And Then She Had Another Good Cry

The feedback from my last blog entry has been phenomenal. Thank you, thank you. Your encouragement and grace has been a balm for my weary spirit. I found myself awake last night at 3:00 or so (after my fifth trip to the bathroom) writing blog entries in my head again, something which hasn't happened as often, but seems to have returned (of course I was too lazy to walk downstairs and get my laptop...but rest assured, the laptop will be within easy reach if the insomniac fairy strikes again tonight.)

The bottom line I suppose is...I'm just going to keep writing, and sorting through feelings, and trust that if someone doesn't want to read, they just won't read. Who knows where the Spirit will lead us.

[I just wrote a whole paragraph here about the fatigue factor and the seasicknessy queasies, etc, etc, and somehow accidentally erased it, or the mystery of the blogging universe somehow deemed it unaccepatable...so imagine it here...moan, whine, moan, thankfulness for it not being worse, sigh...there, it's as if it was never gone.]

This evening I took a tepid bath (pregnancy tip: the pregnancy gurus are not so keen on those scalding hot baths I really like...) with some sweet smelling bubble bath (or, it was sweet smelling until I became a little green at the thought and smell of all things soapy). I lay in the bathtub, my neck perched against a bath pillow and took a few deep breaths, and then out of nowhere began to sob. I cried and cried, biting a washcloth to keep from having the girls hear me downstairs.

My tears were nostalgic ones for I realized, in that soapy abyss some of the truths of my existence anew. I come from a long line of women bathers. My grandmother took a bath each night, often with lavender bath oil and I still remember the clean smell and the fogged steaminess of the bathroom on 38th Street after she'd come back out to watch 20/20 with me on Friday nights, trailing talcum powder with each step she took, her hair a little wet on the ends. My mother recently acquired her dream...a whirlpool bathtub where she can soak in her Apricot bath salts until her toes and fingers get pruney. When I was a little girl I would come in and sit on the toilet while my mom took her bath. And it seemed as if our conversations were somehow more sacred as our words reverberated off the tile walls and drowned out the noise of splashing water.

As I lay in the bathtub this evening, with my belly just beginning to poke out from under the bubbles, I thought about this new life I'll usher into the world. I wonder whether she'll be a bather too, or whether he'll make bubble beards on his chin. She or he is another link in the chain, another piece of the genetic puzzle, another step closer to the divine as this world continues to unfold and create itself with the Spirit's urging.

I miss my grandmother. I miss her profoundly. She would have loved this time. She would have loved the waiting and the anticipating and the baby showers and the offering of advice. She loved babies, and she loved me, her baby, with unconditional acceptance. This baby would not exist, in part, without her--not only for the obvious reason, that I would not exist without her--but because the fertility treatments I have undergone have cost money, money which R. and I did not have. Money which was ultimately an inheritance from my grandmother, but given in an act of tremendous generosity from my mother and step-father. If the baby is a girl, her name will be Ella, which is, in addition to being R.'s mother's birth name, a derivation of my grandmother, Ila's name.

At night, the light which shines in our upstairs hallway was the nightlight that shone at my grandparent's house from my earliest memories. I like to imagine her leading me through the darkness, and I recognize that somehow she still surrounds me, as soothing as the water which I soak in every night.

But it doesn't ease the sense of emptiness I sometimes feel at knowing she'll never hold my baby in her arms. And tonight I miss her fiercely.