March 2023
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Opening up a new journal is such a sacred act for me. Especially this one. I chose it thinking of baby coming soon. It is bright, light green and fresh.
It feels a shame to write of this old, recurring pain as the first thing. But maybe it is right. Maybe it is best to let this be a space once again to dump and digest. Free to ramble and for my words to not mean much. Regardless of my reason for writing, the act of being here and seeing my words flow onto the page in a font so uniquely mine, makes me feel myself. It is a connection with myself. I stand alone and clear. I see myself detached from everything and everyone. Just me.
And that is rare. I warp myself in the folds of others. Particularly one other. Sadly, foolishly, I do.
I guess now it will be two others soon. Or will it just shift? Will this baby take center stage? Likely.
So yes. I guess this book isn’t here to provide me with great space to be creative and fill up my blog. I don’t have much for that these days. This book is here to let me find a portion of myself even while absorbed in another beyond my imagining.
Baby is coming out soon. It feels like he no longer fits in me. His all lumpy, making me all lumpy. These recent days I have wished to not be in this week with baby crowding me and life and work demanding of me. If I am going to be 38 weeks pregnant, I would like to just get to do that. But that hasn’t been my lot so it has been a hard week. Not as hard as last, 37 weeks and sick, but still I have been restless and frustrated.
And now I can’t sleep. Yesterday or today. I am silly tired. But my skin is crawling. And there hasn’t been much peace.
I could tell you of my plight. The injustice and also neediness I am experiencing. But why? Why spend the energy? Why steal the focus? I just want to be here. With myself, with baby. To just be really pregnant. And all the weird, inexplicable things it means. Like how I am having a day where if I realize I am so very pregnant and drop into my body, I just want to cry. I feel so overwhelmed, not my brain but me. My arms and bones and being. Exactly like I have spent nine or so months growing a being within my being, giving of myself constantly, losing sense of me in favor of us or worse – him. And now it is so late and this baby, he could come now, he is big and lumpy and ready and my weary body is breaking to part with him after giving so much, to then have to give so much more in such new and depleting ways. And there is no one to share it with. I alone have done this. I alone must do this, experience this giving of self and loss. I alone.
I will birth this baby for the world to see and hold. I will become a mother. A mom. And I alone will be in that. He will grow, grow apart from me. The world will lay claim to him and him to it. I will be forever changed, forever altered, the deepest bits of me I couldn’t even dare reach myself, reformed into his origin, his creator. And I will be left with that.
I take odd solace in this. He has everything and nothing to do with my new identity. I will be a mom. A role about another. A role this is my own to hold and sit with. Where ever I go, there I will be, me, a mom, his mom. But he won’t know that, can’t carry that. It is mine. So, oddly, I get to hold it precious and close, my unique identity.
I have already given away all of myself but it is just me who knows that and experiences that. It is still just me.
-El An Gilman-