Lucky Chaya will be so steeped in lore of her creation. Due to the accuracy of ART (trigger some stuff and make do like bunnies, baby), I can tell you with some fair degree of accuracy the day of her Conception. And I plan to celebrate it. I've earned that damnit.
And today? Today was her due date. Something I remember because (1) it's also the birthday of an old friend of mine so the coincidence tickled me, and (2) I unwittingly went into labor on the evening of my due date
And this story will be told forever more by Chaya's parents. After an OB visit earlier in the day confirmed absolutely *no* dilation, I figured I was in for a long overdue baby. I felt ok about that. And when I suddenly started having massive cramps and couldn't stand up for seconds at a time, I figured it was either something I ate or the nefarious "false labor" that had gotten nearly all of my friends to make a pointless L&D visit only to be sent home.
So I sat through a Chinese Buffet pretending to make conversation, while occasionally blacking out just ever so. Then I lay in bed all night barely able to focus but definitely not asleep... TO BE CONTINUED... But let's just say we were about an hour off from having a construction worker on Alabama help in the delivery process!
Whew. But that's all ahead of us.
 |
| Exactly 4 years ago. |
On Due Date/Birthday Eve there was a hanging moment of chasm. The most drastic transition of our relationship and up there in our lives was just about to hit and we knew it. The dying of a certain connection between us and our loved ones and the birth and different ones. The loss of selves and the birth of different selves. A time of mourning as much as anticipation. Appropriately, we fit somewhere like that again now.
What it does mean is that we've decidedly entered the magical holiday period that is BIRTHDAY WEEK, which encompasses both my birthday and Chaya's. As well as a whole lot of family stuff.
And an extra twist this year that isn't 100% ripe but ripe enough that I can again obliquely allude to "Oh crap, everything and I mean everything will be different in a month."
But before that...
It's a first. Andrew has actually made it to 22 Parker Island after only ten years of courting the second Parker heiress. It's been a long haul and a few missed steps and/or forgotten passports, but he hung in there.
(Parker is my dad's beach house in the Gulf Islands).
As had Chaya after only 4 years.
And me. I finally made it back.
It's been ... a while. I'm not 100% sure if there happened to be an intervening visit, but the last time I remember visiting was in 2005 shortly after a move, a wander around Europe, and a birthday give or take.
Dang,I used to be cute. Let's say it was the pretty glasses and not the sheer invigorated youth that's since been sapped from my body! Naw, I'm cute still. It's just a little less glaring next to the Cutest of All Creatures, Miss Moony Monster, herself.
I did try to take Andrew there once a ways back. Almost having reached the border, I realized that my passport had expired. My dad basically dumped us the fast as he could and rushed off to catch the ferry. Since then, timing just hasn't worked out. And then there was a baby. But time passed, my passport has been all in order and even has my current legal name on it. Chaya's become old enough not to be a holy terror when it comes to sharing a room and missing naps. And ... we did it! Family trip!!
This time out, it was all the Falconer family plus Uber Aunties Angele and Maggie joining us (W)rights and Patriarch Ian. Oh man the family resemblances were just intoxicating. Everyone looking like uncanny bizarro versions of each other. You never seen so many shades of blue eyes this side of Sweden.
Needless to say I still remember every single one of my nephews as a friggin' baby. Every time I see them, I kind of jump backwards, gasp and wonder what voodoo is this. They're huge now. And smart and funny and quirky AF. It's heartening. The living embodiment of the bittersweet deliciousness of passing time.
It was a grand adventure all around.
Two boats!
And... Chaya got to go on her first golf cart careen around the island with her cousins. I had to come and hold her. Proud to say I did not actually throw up or barrel roll out of the cart as it careened down the steep rugged pathways that pretend to be roads..My job was largely to laugh vaguely and hold on tight to Chaya as Ian explained they had to drive gently because the suspension was barely attached right now. Chaya also had her first golf cart catastrophe involving lots of pushing and a ton of walking before finally making it home. She got to stick a foot in the hot tube while shrieking gleefully at her nonplussed cousins.
