Tomorrow I turn 33. Today is Veteran’s Day, and Adam has the day off. All I want for my birthday is time alone to think and reflect, so this morning Adam is watching Sage. I drive to a nearby town, Milford, alone. My plan is what you would expect: coffee, breakfast, journaling. I stop at Harvest Market to treat myself to an acai bowl and a mocha and have a delightful conversation with the owner about birth, postpartum nutrition, and being a doula. She’s like-minded and we have many parallels, but of course she owns an upscale local market, and me? I’m a stay-at-home mom.
The few side projects I have are coming to a close. I just sent my last contract and invoice for Lemons Landing, my dad’s business. I’ve been running the Cincinnati Birth Center’s social media since the spring, but I have only two more posts before I hang my hat. I’m due with baby two in less than a month, and I feel the need to move my energy toward preparation, literally and emotionally.
After my breakfast and half-hearted journaling, I wander around Milford. It’s an old-timey town with storefronts for lamp repair and antiques, with a few modern diners and salons peppered in. But across the board, nothing is open. Open hours have been limited, and some stores have handwritten signs explaining their closures. Maybe it’s the holiday; maybe it’s COVID.
Despite the last few days feeling like summer, today the weather is mild and the sky has thick, gray cloud cover. The trees are nearly bare. It looks like November. Every year I feel like summer stretches on and on, and then comes my birthday, and the world looks weary and closed for the season.
I invite my mind to wander, to daydream, to create, but nothing comes. The last few days I have felt like my head is in the ether. The usual to-do lists and projects and mental vision boards do not come. I ask myself: what do I want? Nothing comes. I ask, where do I see myself next? Nothing comes. I ask: what do I need to do to prepare for this birth? Nada. No dreams. No to-do items.
This feels like the disconcerting result of months of work unraveling my identity from my productivity, of trying to wake up each day, present with an open heart, for the benefit of my daughter. I found that when I had an agenda, a schedule, or pressing to-do items, I was less patient as a mother, unable to be receptive to the ebb and flow of our days together at home. I had been working to invite spontaneity and creativity each day, planning out our next step on the fly depending on our mutual energy levels, the weather, and what kind of balance we needed in the moment. But now? I couldn’t tap into any thinking about the future whatsoever.
Perhaps this is my body preparing for birth, inviting me to surrender and take a stance of receptivity. Lord knows plans are incompatible with birth. Maybe it’s just the November ennui setting in.
It’s a strange thing to be a woman. All my life I’ve been tracking right along with the boys: achieving, competing, producing. I was a top student, I went to college, then grad school. I was an entrepreneur, a full-time employee. I received an award for outstanding new staff member, got promoted. And then I had a baby.
Life went off the tracks. I tried to be a working mom, but my baby wasn’t having it. I felt torn between two worlds and chose to be fully present as Sage’s mother. But I never trained for this. I didn’t spend my life preparing to run a household, to be at the beck and call of a small child, or to engage in the slow, creative work that makes motherhood more meaningful and fulfilling. This is all new to me, and I’m learning as I go.
I’ve comforted myself by thinking this is temporary, that soon enough I’ll be back in it and my identity will be restored in my future work. But I’m 33 tomorrow, and I’m about to do this all over again: invite a new life into the world that will have its own needs, desires, and dreams. And I’ll be that person’s mother.
I decide to wait to go home until Adam puts Sage down for a nap, to truly soak up my morning alone. With nothing to do and no one to see and no desires on my heart, I drive to the park around the corner. It’s the park where we walk as a family every day. I pull into a parking spot, and I’m the only car there. I consider journaling, but decide to walk in the woods instead. There’s a nice view over the valley a few hundred feet in. A big oak tree invites me to sit with my back resting against it, and I find an in-tact acorn on the ground for Sage. A red-tailed hawk flies overhead, and I am instantly brought to tears thinking back on Sage’s birth and the many hawk sightings we had that season. The woods are quiet, and occasionally a leaf falls from the trees, one of the last to hang on this year.
No thoughts come. I breathe and close my eyes. I nearly drift off to sleep.