Radio Silence

I took a little bit of time off from this place. Not from writing, mostly, but from publishing the things that I wrote. I thought about posting every single day that I didn't because I've been writing and posting here for more than three years, and to ignore it for awhile was strange for me. Foreign. Because for three years I have documented my life on these pages. For better or worse, big things and small things, these pages tell the story of my life for the past three years.

Or, rather, most of that story.

Because a big part of that story over the past year is one that I haven't told yet. I've written bits and pieces of it but I haven't published it because it's not quite time yet. I've mentioned it from time to time but I haven't told it all from start to finish because I wasn't ready. I will be though. Soon, I think. Because for better or worse, I document my life here. Partly because I like to, and partly because, after three years, I need to. Because writing here about myself has become a way for me to puzzle through a life that is good and rich and also complex. To process Really Big Things and to document things that are less big, but no less important.

The thousands and thousands of words that I have written here are deeply important to me. And I am proud of them, even, maybe especially, of the hard ones. The ones I had to reach down deep to find and yank out to put on the page.

There will be more words. Lots of them.

But the problem with having so many words written and not sharing them yet is that I found myself unable to share anything else. There has been so much happening but all the words to explain it all get lost somewhere between my brain and my hands and well, radio silence. But the thing about this blog is that it has become a time capsule of sorts. A place where I write not just things that I want to puzzle over, but things that I want to make sure not to forget. 

In about nine weeks, we're having a baby. It's still a little surreal to say those words out loud. The first twenty weeks dragged by in a haze of all-day sickness, tests and a constant, low-level anxiety that something would go wrong, could possibly go wrong, or was wrong already. Then when the tests assured us that everything was fine I graduated to angst over my slowly dwindling wardrobe and the train-wreck that was getting dressed for work every morning, my concern that I would grow out of all of my coats before the longest winter in history finally came to an end, and vigilance over the constant necessity to always be within five minutes of a bathroom. Pregnancy is not for the weak.

But lately, over the past two weeks or so, something else has happened. It's not just that the weather is finally nice enough for the coats that I can't zip or button anymore to no longer be necessary, and it's not because I finally have a maternity wardrobe that makes me feel like a human being when I get dressed in the morning. Those things certainly don't hurt, but it's more than that. Much more.

It's that for the first time since I saw two lines on a test back in October - and then a plus, a pink line, an unequivocal "pregnant" and a simple "yes" after taking one of every test on the shelf at Target - I can think about life after these months without qualifying it. I can say "we're having a baby" without silently adding in my head "unless something bad happens." I can make detailed lists of things we need - my specialty - without worrying that those lists will be somehow unnecessary.

It's not that I don't worry. When you've been where we've been and walked where we've walked I think there is always worry. It's that the worry is almost all crowded out by a sense of the wonder of it all. Not the wonder of pregnancy, exactly, because that part is just rough. But of the knowledge that we were able to do this thing that we thought we wouldn't be able to do and that in a little more than two months there will be a whole new person in the world that we created that is part of each of us. And the understanding that this whole thing is just one big leap of faith and that even though that should terrify me, somehow, at this point, it just doesn't.

And for the first time, I feel wildly grateful, instead of afraid. For the first time. I want to write about it. To document it in words so that one day I can go back and read them and remember how it was. Because this is the beginning of a brand new part of my life and of our lives.

And now, I don't want to miss any part of it.