The cold ultrasound paddle prodded painfully at my belly as I watched the changing cloud-shapes on the screen.  "Kidneys," the technician announced, and paused the image to measure them, "heart," and so on.  "Good," I'd say at each new revelation, "good."

I've always approached the ultrasound very scientifically, as a way to make sure that everything is okay with my developing baby.  I've always wanted to be one of those mothers who "feel a connection" with a child from the moment he's conceived, or who don't mind putting up with pregnancy because of the love they feel for a child unborn.  The truth has always been that I feel a little irritated and resentful toward someone who's making my clothes not fit, my feet swell, someone who's making it difficult for me to hug my husband.  It's only after my child has come tumbling into the world, after I've been taken care of ("No, I don't want to hold the baby, I just want everybody to leave me ALONE now...") that I begin to feel the very beginnings of caring for a new person.  It's an awful long time to wait, and I'm an awfully impatient person.

It may be because although I'm hauling someone's body around in my belly, I can't actually see him or her, and for me, out of sight is completely out of mind.  I feel, most of the time, like a suitcase.  Thus, to make myself feel better, I approach pregnancy scientifically, as I said, and try to make the best of it in that way.  Of course then I am interested to know that the baby's skull is precisely the right size or that a leg bone measures slightly short.  

Having had four uneventful pregnancies, and having had to learn to love each baby after his birth, I was completely unprepared for what happened a few weeks ago at my ultrasound appointment. 

After showing me the bony parts of my baby girl, the technician paused for just a moment on a screen that showed a tiny fist.  As I watched, five perfect fingers unfolded and spread, clenched, and spread again. I continued my dispassionate commentary on the length of bones, the presence of all parts necessary to a baby girl, but inside something very different had just happened.  What in the world? What was this thing I was suddenly feeling for the black-and-white blobs that have never stirred any emotion at all before?

I thanked the technician, took my roll of little pictures, and exited the building, clutching them tightly but trying to look nonchalant.  In the safety of my car, I unrolled them across my lap and looked at them again.  Tears blurred my eyes as I ran a finger over the image of a tiny white hand, wide open.  They shouldn't do this to me, I thought angrily.  There's still too much uncertainty about this person.  There are still five months to go, and anything could happen.  If something awful did happen, wouldn't I be better not having watched her yawn, not having seen the shape of her little face?  Fear, the irrational fear that keeps mothers everywhere awake at night, elbowed her way into my car and took a seat.

But then I realized, as I looked at my blurry, black-and-white baby girl, that Fear and Hope are twin sisters, unable to be separated for long, and that along with the ache of what could happen always comes the excitement over what may happen, what often has the better chance of happening.  I have, already, four beautiful children.  When I had the first I didn't know enough to fear, neither could I imagine what wonderful things I had to hope for.  Now that I am older and I hope wiser, the fear and the hope live together, more or less peacefully, in my soul.  

And now I suppose I know what those other mothers know, what it is to love someone yet unborn, because that day at the doctor's office a baby girl spread out her fingers and took hold of me completely.  Go ahead, sister.  Make my clothes not fit.  Make my feet swell.  Take anything you need from me.  It's all yours.  

And then, her willing minion, I carefully rolled up my little sheet of ultrasound photos and took them home to this little girl's father, so she could reach out and get him too.    

~MB~

Last weekend we put down the TV remotes, turned off the computers, cleaned the house and washed all the clothes, and packed up the truck with a tiny subset of our belongings.  After we went back and back and back in the house for one more thing, I began to wonder:  How much stuff do you really need to go camping?  At the same time I worried about not having enough, about really getting out in the woods and desperately needing one thing we'd left at home, about being pregnant and having to use a latrine in the dark over and over every night, about, well, I mean, about having to rough it.

Sleeping in a tent?  Eating all our meals outside?  No shower-for any of us-for a week??  How does this amount to a family vacation?  Well, I thought, with a touch of the mother-martyr, at least it will be fun for the children.

And, as you can see, they did love it.

This caused me much anxiety:

Wherever there were rocks, there were little boys climbing.  There's nothing to show you he's about 10 feet off the ground here.  Nor is his father shown, who is laughing his head off, nor am I shown, who am walking away, a nervous wreck.

Ah.  There I am.

