A dispatch from the front.

We enter week 34 (at least according to my ex-dr.’s count) and the stretch of feeling uncomfortably large. One might think I’d be counting down the weeks—nay, even, days—till I can meet this little man on the outside of my uterus, but I am not there yet. As achy as I am, I want to keep him in there for a fourth trimester because there is just too much to do. And I don’t know what I am doing at all. I go from setting up childbirth classes at the nearest hospital to researching birth centers. I pay a horrendous amount to see a collaborative midwife practice without even knowing if I am going to commit. I read The Thinking Woman’s Guide to a Better Birth by Henci Goer while also attending the hospital childbirth classes, and both make me want to run screaming from the classroom. This is how I end up crunchy with oats, covered head-to-toe in granola, seriously considering home birth while also having an out-of-body experience that consists of me staring down at myself, going, who the fuck are you and what did you do with the real me? I agonize about money, and insurance, and throw mini tantrums about not being able to have a bathtub for labor.

It is all researching and agonizing and arranging and rearranging and organizing and sleeplessness and admittedly a good deal of crying and nightly candlelit baths for stress reduction up in here. Dave has been back to work for four days, during which he has managed to come home late three times and be actually physically out of the state of California for one. I won’t lay on you how I feel about that, but you should be able to guess.

We live, always, so mouth to … haha. I meant to write “hand to mouth,” but I almost wrote “mouth to mouth.” Which in its own way could be true. We live kissingly. In constant need of each other’s resuscitation.

But pressing onward. I make myself start each day with morning pages to get out the gripes followed by at least five minutes of notations of gratitude. Despite the overwhelmingness, I make myself note the many things about which I am grateful. It is a good and necessary practice. I just want to make all of the lists, and do all of the things, and somehow arrive at peace and calm and time to reflect and turn inward before my insides turn outward in bringing this babe into the world.

This entry is all over the place, so this seems as good as any exit point.

But let me leave you with a quote from one of the many motherhood memoirs I’ve been reading:

“[Anne Lamott’s friend Larry said that] I was just an opening for Sam to come into the world, that I wasn’t supposed to be a drug for him. I was just supposed to be his mother. Sam was meant to be born into the world exactly the way it is, into these exact circumstances, even if that meant not having a dad or an ozone layer, even if it included pets who would die and acne and seventh-grade dances and AIDS. He simply wasn’t meant to be born into the paradise behind the mountains.” [Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year, by Anne Lamott, 1993]

Which I translate as: it doesn’t all have to be perfect. Or even figured out. We will never be 100% ready. But we want him, badly, and we will make it all work. The important things—like him coming out—are going to happen whether or not I feel ready, and the love is there. The love is ready.

hello goodbye hello goodbye.

The news finally “officially” announced, I can now report that Dave was offered a generous promotion at work, but it is moving us. Yes, again. This time to Los Angeles. In fact, next week.

2012 kicked off with a lot of questions hanging in the air: Should we take the transfer? What would it mean for his career if we didn’t? What would it mean for my extrahormonal, emotional, pregnant mental state if we did? When could and should and would we move? Could we find housing on the fly? Would the housing we ended up wanting end up falling through at the last minute? (We’d been trying to get the lease signed by all parties for over two weeks, and it only went through yesterday morning.) Whose blood pressure would go through the roof first—Dave’s or mine? And onward to other current concerns like finding a new doctor or midwife, hospital or birthing center, prenatal yoga for sanity, a doula and pediatrician, and so forth.

This move was a challenge for me not just because of how quickly it went from possibility to inevitability, or because it appeared on our horizon literally four days after we’d moved into a new condo in a charming town where I saw myself making a home and being happy, or because it entailed a move to a city that almost certainly will require me to get comfortable with driving a car again (TRAUMATIC!)—but also because the move stood for more than itself. It represented the hard choices we constantly have to make between the comfort of maintaining the status quo and the willing leap required to support our loved ones in their passions and dreams, balancing thriving, challenging careers and nurturing our relationships, considering all the things we each want and figuring out how to get there—with the added thought now of how our choices will affect the life of our child. And with the knowledge that all of this will continue to shift, magma-like, underfoot.

While I can’t say I’ve had the relaxed, intuitive, introspective, and transcendent pregnancy I would have wished for myself—especially it being essentially my first pregnancy and one long awaited at high emotional cost—all I could do is (1) cry and throw hissy fits, (2) sleep on it, and then (3) sigh and remember that life is what happens while you’re making other plans.

Considering how often we’ve moved cities (as well as apartments), you’d think we’d excel at it by now. And it is true that we’ve gotten incredibly efficient at finding exactly what we need from new housing, have movers programmed into our phones (ok, not really, but maybe we should!), are really quick with the packing and unpacking, and can make an empty shell of a place into a home in under a week flat.

But what never gets easier is saying goodbye.

It began yesterday with my OBGYN. There we were, two months away from delivery, and we’re telling her that this day is our last visit. Three weeks ago, when everything was still up in the air, we tentatively brought up the move as a pending possibility—and she tried to convince us out of it. Opined that we should move after the baby arrived because it would be easier on me, because I’d have my body back to myself. I wasn’t convinced, though, that looking for housing and homemaking would be easier with a newborn. So we went ahead with the plan to move before the babe is born, but yesterday still felt awful. I felt like I was breaking up with my doctor, offering the old “it’s not you, it’s me” line. I hugged her and got teary-eyed more than once. Although down the line, when we’re ready to have another child, I think I would opt for a midwife so as to have a more informed pregnancy and one made healthy through advised food/exercise/lifestyle choices over handfuls of prescriptions, I wouldn’t undo the overcautious choices I made for this baby. Even though at times our doctor could be a little scatterbrained and often ran late for appointments, her heart was in her profession, and she truly cared about us and made us feel comfortable. Moreover, we will never forget that she is the woman who took us from wanting desperately to be pregnant through to a healthy third trimester. She never once pooh-poohed our overcaution and truly took every possible measure to prevent another loss.

Last night continued with phone calls to my uncle and aunt, who live nearby in Sacramento. Another hard slog of trying to explain why the move is a good idea, knowing still that it would make them sad for us to move away again—especially with the next generation on its way.

This weekend, we have back-to-back goodbye brunches with friends we’d just begun entwining our lives with, old friends turned new again in that most of us are coming to share new parenthood. We’d watched some go before us, celebrated joining their ranks, and welcomed others into the thrills of early pregnancy, and together we dreamed of the lives we’d make for this next generation. And now we’re leaving that sweet nest, and we have to begin all over again.

So, no. It doesn’t get easier to say the goodbyes nor to make the promises to each other and ourselves to keep in touch while knowing still that relationships change when you cannot plan to see each other regularly, when you miss all the little things that make up a life and even the big things you only know because you read them on Facebook.

I’m not saying I have any of the above figured out, but what I am trying to promise myself is that this time I will get better at the hellos.

Oh, I’ll still mourn what we left behind, but this time I’ll get better and faster at the reaching out and the rerooting—even knowing how temporary these entanglements may end up being. I will make myself take chances and reach out to people I once knew along with those I once only kind of knew. I will be my most engaging, charming, openestest self and come to know those I never had the chance to know till now. In other words, I will try my damndest to not grip the reins so tight—to let go and let life surprise me.