the birth of a heart

the leaves in our bountifully wooded yard are clumping in bothersome, wet piles, resistant to all attempts of blowing and raking. loverboy is home for two days, going crazy because of all the yardwork-halting rain. the muncher is happily crawling everywhere willy nilly and we are stocking up on baby gates. and thanks to that 24-hour visit to the ER a few weeks ago and a recent bout of sickness, we've been hunkering down at home in true winter fashion. in other words, 'tis the season to be grateful.

i think maybe it's unfortunate that i can't think of happiness without sadness. i can't think of birth without death. maybe it's because, as they say – they are two sides of one coin. the bookends of what it is to be human. but it's really, i think, just because of my own history. and when you've spent so long miserably, bitterly wishing you could change—or just forget—your own history, it comes as a surprise, a shock, a wonder, to find that you do not want to miss another second of life. to find that you must open your eyes. open your heart. to find that you have a heart. that with the birth of your own child, you've birthed a new heart. or maybe it's your old heart, just reshaped: a mother's heart.

“Making the decision to have a child — it is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. ” 
― Elizabeth Stone

it is frightening, it is wonderful.

the first week home with my baby i cried because it was going by too fast. because i knew that it was only the beginning of a lifetime with him, and that a lifetime would never be enough. i cried in anticipation of the bittersweet passing of babyhood into childhood and then adulthood. i could taste the pangs of missing his brand-newness already. i cried because i couldn't stop time, and oh, how i wanted to. i'd cried for the same reason in a completely different moment before, and maybe that is what informed this feeling. i knew the fragility, the ephemeralness of human life.

i have so much gratitude for this year. not just because motherhood is more magical than i ever could have imagined. not just because this baby of mine has a smile to light up the moon. not just because i get to spend all my days watching him pull himself up on our baby gates and stomp his little foot, determined to find a way over it, which will probably happen by tomorrow.

but also for this heart.

my response so long has been to stay busy. to stay ahead of it. to keep moving. and now i have to slow down. to get on eye level with the carpet. to crawl. to marvel over crinkly paper and the perfect shape of a button and the thwang of a doorstop and the taste of a table leg.

this heart walking around outside of me has been a salvation to me. teaching me again, to crawl, to see, to taste, to feel.

i cannot comprehend yet, the healing of this new heart. but i am so thankful, every day.

my blessings

sometimes, you look at your husband and you realize the two of you just created the most amazingly perfectly beautiful little boy down to his pointy left ear and curly left eyelashes and those two little scars where his little fingernails cut him just under his left, quarter-Asian eye (darn those sharp little baby fingernails!). that's when you count your lucky stars that they are your family.

in preparation for my birthday coming up, i'm counting my lucky stars for these days. i can't believe i'm getting so old. i can't believe my baby is getting so old. i can't believe times is flying by so fast. but i am so happy to be here with these two. i hope this week lasts forever.

savoring a simple life

there is something strangely pleasurable in living simply. when a frozen snickers bar for two is a treat. when room service at a decent hotel is a splurge. the hotel stay, a vacation. limitation helps you appreciate the small things, treasure the little things. giving in to limitation — or i should say, accepting it — is a relief, somehow. i don't mean the limitations of laziness or insecurity or low expectation. i mean the limitations of circumstance, of situation, of finances and family. of having what you need, versus what you want. while i still have wanderlust at heart, i am finding so much comfort in this place, this home, this family. the smaller handful of activities and things we have.

sometimes, in looking for my next big adventure or shiny new toy, i forget to appreciate the things i have. and sometimes it seems that the more i have, the more i want. and think i need. and i have a lot. i have unthinkable gads more than probably half the population of this planet.

sometimes, there is so much simple pleasure to be found in a cup of gas station coffee — a cup of bitter, burnt caffeine in a styrofoam cup with a fold-down plastic lid contains as much pleasure as a hot air balloon ride in the outback or picnicking on the pont des arts. more, even.

so, thank you, God, for this life. it is simple right now. and it is good.

thankful in january

while january hasn't been a long month, it's been a long season. 

here are some things that i've been particularly thankful for: 

1. the wonderful excuse to eat as much fresh produce and dairy as i can.

2. all the soup we've been making lately: chicken tortilla soup, chicken soup (no recipe), lentil soup (my recipe is similar to this), white bean chicken chili, and cabbage soup (recipe below).

weeknight dinner has never been so easy—and nourishing.

3. our sunday dates to birth classes together (and the relaxation pose with massage at the end).

4. the surprise stunning necklace with our baby's birthstone loverboy gave me...i'm still in shock!

5. morning appointments with my midwife—because i get to sleep in a little!

6. belly butter. 

7. baby kicks—and what feels like cartwheels and somersaults!

8. maternity jeans! i held out as long as i could, but i'm rockin' em now!