There were hikes, there were tide pools, there were morning trips to museums, (what a bunch of smoky-smelling, dirty museum patrons we must have been), and there was always our little corner of the woods, with our picnic table, our tent, our circle of camp chairs around the fire pit.  There was no TV, no phone, no (gasp) internet access, but there was each of us, and each other, our circles overlapping more closely than they usually do.  We laughed together more easily, made decisions on what to do next more easily, paid more attention to each other, somehow, and again I began to wonder.  What was it about our everyday lives that we'd stripped away that allowed us to be together so completely like this? 

Every night Father Bird and I would sit near the dying coals of the campfire, something warm to drink in our hands. The circle of light cast by the propane lantern lit up the undersides of the leaves of the spreading sycamore tree that formed the edges of our little world, and beyond it everything was darkness.  We'd listen to the whispering and chattering of the four children in the tent, laid out in brightly-colored sleeping bags in a row.  One night the boys all lay hushed as their sister told them a story.  Another night, a sweet impromptu song about sand dunes was the last sound any of them made. After they'd settled down, we'd wash our handful of dishes and creep into the tent ourselves, to zip ourselves into sleeping bags and listen to the crickets and the pounding of the waves on the beach.

Eventually it had to end.  With a resolve to go camping more, ("Once a week," our son requested), we filled the back of the truck up with dirty, half-used camping supplies and came wearily home.  There was a general rush in the direction of the running hot water as soon as we came through the door, a frenzied putting-away and washing-up, and all of us collapsed, sunburned and satisfied, on the couches to watch TV, open laptops, and move back into everyday life.  

And I realized it hadn't been the rough experience I'd feared (It may have had something to do with the fact that there were flush toilets instead of the much less lovely pit latrines), in fact, it had been something vastly different.  This morning Father Bird left for work again, I have a regular "to do" list again, there are the usual quarrels going on over who's going to have computer time first, and I'm left pondering.  Which, really, is roughing it?

~MB~

Over the last several weeks, my immune system, bless its poor, misguided heart, has been desperately trying to reject an invader.  It just knows that it's a malicious intruder, and that my life is on the line if it doesn't kill all intruders. 

I love my immune system.  It's just trying to do its job.  How can you not love something that only lives to defend you?  It's sweet, really, romantic.  Only problem is, it's tried this same thing four times before, and failed.  For photos of the previous results, please see raising baby birds. 

Not that I mind a failure.  The four failures I've got are an awful lot of fun, and who doesn't want 25% more fun?  It's just...I and my immune system are stuck in the same body, and it's been giving me an awful lot of grief because it didn't get the "Failure This Time Is Okay" memo. 

This is where my little wintertime friend up there comes in.  My one true mug.  I have other mugs, to be sure, but this one has been pasted to my hand for the last weeks.  It's held tomato soup, chicken broth, breakfast cereal, and many, many cups of soothing peppermint tea.  (Not all at the same time, because, ugh...that doesn't even sound good to me.)

Oh, how I love the happy, chipped visage of my companionable mug.  Day after day lately has found me filling it up with one warm thing after another, trying to soothe that vigilant immune system, trying to make it until bedtime so I could sleep more of the first trimester hours away.  It holds a whole can of chicken broth, something I've been grateful for many times during the last weeks.  And it always, always smiles.  

Now, however, it seems that the clouds are clearing.  Romeo, my wonderful immune system, seems to well and truly have failed again, and is receding to his corner (or maybe he lives in a guard tower) to sulk over his defeat.  A week ago, when I began to think I might start to feel better soon, I took my sewing machine out of the house for a cleaning, mostly to keep myself from starting up new projects before I'm fully out of the woods. 

Yesterday the sewing machine shop called to say my machine is ready to come home, I've got a new stack of fabric (a trip to the fabric store alone was therapy indeed), my children are, miraculously, all still alive, and so life will be getting back to whatever normal is again very soon.  But before I move on, I'd just like to say, thanks, mug, for the nourishment, and the reminder. 

Keep right on smiling.

~MB~

These curls:

These beautiful, bouncy, soft brown curls, are on the back of the head of a boy.  That doesn't seem right, does it?  Is it fair that such beautiful hair should come to someone who, all his days, is probably going to keep it short?

Because, honestly, this guy needs a haircut:

But how, how can I?

~MB~

What if I told you you don't have to? 

This article makes me wonder what would have happened if they'd done the same experiment with other subjects, such as language arts.  My suspicion is the results would have been very similar...

~MB~