The half way point

Yesterday I got the breathtakingly great news that I am carrying two healthy babies. And whats more, a boy and a girl. My family will be perfectly balanced in terms of biological gender, how they choose to identify later will be up to each of them. I chose not to do any of the preliminary testing that comes around 12 weeks and hold out of this 19.5 week ultrasound. I was overcome with emotion, as the ultra sound technician moved the wand across my belly, sliding that blue sticky gel back and forth, working hard to identify each body part belonging to each twin.

Double double it goes. And while cognitively I know I am not alone in my journey, not only have others succeeded but I will have the help of our beloved nanny and family and friends, ultimately I still feel the individual burden of what is to come. It wasn’t until just now that I allowed myself to imagine what life will be like come late fall. What the fourth trimester, those blacked out twelve weeks post partum, will deliver for me. Rationally, I can see that it will be manageable, we will make it through and we will care for our children and ourselves. But for whom is the fourth trimester truly rational? I’d love to know. For I recall a chest that felt cracked open from the inside, a heart breaking open to become larger to hold the deep love I was feeling for my children and my partner. I recall highs that brought me to blissful tears and the lows that took me to the floor of my bathtub, unable to differentiate between the water streaming from my eyes or the faucet head. I found the middle ground eventually. I found that rational place, without the extremes of emotion. I found myself again, new and different, but me.

Is that just part of it? How much preparing can we truly do. Other than maintaining a space, and setting up beds and chairs and sleeping arrangements. Formula, bottles, food, how much can we truly do to prepare? How can we ever anticipate what is to come, even if we look to others who have experienced it before us, and try to garner knowledge from their experience?

How, as a rewarded overachiever, do I choose to not do it all? Choose to sit on a perfectly good day, in complete and utter stillness, rather than do something productive. When the instinct to hibernate, to go further inward calls, how in which I invested so much to be seen, do I comfortably allow myself to fall backward, in trust. For what I thought was a lean, is quickly turning into a slow and gentle tip backward through space, all while knowing what I have been building will support my case. Is this the surrender that so many speak of? How I despise that word. I have always seen it as a giving over of ones power. A giving over of ones ownership of self.

How to reconcile the body’s drive to do less with the mental delivery of an acutely drawn picture of what is to be?

There is much to heal now. There is much to see inside now. For pregnancy is a tool for me too. Small beings inside of me, physically forcing space within. Forcing change within. Going internally to meet it, to greet it and to welcome its possibilities. I am actively attempting to adjust my posture, and my habitual crunching of my right side. Can I once and for all use the hormones and the adjustments to resolve my back pain? Is this the opening I have been waiting for, to let go of the traumas of so many moons ago to make space for the lives that are entering?

Is that the preparation that we are longing for? Is that the preparation that is required? Simply the making of a space, and not to forget that that space is within us as well. Not to be swept up in the productivity that is the outside world and forget the value of the space made within each of us. The harder work that cannot be purchased or persuaded, but must be waded through.

This is the place of the seeds that are set to bloom. Through moonshine and sunshine and water through. We have no timeline to see this new. We are meant to be here within us a kin to you. We have no timeline to see this new.

A note about the image:

This photo was posted on instagram the day before my ultrasound and I was struck by how connected I felt to the image. It feels only appropriate to tie it to this post. For amazing daily astro readings, follow @thehareinthemoon she did an inperson reading for me back at a pivotal point for me this past fall, posted this image and is incredibly intuative.