I can write again.
As of this week, I am 12 weeks pregnant. Noting that, I feel like it's safe enough to express my thoughts again.
I have several pictures of my mother, various stages of her ongoing life, and the ones I keep looking at are when she was pregnant with me. I have another of her much younger, 16, 17 years of age. Her face looks like Erica's at that age, the grace of budding youth in her limbs, her features almost unrecognizable to me; my mother was not yet my mother then.
The polaroids are my favorites, her belly big, her face having grown in to the handsomeness both my fathers have described; I recognize the woman I know and love now, the face in those snapshots are the features of my mother. I don't know what the change was, hormones, life, a few years of age and maturity, or simply the change, the aknowledgement of impending motherhood.
I look at these pictures, and then I look at my pictures. When I was 16, 17, 19, 21... I know it wasn't that long ago, but there are distances in those numbers, between them and through them, that aren't mapped in line or foot or mile, but counted in laughter, traveled in loves and smiles and tender moments, in heartbreaks that were almost audible, poisoned dreams and jagged, ragged loss of self.
I look at pictures of me at 22 (the age my mother had me) and 25 (when she had Erica). I remember passing those markers and wondering wistfully when I'd be ready for my turn. Not for years, I figured.
At 25 I knew the world was turning for me again; things would change, and they did.
I keep looking at my face in the mirror, now. I wonder how it's going to change, how it's already changing, yielding to the hormones of pregnancy with as much grace as skin can allow, trying to let my vanity go as my body does what it was made to do. I see the laugh lines, the scars and the blotches. Will they get worse, or go away? What will become of the plains and mountains and sacred places of my body, after the plates shift and the transformation ends? What will I be then?
And cradling me through all of these questions, the wonder and the insanity that seems to go hand in hand with carrying a child, is him. My Shawn, solid granite and shading tree, yielding limbs and a heart that brims and spills for me and only me. I can't get enough of his gentle hands, as wondering as mine, as my belly is already swelling as it becomes the home of our child. I can't stop looking at his smiling, loving, teasing eyes, his worried words about our future, and the determind frown of concentration that settles on his face when I express my own fears about money, our home, our family.
"Don't worry," he tells me. "I'll take care of you, and us."
A perfect life has never been something I thought to wish for; 'perfect' sounds like 'boring' to me. Paradise and Heaven are imperfect, uneven things: sunshine on a cold day, sleeping in the grass while a beautiful day wanes on unseen, a star scattered sky blanketing a sensual moment; the melancholy on Christmas morning, knowing that the anxious waiting has come to an end, and it'll be another year before we count the days, the hours, the moments.
My life is completely far from perfect, but it is a minor form of Heaven. I am loved and loving, I am full and making room, I am messy but endlessly inspired. I am cradled and cradling. I am worried and worried over. All of these things make me both sigh with frustration and smile in joy. And gratitude.
Yes, that's right. I'm saying thank you.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Oh, thank you. Current Music: Israel Kamakawiwo'ole - Somewhere Over The Rainbow 
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
chainoblivion's Friends Page
creative
giggly