The glow is real

And so is the panic.

If you’ve asked me how I’m feeling lately, most likely I’ve responded with something along the lines of “Amazing.” And it’s true. I am. Feeling amazing, and amazed at how good this season of life feels. I am at week nineteen of my pregnancy and I feel lit, powerful, and filled with wonder and a sense of limitless optimism and possibility. It’s like the best drug I could ever imagine, and it kind of just keeps going.

I remember my mom talking about how much she loved being pregnant with the four of us. In my first trimester I was utterly baffled at how anyone could ever love this experience. Now I am fully on board, and fully in love.

After learning at week fifteen that our baby can now hear (!!), Andrew and I have been singing to baby every day. He’s started having night-time chats with the little one, who I am beginning to actually feel wriggling around in my womb. My body is expanding and ripening, and for the first time in my life, the sensation of having my pants no longer fit me is accompanied by awe and delight, as opposed to shame and horror.

My mojo for music has returned. My voice, after two months of rest, feels powerful and filled with a new confidence that is all at once surprising and familiar. As though I’m hearing echoes of a time when I believed in myself completely. I’ve jumped back into recording with a fresh fervor: the last remaining songs on the album, including a few that I was considering cutting altogether because of how tired and worn they were beginning to feel, are revitalized and new, somehow.

On top of all that, mother nature is blessing us with the most insanely gorgeous early autumn I think I’ve ever experienced. The days are cooling down, but the sun is still here in full force, the leaves beginning to tint gold and red, with breezy delicious nights that have us sleeping windows open under our down comforter. Andrew and I had been talking about wanting to visit Acadia National Park, and then he was invited to attend a conference that included an all-expenses paid trip to Bar Harbor, allowing us to spend three glorious days in the park, hiking in the coastal breeze and happily playing tourist with the rest of the late-season crowd.

I feel like the solar battery of me is soaking up so much goodness, so much abundance and beauty and I don’t want to miss any of it. I know there are months—years!— ahead whose trials I cannot fathom, and I am so grateful to nature and my body and the universe for gifting me this honeymoon of delight before shit gets real.

This chapter isn’t without challenge, however. In my excitement to embrace the portal of labor and birth, and to welcome my baby into the world, I am also being drawn into the vortex of birth preparation in the age of information. This means reading books, listening to podcasts, meeting regularly with my midwife and asking lots of questions, signing up for a birth class and making a registry for a baby shower.

Initially, I had said, “I don’t want to inundate myself with information. I don’t want to approach this from a cerebral place. I want to stay connected to my body’s wisdom at every step.” Aaaand while I do still feel the beauty of that intention, I find myself googling every week: “What is happening at week x of pregnancy?” and hungrily devouring the write-up of each new development of my baby’s organs and senses, as well as the size they are. (For those of you who are also curious, this week baby is the size of a Magic 8-Ball.)

I have also gotten sucked (although I’ll admit, willingly) into the rabbithole of researching baby gear. Strollers, car seats, high chairs, bassinets, mini-bath tubs (did you know those were a thing?) and a whole lot more. I remember hearing women at my work talk about how many hours they spent researching car seats for their first child, and silently scoffing, “I’ll never do that! I’m gonna be super chill about the whole process.”

Yet lo and behold, yesterday I found myself deep in stroller comparison reviews, beginning to spin out with anxiety around which one to pick. Up until a few days ago, I had been unconsciously immersed in the process, telling myself, “Well, if I’m gonna have this shower, I may as well ask for gear that I actually want and research is a necessary step of the process.”

A few days ago I had a walk in the woods with a friend who has the kind of quiet and vast listening presence that just draws truth and insight out of me that I didn’t realize was in there, without her even asking a single question. I was fresh off a day on my computer, in full frenzied research mode, and as I told her about it, I found myself saying, “It’s almost like, I know I’m approaching this massive ocean of unknown and there’s so much that’s out of my control, and there’s a part of me that hopes that if I can just get the right stuff that will save me from this terrifying uncertainty. And like, as I’m texting my sister-in-law and friends who’ve had babies and asking them which breast feeding pillow they used, what I’m really asking is, ‘Am I gonna be okay?’”

Boom. There it was, and there it is. In the same way as I always get butterflies before a psychedelic journey, there is a deep quivering in me, the part of me that knows it is about to be obliterated, totally transformed, rendered completely unrecognizable, and that is utterly terrifying. How do I prepare myself to let go of everything? How do I fully surrender to the end of my life as I’ve known it? And how I do let go of the unhelpful delusion that having the right high chair will be my salvation?

Last night, Andrew and I kept talking for hours as the moon rose in the sky, long after we’d turned the light off. Sometimes this happens to us, and one of us will whisper to the other, “This is a really fun sleepover.” He asked me, but he was really asking God, “How is this all gonna go? How is it gonna be between us? How do we really make the most of the end of our time together?” Because as much as I know we’re welcoming in a great beginning, the rest of our life, there is an end, too.

I love talking to Andrew more than anything in the world. I love having his undivided attention and presence all to myself, to feel completely surrounded and immersed in his love in the nest we’ve made and both fiercely cherish. Our baby coming in is the beautiful, necessary, natural next step. Our love has made life. And that life is about to transform and expand and magnify our love, beyond the bounds of our imagination. But nights like last night will be a thing of the past. Days like today, where I hear him quietly muttering to himself as he edits his latest piece, and I sleep in, do yoga, drink a smoothie, take a walk and on my own luxuriously slow time, eventually find my way to my computer and microphone to write and record, are going away. The desk where I have been creating for the past two years is going into the garage, to make room for a crib.

I’ve got tears running down my face as I write this, this early elegy to the life I’m saying goodbye to. The sadness and fear is all mixed in with the wonder and awe and love that is my baseline of being right now. This threshold is nothing short of sacred, and I’m so glad to feel alive and supported enough to really experience it in its entirety.

I will go back to researching strollers, eventually. I’m giving my self a few days off from the process to ground into what’s real (i.e. everything I just wrote) and quite honestly, calm the fuck down. Today on my walk with Rose, I did have a nice little download, something along the lines of, “The right one will just show up. You don’t need to work so hard.”

This (“stop trying, let go”) is obviously a theme for me, a lesson I’m needing to learn and forget and remember and learn over and over again. And I have a feeling that many more lessons of this sort and beyond are in store for me. I can feel it flipping over in my stomach, and this time, it’s not just butterflies.