9. cake:)

2012

this new year has begun with that drizzly kind of rain that bears more resemblance to a cloud of gnats than the satisfying swoosh and fall of thunderstorms that i grew up with in texas. rain in texas, like all things texan some might say, is gloriously big and bold. it shouts and hollars and drops like all the heavens are descending, sometimes without warning. in constrast, the wet perspiration of these misting showers creeps up and clings to the neck, gathering under the nose and on the backs of eyelids like a faintly unwelcome memory. it is like the insides of me a year ago and the year before and a few more years before.

maybe i'm just remembering through my nostalgic-me glasses, but it seems like they just do rain better over there in the land of wide open spaces. in fact, it often seems like they do a lot of things better over there. i can't believe it's been three whole years since we packed up all our stuff into a moving van and drove it out here to the south. loverboy says it seems like we've been here longer, but to me, three years sounds real long. one of loverboy's three favorite sentences to say to me goes like this: did you ever think you would...(often followed by, "be married to such a cool guy?" or something along those lines—and no, i really didn't;) i also really didn't ever see myself living in the south. for those of you from the south, Texas is not The South. Texas is Texas. and i've kind of been missing it lately. maybe not just it, although i do miss austin with its manageable city size, informal people, amazing tacos, real coffee places, town lake that's really a river, and rain that falls with purpose...

[long post disclaimer: feel free to skip to the end]

recently i realized—as i started sobbing on the way to the mall—that what i really miss is people. i miss family. i miss friends. i miss the community i had for so long that was mine and was comfortable. i miss having family that i felt close to (geographically and otherwise). and i miss the communal, group-centric life i had during college and especially while spending two years at bible school after college. it was a constant hum of people and togetherness. and actually, i fought it in a way, at the time, because i was emotionally hobbled from various experiences and was mostly unable to just enjoy it. i was closed off and inaccessible, even to myself. still, so many people came through the cracks in my shell, even if they didn't realize it. even if i didn't dare venture out to theirs. and when six years ago i graduated and came home from school, and life changed in an instant, it seemed like i also slowly lost that community. friends got married, moved away, left bible school to go back to their own home towns. it felt like everyone was moving on except me. i may have moved on outwardly, getting married and moving. but inwardly, i felt like i was standing still, alone.

loneliness has been my shadow, an ever-present companion even on the most promising of days for what now feels like both forever and no time at all. i guess six years is pretty long. but during most of those six years it felt like no time was passing at all. as if those years never existed—and yet continue to exist. i know it doesn't make sense. there are still days when i'm in that vortex of bleak and tormenting confusion over how i ever got here in what feels like a stranger's life.

i used to think that i would one day wake up and things would return to how they were before. maybe they wouldn't outwardly be the way they were before. but i, at least, would be the same me i was before. i would be the me i recognized. i would be the same kind of happy that i was and the same kind of hopeful. and maybe i wished and hoped that a lot of my life would look similar to how it was before. of course that's impossible. but my struggle to accept that has been long and slow and disorienting. it felt like life itself had become alien to me. it is a thin feeling. a feeling of having lost myself. of being a ghost in my own life. i was constantly treading unfamiliar territory without even the cognizance that that was what i was doing. so surprised was i to even be this person i was with this life i had, that i wasn't really able to even recognize that things were unfamiliar. it was like being reborn. like i appeared out of non-existence, with no past experience of life to draw from—as if i'd sprung fully formed into the world—and discovered that i was alive and an adult woman to boot, but without the truth that i hadn't been this person before. because i was still me, just a me i didn't recognize.

but i guess what i'm trying to say is that i'm starting to recognize it, to recognize the deep longing i have within to be with family, friends. and also the need to accept and embrace the me i've become.

the truth is, i've experienced a huge amount of healing, a regaining of family and friends, here in the south. as much as i yearn for texas, most of the people i miss aren't there anymore. season by season, and with great strides within the last year, i've begun to climb out of that intense well of loneliness. happiness is something which i've begun to feel again in these last three years, since moving here. and i have to cling to that, to acknowledge it and bookmark it for all those many moments when i feel like i'm not really here.

but today, even though it is dripping like my nose outside, i am reminded that things are very, very good, here and now. i'm so thankful that we're going to be a family of three. and i'm thankful for the families and couples and friends we've gotten close to here in atlanta. i'm thankful for our friday night small group gatherings. i'm thankful for friends who get to visit from other states from time to time.

i'm thankful for 2012, even though parts of it have been the hardest in the last six. although i didn't really do a very good job of documenting most of it, 2012 was a big year for us:

first, we went on a special new year's eve adventure. then, we had a fun, frozen, long weekend in nyc. i had a miscarriage and spiraled into a scary place of fear and desperate sadness. i got braces (and never smiled in a photo again). we attended my sister in law's beautiful wedding (and three other weddings in three other states that same spring!). i dreamed of tacos and rambled my way through my last quarter as a grad student. i finished my mfa in writing at scad which i didn't post about because i was really going through too much to talk about anything. we visited the most beautiful beach in isla mujeres, mexico for our fourth anniversary and thought that was the end. i started to recognize myself again. we watched some fireworks on the fourth of july. i went to london to pass out free bibles during the summer olympics. i spent the rest of the summer sitting on the couch in nauseous misery but i couldn't talk about it because it was the most wonderful, mindblowingly awesome secret! but before you knew about that, i got a job and then turned the big 3-0, while apple picking which is not the worst way to head into a new decade. we also visited family in raleigh for thanksgiving and demonstrated how to (not) babymoon in the north carolina mountains. and finally, we celebrate the second anniversary of fête.

it didn't always feel like much was happening (especially last night while i was sick and we continued our tradition of not really being prepared for celebrations). but really it was a lot for one year. i'm thankful for it, but i'm so ready for 2013!

happy new year!

we are party decoration challenged:/ we know. we're working on it...

xx

B, loverboy, lars & baby