The Becoming Never Ends

mood: ponderous | drinking: lots and lots of water

My thoughts are scattered far and wide today, floating on haphazard breezes like so much dandelion fluff. I don’t know where to begin.

I can feel myself changing. Outside, the transformation is obvious even to strangers, as my hard round stomach pushes its way further and further out into the world. Inside, everything is re-arranged. My viscera, my ribcage, my brain.

Who is it, exactly, that I am becoming?

You don’t even know how many people have said to me, “Oh, you will make such a good mother!”

The polite response is “thanks” of course, but what I would rather say is, “How the hell do you know that?”

Because I don’t even know that. I don’t know what it is going to take, exactly, to be a mother. I don’t know where, exactly, mother will end and me will begin. Or perhaps they will become inextricably entangled and I will never again be precisely myself.

I’ve waited a long time to become a mother. This is something I don’t think I could ever regret. I’ve had an excellent time learning to be myself, learning to be Boy’s partner, learning how to constantly and consciously become a better version of both.

And now, a whole new door is opening inside me. A whole new person is being knit together, and whether she likes it or not, she will always be a part of me. From here until the end of time.

It’s easy to talk about all of this evolution in pretty prose, but the reality is what scares me. I don’t know how, exactly, all of this will change me. I don’t know who I will be on the other side. I don’t know how Boy and I will make it all work.

And even more, I don’t know who exactly this new little person is. I don’t know yet what she’ll like and dislike, what she’ll dream of and what she’ll discard.

There are just so many unknowns to this whole situation.

And it’s fine for all the onlookers to be all pleasant with their platitudes about my parenting skills, but only time will tell, right? These chapters have yet to be written.

I’m sure we’ll do the best we can and day by day, we’ll figure it out. Right now, though, I sit with a butternut squash in my belly and a whole lot of blank pages in front of me and I try to remind myself not to jump so far ahead.

And I wonder why everything I write comes circling back to what’s happening in my uterus. It’s an all-consuming project, this baby-growing thing.

I fear I’ve become a boring conversationalist already, and we haven’t even gotten to the part yet where Boy and I spend dinner discussing the irregularities of our progeny’s poop.

-Lo, with a bad case of the baby brain.