He asked me a while back why I had stopped writing and I gave him the easy answer: my body is creating a little person instead of words strung into sentences and the birthing side of me is all used up right now.  It was an easy answer but it was also true.

There's a bigger reason, though, one that has flitted into my mind in pieces, incomplete and fragmented and foreign, not quite English if that makes sense.  I've tried to put it all together into one, tidy thought; I've tried to find someone else's words that work in place of mine but the words aren't ringing.

I've wondered if it is possible to wash your baby, to drown it even, in your own feelings and if it was, would my baby be midnight blue?  The darkest gray?  Is it touched at all by the grieving, the sadness, the fear that comes in waves in the middle of the night and the late morning and even in the cleaning aisle at the local supermarket.  The feelings that aren't allowed right now because right now I should feel only fiercely grateful, overjoyed, ecstatically anxious.  And I do.  Most of the time.  This baby is a gift I wasn't sure we would receive.  And that's why the lows are so startling when they come but of course I had to know they would come.

Because in spite of the long waiting, the yearning, the emptying, my temperament remains and just as marrying did not erase the valleys neither does having something small born inside me.  Before we married, I wrote endlessly about the dying breathing in the same moment the living does and I have found myself back in this space again.  Something new and big is about to occur: we are all about to shift, bringing with it the end to smaller but still good things.  Maybe this journey is lengthy because He knew I'd need time to say goodbye to all of those small gifts before the bigger gift arrives: the late and lazy mornings in bed, the crisp whiteness of the walls, the impractical spending, the long rides and the spontaneous timing of whatever struck our fancy.  The freedom to say goodbye to the schedule on the weekends and to stay out late.  The luxury of rest and an able body.

You see why it has been so silent.  It isn't right or fair or decent even to be anything but grateful.  I hear my friends' familiar barren moments and I want to shake myself.  You were given this and they weren't, you're awful to feel this way, you're selfish and spoiled.

But still, my prayers are for its Spirit to come out singing, yellow and stunning and full of only the bright colors.