One Year Ago

This post was originally going to be titled "Eight Months Ago" since it's Lucy's 8-month birthday today. (Can you even believe it? The months are whizzing by my head, like softballs thrown by Upper Competitive League girls against whom I have no business playing. But I do.)

But I have nothing interesting to say about Lucy being 8 months old, and i found this little ditty I wrote a year ago when Joel and I were driving to Chicago for the weekend. Or something.

OK, so it's not quite been a year since I wrote this. But I just found it! And I kind of like it, though like everything else I write, it's unfinished. Here goes:

May 21, 2004
8:19 PM
Just east of Mauston, WI
25.5 weeks pregnant

I told myself I was going to start writing. I tell myself this several times a year, though this is the first writing I’ve done in about 12 months. As they say, starting is the hardest part.

Occasionally, I find myself feeling retrospective about pregnancy and parenting. Though I don’t see how I can be “retro” anything about something I am in the middle of experiencing, or, respectively, something I haven’t even started to experience.

Which is interesting. My sister called me on Mothers’ Day this year. My own mother refused to wish me a happy Mom’s Day, saying I didn’t quite qualify … whereas Jean maintained that I am the only one caring for this kid right now. Which is true, I guess. And really, how can you argue that parenting begins only at birth? From the moment you see those two pink lines on the HPT, you are changed forever. You are instantly protective of your middle region, shying away from balancing laundry baskets on your hipbones (if you are lucky enough to still have hipbones when you discover you are pregnant), instantly eschewing the “sucking in your stomach” reflex of every American woman over the age of 14. The first three months of pregnancy are a quick primer on some of the perils of parenting. Your body is the vessel in which another body is growing, and yet you have no control of how it will go. The risk of miscarriage is so great in the very beginning … and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s a terrifying and beautiful juxtaposition. Some of my friends who have young children tell me how they have to start “letting go” of their little munchkins bit by bit. First, they learn to walk without holding your hand, and the next thing you know they’re paying their own car insurance. But the truth is that the letting go begins right away. All you can do is do your best.

Many of us are control freaks. We were probably the first generation of American women who were raised to believe that we could be whatever we wanted to be when we grew up. And unfortunately, we extrapolate that to mean that we can control every bit of our lives. But you know what? Things go wrong. Cars break down, gutters need replacing. Perfectly good husbands get crabby.