little black journal

I haven’t made much progress on that stack of birth and parenting-related books that sits on our end table.  Partly, it’s that the arrival of the baby still feels so far away – September lies in the unfathomable future.  But beyond that, I am perhaps a little over-confident in our ability to figure out the parent thing on-the-fly.  I want to believe we’ve got it covered.  We have spent the past couple of years building up our love bank for this baby.  And children adore Shane (he’s known as the “baby whisperer” among our friends), so there’s no reason that our kid shouldn’t be head-over-heels for his or her dad.  All you need is love.  Right?  Right?

Maybe I’m being just a wee bit naive.  I was on my way to work via Lightrail a couple of weeks ago when a woman got on with her adorable 2-year old daughter.  The little girl sat in her mama’s lap and babbled sweet nothings while mom stroked her pretty brown curls.  I could so easily picture myself in their shoes, commuting downtown with our perfect babe, soaking in those last few minutes of time together before work and daycare begin.  Precious moments.  But then that little girl started to get squirmy.  And then she started to whine.  And by the time we’d rolled into SoDo (still three stops from downtown), she was shrieking bloody murder on an otherwise silent train, flailing those chubby arms and refusing to be held. Poor mom did her best to restrain her daughter with one hand while she dug around in her bag for a distraction.  She pulled out an iPad and I figured the crisis would soon be averted.  But it took several minutes before the little girl was presented with a satisfactory video and a seat of her liking, and by that time, we had rolled into University Station and it was time for the woman to put away the iPad and pack up her bag.  More wailing and tears ensued, more sympathetic glances were cast mom’s way as she grabbed her daughter and hurried off the train.  And I was left wondering how I would have handled such a meltdown.  Would I stick to Shane’s and my resolution to strictly limit “screen time” for our kid?  Or would I concede that desperate times call for desperate measures and use whatever means possible to get the child to quiet down?  Would I rock her, walk her, coo to her, attempt to reason with her?  I don’t think the “right” answer can be found in any book, and I don’t know that any amount of preparation will eliminate tantrums, but I was slapped with healthy dose of reality that morning.  I was reminded that parenting will sometimes be really, really hard.  It will be full of sky-high joys and depths of unimaginable love, but it will also be riddled with moments of frustration, confusion, and insecurity.

And it will require sacrifice.  I catch myself believing that I won’t really be too tired, that we’ll still have room for spontaneity and freedom, that my maternity leave will be like vacation, full of “bonus time” to rest, to read, to work on my art.  As we sat around a table at Spinasse for dinner last night with Jack, La Verne, Jason, and Nance to revel in what may be our last meal out together for awhile (baby Chen due in just 8 days!), I was struck with how times are changing.  Baby-sitters and feeding schedules will soon require some adjustment in the make-up of our Friday nights. We’re not resigning ourselves to a hermit-like life, but 4-hour multi-course meals might be on hold for awhile.  Shoot!

It’s absolutely a good thing to anticipate our baby’s arrival with hope and glee, but I also want to embark on this journey with the acknowledgement that it will stretch me in ways I’ve never been stretched.  Things won’t go as expected sometimes, and I’ll need to learn to roll with the punches.  I might not have the “ideal birth”, breast-feeding might bear unforeseen challenges, there might be times when I need to choose rest over having a clean house or a home-cooked meal.  I’ll need lots of help, and I’ll have to put aside my pride to ask for it.  That doesn’t mean I’ve failed.  It just means I need to loosen my tight-fisted grip on complete control and pray for flexibility, for patience, for heaping helpings of grace.  And for the ability to stop and soak in the goodness of those pre-meltdown precious moments.  Because the feeling of wrapping my arms around our child is guaranteed to exceed my wildest dreams.

Today marks 20 weeks, which means we have officially hit the half-way point – in 20 more weeks (give or take), we’ll be holding a baby in our arms, hearing its cries, looking into it’s barely open eyes, navigating the entirely new experience of being completely responsible for the sustenance and well-being of another person. Ooof. That sounds scary. And amazing.

We had our 2nd trimester ultrasound on Wednesday, where parents can find out gender if they so choose, and we’re having a healthy, bouncing…TBD! As hard as it was not to peek when the ultrasound tech told us to divert our eyes because she was in the “gender region”, we stayed true to our decision to keep baby Schnell’s sex a surprise. I know, we’ve waited and waited and waited for this kid, and now we’ve put ourselves back in the waiting game, but this time the suspense is full of excitement and fun. I have this really silly 50’s-esque image in my head of Shane passing around cigars wrapped in pink or blue foil with “It’s a Boy!” or “It’s a Girl!” printed on the wrapper while his buddies give him congratulatory pats on the back (he’s also wearing a snazzy suit and has a martini in his hand – have we been watching too much Mad Men?). While this probably isn’t how the announcement will go down (okay, knowing Shane, there may be martinis involved), the anticipation and prediction-making shared among us and our friends has been a joy.

When we weren’t “diverting our eyes” at the ultrasound, we were soaking in every other detail that showed on the screen. It’s incredible to see that what was was a miniature jelly bean 14 weeks ago is now a miniature human with fingers and toes and a mouth that opened and closed in what looked like cute little yawns. Watching this development take place is mind-boggling. Shane can’t believe that I have the ability to grow something as solid and strong as human bones inside of me; I’m overwhelmed by the complex detail of it all – functioning organs and little toes and a brain (does the baby have thoughts yet?). I’m simultaneously super proud (I’m growing that, inside of me!) and very much humbled (clearly I’m not the one making this magic happen). It’s all so wonderfully confusing and surreal. So while we don’t know yet if it’s a little boy or a little girl, we do know it’s a big, big miracle.

