coming true, finally manifesting. What a happy new year 2009 is for me!

The happiest I've yet known...but then again, wait until next year ;) HA!

Maternity Photography: Mattitude Photography

Music: In the Still of the Night, Cole Porter