This is quite the liminal time for me, a season of transition and finding my bearings after losing them to a difficult pregnancy. As happened after Elijah’s birth, I’m shot with a surge of hope and creativity, a longing to get my hands and feet and face a mess in art and music, poetry, prose.

This time, however, I have a toddler besides the baby, with needs and frustrations and a keen sense for knowing what boundaries to push. And when. And though baby sleeps huge chunks of each day, Eli sleeps but a fraction.  All my creative energy is funneling into daydreams and lists of things I only want to do, scrawled quickly in my journal. My outsides, and the tasks of my days, are not aligned just yet with the yearnings that innerly spin.

Superficially, I yearn for new clothes. Clothes that actually fit, and that bear witness to the me of today. Part of me feels silly for hating my wardrobe; it’s mostly in good shape, and provides the warmth and covering I need. Other parts, though – my inner artist and psychologist and sociologist – know that clothes that fit well and that express outwardly what one feels inwardly (freedom, rather than stodginess, for example, or confidence instead of fear) are actually part of creating reality. They matter. Balance has to be made between wanton consumption and joyless, pious, under-consumption, but given my history with the latter, I’d like some newer clothes. And I’d like to make a plea to stores everywhere to stock clothing for very tall women. Consider that shouted from rooftops.

Less superficially, I long for contemplation. Meditation. Spiritual practice. I’ve constructed and discovered the outlines of a lifestyle that enlivens my soul and questions that spur growth and connect me more deeply with others and God. It feels, though, as if such outlines don’t exist if existence implies experience of them. There’s hypocrisy in all my lofty ideals, as the me of my actual life is far more consumed with doing than being, with trying to squeeze in sleep instead of prayer, with wiping bottoms a thousand times oftener than examining life or soul.

And somewhere in between my surface and my depths, I feel like I’ve outgrown this site. I want a new design, a new focus, a different story to tell. Which layers of me do I reveal here? Which thoughts do I explore? Do I lean more toward ups and de-emphasize downs? Portray myself far more serenely than this tattered, visceral me?

Time will have to tell. Or not, as the case may be. In the meantime I’ll live the gangliness of mis-matched me’s, outers and inners askew. I’ll keep snatching moments for daydreams. Keep scrawling out my lists. Keep hoping things into glimmers of existence, and consider that prayer.

And honestly, those booties, they’ve got to be wiped.

Family photo, November 15, 2007

Well, she’s here!  Charlotte Makenna was born last Thursday.  Surgery went very well, and we’re home now, embarking on that joyous and perilous journey called “adjusting to a new family member”.  So far Elijah is hanging in there.  Day one wasn’t pretty.  Days two and three were much better.  N and I both read “Siblings Without Rivalry” this fall (thanks to those of you who suggested it!) and are SO glad we did.  We both can’t recommend it enough.  Whether you have kids or not, or even whether you have a significant other or not, it’s so helpful for understanding the ways that we shape and are shaped and *were* shaped by dynamics in our homes.

But that’s a tangeant!  I’m feeling so grateful to be home, to have the scariness of surgery over, and for the initial plunge into new babyness to be made.  And not least by any stretch at all, to get to see dear Charlotte, daily, face-to-face.  I feel like I’ve emerged from a long, dark tunnel (pregnancy is unquestionably miraculous, but honestly, for me, this one was very hard), and the parts of myself that were necessarily on hold for so long are returning to life.  I can’t wait to begin exercising my body and mind and soul again in the ways that I used to enjoy.  Such things feel wonderfully imminent.

Thank you again for your thoughts and prayers and good wishes!  I hope to return my own offerings, by means of essays and conversations in this and others’ spaces, in the very near future.  For now, I will let this adjustment journey continue its new course.  From what I hear, the paved part begins a little further on.

Much love to all,
Kristin