There's a strange vibe about Parker. Something daunting and heavily loaded. A place that I came to at punctuating times of my life. And a place with concentrated rushes of presence and absences, both thoroughly soaked through each visit.
It now has wifi and a bustling quality once alien to it. But always, it is haunted by a certain remote quietness. It allows a depth of emptiness that comes out the other side to fullness. And it gives you remote little spaces to think about the transitions rising and falling over your life like the tide.
The house always feels a little haunted and leaves my brain in that particularly sensitive spot of eerie awareness.Appropriate for yet another moment that hovers on the unknown with its anticipation and its mourning all wrapped into one.
As alluded to overly much, things are about to change... what else is new. But it feels new every time. Of course birthdays always highlight that. But the recent news/plan that comes into reality soon glares a spotlight at it.
All the feels arise. Even disgust when I look at all the work our current house will need in order to be marketable.
And oh the upswelling of gratitude and sorrow when I think of Chaya no longer attending her preschool.
And I think of the feelings that flit by as I sit back and watch them without trying to grab for a single one. How slippery they are. How terrifying that is, but perhaps how comforting as well to watch them manifest and dissolve in the sea air before they've even fully been understood or felt. And how much context matters.
When I was very young, I punctuated a relentless "smiling" depression by hurling my heart at a kind soul (happy birthday to him) who was wise enough to withdraw from the hazard area in the most painfully gentle way. I could call it a trigger for a more surly depression or maybe a catharsis for a journey I'd long forestalled. Regardless, things fell apart for a while in that way they do for shiftless young people with wonky brain chemistry
I remember being so tired. And so numb. And holding on with my last strength to the pain of heartache.I was still somewhat able to laugh. To see beauty in the world around me. Sometimes even to function or give the illusion of doing so. But at a certain point those other feelings burned as they blossomed and rapidly faded. The damned pain was the only thing that felt meaningful or enduring.
The hardest thing to imagine and accept was that I would get over this too. That someday I'd look back and feel nothing or some mild pleasant farce of a feeling. That I'd continue along on a cycle of joyful and bereft. Love and loss. Etc. Shrugging my shoulders.Pretending the meaninglessness of the past wouldn't impart meaninglessness into the present and future. I clasped onto that enduring hurt as if my well entrenched misery could reach such strengths as to stop time itself
**Spoiler alert**
It didn't.
Time did pass.
Life changed. Repeatedly. I remember the passion but it feels entirely detached from the kind friend who looked out for me at a distance a handful of years afterwards and for whom I have mostly a gentle smile and a small chuckle. That passing of feeling I so feared happened almost exactly how I expected, albeit the fondness and compassion for the self of the moment had not fit into the equation.
I met far stranger and more marvelous people. Forged connections I'd never have imagined. And severed some others I'd thought would last forever. I've experienced a wide array of losses (friends, lovers, possibilities, and dreams) far deeper than anything that had come before. And I live far more aware that the flesh of my flesh, the heart of my hearts could be swallowed into the maws of mortality at some minor twist of chance.
I don't feel that way I felt at 20 anymore, though I deeply understand that sadness that permeated the fear. I haven't been depressed like that since then, although my anxiety has increased in proportion to the ebbing of the depression. Perhaps my sign of becoming more and more engaged and attached to the life that flits by with such vertiginous variety. I still wonder if it might come back though whenever those moments of sadness of despondency occasionally wiggle into view.
Maybe the difference has been all in how to imbibe it all
When I was very young, I punctuated a relentless "smiling" depression by hurling my heart at a kind soul (happy birthday to him) who was wise enough to withdraw from the hazard area in the most painfully gentle way. I could call it a trigger for a more surly depression or maybe a catharsis for a journey I'd long forestalled. Regardless, things fell apart for a while in that way they do for shiftless young people with wonky brain chemistry
I remember being so tired. And so numb. And holding on with my last strength to the pain of heartache.I was still somewhat able to laugh. To see beauty in the world around me. Sometimes even to function or give the illusion of doing so. But at a certain point those other feelings burned as they blossomed and rapidly faded. The damned pain was the only thing that felt meaningful or enduring.
