It's odd, really, this whole notion of writing in a place open for observation. The things most worth saying are the very things that my tentative self hesitates to share. Where's the line? How much is too much? What are The Rules? Rundy is far more comfortable with me sharing my personal turmoils (learning how to be newly married, wrestling with predestination and election, etc.) than I think I ever could be. He gives his blessing, and yet I don't think I have my own blessing. It's a tenuous line, this line between too little and too much.
As a result of these ruminations, I've decided to try to find my feet first in this unfamiliar virtual room. The old blog was an old friend, and this one's still a stranger. Maybe I'll just follow social norms and start with small talk (the least meaningful kind of talk, undeniably, but sometimes a necessary precursor to big talk).
In this case, small talk is the beautiful absurdity of being pregnant.
When I was younger and the future was mostly sunbeams and daffodils, I thought being pregnant was just that nondescript period of time between not-being-pregnant and excruciating-labor-resulting-in-a-wee-human-who-makes-it-all-worth-it. You know, that time when you look like a beach ball and your belly button turns inside out.
In my naivete, I never really understood that growing a human pretty much meant your body became foreign to you. Nothing works the way it used to--eating, sleeping, going to the bathroom, exercising, bending over (and some may argue that those last two aren't even distinguishable from one another).
I also didn't think about the alien mental landscape that being pregnant can transport you to, a place where What Ifs can loom large and Not Good Enoughs start to leer at you around corners. A place where trusting God--something I could write pages about, not because I'm adept at it but because it's something I fail at so often--becomes both a lifeline and something that feels impossibly out of reach. The machinations of the pregnant mind are only exacerbated by considerations like personality and a history of losing children before being able to meet them. Suddenly the naivete is broken beyond repair and pregnancy is the most mentally taxing and emotionally arduous thing you've ever done; at its bleakest the beauty is hard to spot in the midst of all the fear.
So, no.
Babies aren't delivered by stork, nor do they show up dew-bedecked in cabbage patches fresh for the picking. They aren't always grown in mental sunbeams and daffodils. Sometimes God brings new life into the world when we walk very consciously in the valley of the shadow of death, the knowledge of our mortality and our smallness and our sin clinging to us like cobwebs. But perhaps this is the very best path to walk when waiting in expectation for a son or a daughter; not walking blithely into a future of perfect nurseries and perfect children and perfect homes, but walking without illusion into the gritty hardness and unspeakable goodness of learning the contours of another soul created in the image of God.
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