It was a little hard for me to hold back from sharing the early months of my pregnancy on the blog – I looked forward to the news being fully “out there” so that I could freely write about my thoughts and hopes and experiences.  And now here I sit, bump and all, wondering how in the world I’ll put my jumbled, confusing bag of feelings into words.  Bear with me.

The physical part of being pregnant has gone more smoothly than I expected – there was mild nausea, some fatigue, and a couple of vomitous incidents, but all in all, the symptoms were minor and quickly passed.  The emotional part, though?  Sheesh.  Saltine crackers weren’t going to help me there.  The first few weeks were ridden with anxiety – I tried to guard my heart through denial, to prepare myself for the bottom to drop out at any moment.  I told myself that the faint pink line on the pregnancy test was a fluke, that my HCG levels in that initial bloodwork were too low to make this a viable pregnancy, that since I wasn’t spending every morning locked in the bathroom with morning sickness, this probably wasn’t real.  We shared the news with our parents and a couple of close friends, but I always followed the announcement with, “remember that it’s still really really really early and this might not work out”.  Joy was terrifying – I was afraid my heart was too fragile to handle the blow of having to come down from a celebratory mountaintop, should things take a turn for the worse.  So I stayed down in my hole, just in case.

We scheduled an ultrasound with our doctor at week 6, as that’s the point when they can start to see development and, hopefully, a tiny little heartbeat.  I remember walking down the hall to the exam room with Shane at my side, my palms sweating and my own heart racing as I prayed a single word over and over and over.  Heartbeat.  Heartbeat.  Heartbeat.  Please, please, please, God – let there be a heartbeat.  I couldn’t help thinking of the 6-week ultrasound we’d been through 18 months earlier, where there was nothing but stillness.  Please, please, please, God – let this be different.  I held my breath as the image of my uterus flashed on the screen.  And then, there it was – our baby, looking like a grain of rice, with a fuzzy little flicker at its center.  The sonographer quickly confirmed that the flicker was indeed a heartbeat, and I grabbed Shane’s hand as tears of relief streamed from my eyes.  The first seeds of hope took root in me that day.  That hope blossomed as subsequent ultrasounds at weeks 7 and 9 and 12 showed positive development – by week 13, I had come to believe that this was actually the real thing.  I was going to be a mom.  I was free to celebrate with reckless abandon, right?  Right?  I could start digging into that pile of baby books people had lent to me, I could start thinking about converting our extra bedroom to a nursery, I could quit trying to fit into my pre-pregnancy jeans and settle into the comfort of elastic waistbands.  “Danger zone” cleared!  Happy trails ahead!  And it’s true – there certainly were moments of unbridled joy as the weight of infertility was lifted from my shoulders.  But I also found myself still wanting to stay on the fringes of baby-related conversations among my pregnant friends, and I still felt anxious when they started to talk about how fun it would be to watch our babies grow up together.  What was my problem?  I had ached for so long to be part of the expectant mothers’ club, and now that my time had come to talk diapers and daycare and maternity fashion, I was stand-offish and uncomfortable.  Some of my reticence was due to sadness for the women I know who are still in the throes of trying to conceive – it felt so unfair that some were chosen to carry a baby while others were left waiting.  I felt like I was leaving my fertility-challenged sisters behind, like it woulnd’t mean as much anymore if I said that I knew what they were going through.

And then when I really dug deep, I found that a part of me was still caught in the clutches of the sorrow I had felt over the past couple of years.  I had let the disappointment and uncertainty become an integral part of who I was, and while the presence of a baby in my womb washed much of that away, there were remnants of loneliness and worry and that were not so easily purged.  And there was regret.  So much regret over who I had become while I waited and longed and mistrusted God’s plan.   I wish I had been better at finding my joy in Him while we were still on our journey toward pregnancy.  I wish I hadn’t wallowed, hadn’t let fear take such a strong hold of me.  I wish I had been a better friend last year to the pregnant women in my life, rather than succumbing to jealousy or bitterness.

Day by day, I’m the clearing the sorrow and regret from my soul and settling into the spirit of joy and gratitude that God has intended for me all along.  The road to this place has been full of envy and tears and deep, gaping potholes, but I can’t change that.  So I’m focusing on that one very, very important wish that came true with that tiniest little flicker of a heartbeat.  I have much to be thankful for.

It’s March 22nd and Spring is in the air.  Yes, it’s still cold, gray, and rainy in Seattle, but my spirit is buoyed by the longer days, by a sense of hope, by the promise of growth and new life.  Oh, and speaking of new life…

(Seriously, how’s that for a segue?!)

Baby Schnell should be making his or her long-hoped-for appearance around September 8th.  Which means I am 15 1/2 weeks along.  Which means I’ve been waiting approximately 13 1/2 weeks to shout this news from the rooftops.  So hear me out: there’s a real, growing baby in my belly!  (S)he is the size of an orange and has a good strong heartbeat and a tiny little nose and even itty bitty fingernails!  Shane and I are going to be parents!  And damn, we feel so mind-blowingly blessed.