The Lizard Brain Prevails at Night

I have been in this place previously; on the precipice of a life event that is going to permanently alter everything that I know. I will awake after labor and the world will have adopted an unfamiliar hue. I will mourn my life when it was just four of us, when Asher was the youngest of the crew and we had extra minutes simply to be silly together, when Aria was the oldest sister to just one sibling and they were coming to be the closest of playmates and buddies.

And then I will meet you and over long weeks we will sleep close to one another, you will monopolize my body in ways I find uncomfortable, and I will physiologically respond to your cries despite my exhaustion and bruised body. Your smiles will be slow to come and your recognition of me seemingly slower. I will love you innately and instinctually but not, at first, with the vehemence that will come in later years, through shared experience and commitment and interaction.

I choose to do this yet again because I know that the love that comes will overshadow all other loves in my life. If I think about it too much, though, the fear of the next few weeks overshadows the joy. I think about the inevitable hormone dive, the exhaustion, and the physicality of breastfeeding you into the late hours of the night. I think too intensely about the labor and whether you and I will both make it through safely. I recall the all-consuming, body-encompassing, mind-numbing pain of the contractions and I grow nervous about how much I will feel before the blessed numbness of the epidural. I worry about the after effects on my body; the sense that the two halves of my pelvis are no longer working together and the stitches and the bleeding and the inability to reside within my own body comfortably.

Motherhood is, if nothing else, the usurping of the physical self entirely by biology and instinct. It is foreign and uncomfortable and an exercise in endurance.

And then the day will come when I will wake up and will have slept through the night and you will have weaned and will be tiptoeing further and further away from me; the autonomy that disappeared overnight will return a centimeter at a time. My body will be mine again and life, though different, is one I will gladly claim. All the control I relinquished and all the chaos I endured will dissipate without so much as a formal announcement. Normal will return and in the absence of the dull-eyed madness of the first months, there is an abundance of love and affection and small faces to bathe and kiss and pancakes to cook and exciting adventures to pursue. For a few brief moments, I will hold the power to fix a scraped knee with a kiss and my body will encompass a pervasive sense of home for three wee humans.

My dearest friends, I approach this next adventure with an abundance of fear. I wake in the dead of the night unable to conquer ideas of the worst-case scenario. I worry, perpetually, if I will love her the way I love the other two. I allow my mind to wander to the very real experiences of other women whose bleeding couldn’t be controlled on the table or whose hearts accrued too much damage to work normally afterward. I worry about depression and my relationship with my husband and my ability to hold it together with two other precious humans when sleep is elusive.

And I must remind myself, again and again, that the experiment of living is nothing, if not an enormous exercise in acceptance, in letting go of the perception of control. I must remember that our lives inevitably meander, despite our deepest intention for everything to stay precisely the same. And, in small moments of grace, I remember that it is only from the most grueling and difficult periods of my life that I have been reinvented and reinvigorated and rededicated to feeling my brief time here to the very depths of my marrow. It is the moments where I am ill at ease and uncomfortable that I find, suddenly, I have meandered down a new path that is no less beautiful than the ones I have wandered before and, certainly, no less essential or meaningful.

And so I shall in the weeks before the upheaval, embrace this very temporary now with whatever fleeting courage and passion I can muster for the inevitability of change.

Beginnings

Do you remember what we were at the very beginning? I hate to give beginnings more credit than they are due, but ours was so very filled with excitement and heat and lust and desire that it seems only fitting that nearly a decade in, I should feel not so dissimilarly infatuated with the very idea of choosing to spend our lives with one another.

Do you recall the frivolity and the passion and the driving one another mad? The trips to see one another after months apart, falling asleep glued to your body and fearful that if I let you go I would awaken a thousand miles away. The way the minutes dragged between visits and I found myself counting down the seconds until I could check for another email from you. I spent hours and hours and hours composing thoughts for you – ours was a love established, first and foremost, on words and late night phone calls and intense moments of physicality followed by giant gaps during which we fed our connection with thoughts and truths and the innermost portions of ourselves.

I drank a bottle of the cheapest red talking to you and the conversation lasted for so many hours that it was two am before I realized I had to teach the next day and I had nearly finished the bottle and yet I could not stand the idea of hanging up the phone. I obsessed over the words of your letters; over the affection and intent implicit in the time you spent constructing them. I fawned over the care packages you sent; the photo shoot you set up for our gloves after I left mine at your house following a weekend skiing. I fell in love with you and the life I thought we could have and your dog and making salads together and taking the dogs on runs and the way you always brought me a cup of coffee in the morning.

The painful thing about loving you like this is that one of us shall have to leave this place first. Either I will leave you or you will leave me and I fear I will find myself so desperately and utterly empty either way. I have loved you so very deeply and for so very long that the idea of not sharing the same space feels like a terror I can hardly fathom.

You have crafted so much of my reality and so much of my world for so long that your absence would steal all of the light from the world. It is such a wonderful gift and such a terrible, terrible burden to love someone as I love you; to love anyone in such a way that they are utterly and fully capable of shattering one into pieces.

Thank you for the back rubs and the ice cream and for listening through thousands of tears and for dissuading my fear and uncertainty and for giving me the courage to be precisely who I am at every moment. Thank you for being the kind of father every child deserves to have but so few do. Thank you for your patience and your persistence and your fortitude when I am ready to quit. Thank you for the nights in Santa Fe and a thousand inside jokes and for pretending calm when I am driving and you are not in control. Thank you for our children and a hundred unrealized dreams and for willingly embarking on new adventures that throw everything into chaos. Thanks for waking me from nightmares and still reaching for my hand and for Sundance and hundreds of bottles of wine late into the night.

Thank you for choosing me and for every single minute we have left ahead of us. I love you.