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.