That Odd Post about Babies and Change
It should be worth mentioning at this point, before anything else, that I am grossly pregnant, and am expected to discharge my load, so to speak, by the end of this month.
This is not usually something I like announcing, because very few things in my life I have a habit of announcing, unless it’s book-related. I am fairly sure that people have been pregnant before, is currently pregnant now, and will be pregnant in the sometime future, so the experience would be more personally rewarding and subjective by nature, rather than a revelation that demands that You All Must Stop Whatever You Are Doing And Listen Only to Me.
And I use the term ‘rewarding’, loosely. I am not the type of person to look at birth as some wondrous miracle of an unseen god, mostly because the process, to put it in a slightly more PC way, is a fairly easy thing to do, when you think about it. I’m not the kind of person who would look at any potential child as the world’s most special and unique snowflake, because siring them is not so much important as learning how to raise them right, and that would come much later. Any baby sonograms / photos of cribs and toys went largely missing from all my social accounts, mostly because I dislike them as a would-be mother just as much as a friend or acquaintance trying to mask their disinterest underneath a veil of politeness when other would-be moms show same.
If anyone told me I would be capable of having and raising a baby five years ago, I would have been incredulous – the same reaction I would have made had anyone told me I would be able to write a book. At that time in my life, I hadn’t thought myself capable of either.
I am, however, a person who likes being comfortable, and pregnancy is not the condition to encourage this. I had no morning sickness, but I did get the urge to wander out of the house in the dead of night looking for pickled Japanese radish, fettuccine carbonara, and other things you aren’t supposed to find at 1 am in the morning. But the worst part was when all the kicking started. I have woken up numerous times to the sensation of my lovable son gleefully kicking me in the nads from the inside, which is never known to be fun. I could already see his burgeoning potential as a muay thai fighter, given his dedication at practicing 18 out of 24 hours a day.
There is something to be said about taking care of a spawn in a belly that has by now ballooned up to the size of a watermelon, or perhaps a missile. It’s a nurturing process, and if anything else it has taught me to be patient, something that I have sometimes lacked throughout the years.
In between that and writing another book for a new series, my third novel to date (more information about my sophomore book to come!) blog posts – which are already somewhat sporadic here – may be even more lacking in the coming weeks. This year is marking the start of a series of very profound changes in my life – a baby, a debut, and a growing sense of confidence that I am, in fact, able to do all these for a living – and making that transition from knowing you can’t to knowing you can, has always been a very strange, blessed thing one should enjoy for as long as it lasts.
