1. Loving Thy Self. For someone who used to have as a serious life goal to have a bikini model's body and to document this physical state with copious photos before I had kids, it's been a real shift of priorities. That's the best I can ask for from my body? To look pretty? I mean, REALLY? I want to slap my 20-something-year-old self. Now I look at myself in the mirror and I cradle my belly. I ask it to perfect science experiments that I myself would no doubt fail if it were me standing in a lab coat with test tubes bubbling over the Bunsen Burner. I ask it, nicely, to please make a baby and then to hold onto him or her very carefully.
2. Knowing Thy Self. I feel so much more connected to my body. I notice and remember symptoms and how they are interconnected, and I never would have before.
3. Always, Gratitude. I hear a man in the parking lot yelling at his little girl, watch him tug her arm violently in effort to get her to listen, follow, behave. I want to remind this man to be grateful. But I also know how naive this sounds--naive and bitter at the same time--because it's not like I think it could never be me, someday, at wit's end in a parking lot, trying to make the right decisions but also so frustrated that I could cry. But what I hope I never lose underlying the rest: always, gratitude. The linear sense of what it took to get to that parking lot. Of how much I want to begin a family, and love a child, and take on those challenges.
4. The Ever-Radness of People, Intimates and Strangers. When you are willing to put your business on the Internet, people are willing to open up to you, too. Any lingering shame I might once have felt about "airing my laundry" or whatever is utterly dissipated in the face of the support I've received and the honesty I've been privy to.
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