The hardest thing to imagine and accept was that I would get over this too. That someday I'd look back and feel nothing or some mild pleasant farce of a feeling. That I'd continue along on a cycle of joyful and bereft. Love and loss. Etc. Shrugging my shoulders.Pretending the meaninglessness of the past wouldn't impart meaninglessness into the present and future. I clasped onto that enduring hurt as if my well entrenched misery could reach such strengths as to stop time itself
**Spoiler alert**
It didn't.
Time did pass.
Life changed. Repeatedly. I remember the passion but it feels entirely detached from the kind friend who looked out for me at a distance a handful of years afterwards and for whom I have mostly a gentle smile and a small chuckle. That passing of feeling I so feared happened almost exactly how I expected, albeit the fondness and compassion for the self of the moment had not fit into the equation.
I met far stranger and more marvelous people. Forged connections I'd never have imagined. And severed some others I'd thought would last forever. I've experienced a wide array of losses (friends, lovers, possibilities, and dreams) far deeper than anything that had come before. And I live far more aware that the flesh of my flesh, the heart of my hearts could be swallowed into the maws of mortality at some minor twist of chance.
I don't feel that way I felt at 20 anymore, though I deeply understand that sadness that permeated the fear. I haven't been depressed like that since then, although my anxiety has increased in proportion to the ebbing of the depression. Perhaps my sign of becoming more and more engaged and attached to the life that flits by with such vertiginous variety. I still wonder if it might come back though whenever those moments of sadness of despondency occasionally wiggle into view.
Maybe the difference has been all in how to imbibe it all
When you're young, you pound pure raw feeling wholeheartedly and with abandon. That purity of emotion is exquisite. Like a high proof whiskey, sadness hits the system hard and fast and does not let go. You go too hard or too fast and it turns you inside out and leaves you with epic hangovers when the feelings have been had.
In adulthood, there are times of that deep melancholy, but they are rarer deviations of a more steady state. You learn not to gulp, but to sip. To take that same enduring sadness/joy/fear and imbibe over the span of years. At this rate, it hits poignantly and unshakably. Unfolding every nuance and flavor in which it's been brewed. It flavors everything else you touch with the gentlest hint of its woody wistfulness. It makes you cry when you're happy. And feel in every hug one small ounce of loss in the final squeeze.
Maybe it's not that things mellow out in adulthood as much as they all blend and mix together in countervailing ways. There's heartrending sadness in joy and ecstatic joy in sadness. And rarely are they felt in pure extraction anymore
And on this pre-birthday moment, I can only raise a sparing glass between mouthfuls of cake and cupcake to say "life continues and the breadth is staggering, but manageable in these endless sips of it all" And to me as I inch into 37 and all its hints of middle age, I sit between a point of youth and wisdom, partaking exactly much of either. But I see both with a heady clarity. Let's get this aging thing on I suppose.
And then the celebrating.
And then let's burn the house down because no way is this place ever gonna be up to market.
Happy... Due Date Day
In adulthood, there are times of that deep melancholy, but they are rarer deviations of a more steady state. You learn not to gulp, but to sip. To take that same enduring sadness/joy/fear and imbibe over the span of years. At this rate, it hits poignantly and unshakably. Unfolding every nuance and flavor in which it's been brewed. It flavors everything else you touch with the gentlest hint of its woody wistfulness. It makes you cry when you're happy. And feel in every hug one small ounce of loss in the final squeeze.
Maybe it's not that things mellow out in adulthood as much as they all blend and mix together in countervailing ways. There's heartrending sadness in joy and ecstatic joy in sadness. And rarely are they felt in pure extraction anymore
And on this pre-birthday moment, I can only raise a sparing glass between mouthfuls of cake and cupcake to say "life continues and the breadth is staggering, but manageable in these endless sips of it all" And to me as I inch into 37 and all its hints of middle age, I sit between a point of youth and wisdom, partaking exactly much of either. But I see both with a heady clarity. Let's get this aging thing on I suppose.
And then the celebrating.
And then let's burn the house down because no way is this place ever gonna be up to market.
Happy... Due Date Day
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