Hope comes with making space

Since the ultrasound and all the good news about what is not, in fact, going wrong, I find myself less and less in scared headspace and more and more in hopeful headspace. It's strange because of course, Emily's ultrasounds were all fine, and in fact there was nothing wrong with her, and that didn't guarantee that she would be okay. And the same is true now.

Still, something that was withheld until seeing this baby's four-chambered heart there working away on the screen, and this baby's hands and feet moving around, and this baby's cute little pug nose, is flowing. I find myself and sometimes Lyria talking to the baby in that self-absorbed pregnant way, and even Magdalynn has joined in with a song or two in the shower. It may be partly the time of year - spring, a season in which I was never pregnant before - or the second trimester highs, or trust in our medical team, or any number of things.

I suspect this'll change as we move towards labour &/or a c-section, which raises waves of panic. But for now I enjoy the ride.

So, the ride: on the train yesterday the motion must have been soothing. Whenever we stopped at a station the baby would move around, fairly nicely placed right in the middle rather than down against my bladder or up against my lungs. Unless placed nicely right over my cervix, the movements aren't all that strong yet - not the kind that comes later and stops you in your tracks, more like burbles, if burble can be a sensation as well as a sound. But they get stronger and more insistent, in their own way: muscles building, tendons getting their acts together. I'm surprised still that I enjoy them.

I was worried that I wouldn't be able to handle this - that it would only remind me of Emily. It does sometimes, but a whole new relationship is forming. There's something bittersweet about that; life goes on, except for the dead. Sometimes I have nightmares of leaving Emily behind - in the daytime I know it's not that binary, but my subconscious isn't entirely convinced.

But at the same time in all my dreams I'm pregnant, from the most mundane to the more dramatic. I really do think the body informs the mind, to help the spirit get ready for the child ahead. And our spirits respond.

~~

In that spirit of hopefulness I find myself again in the struggle to align my life with what I think would be a good environment for kids, and it's tiring. It helps (or doesn't help?) that we have made so many changes this year: we have a blank slate in terms of houses, neighbourhoods, even daily routines. At the same time when I said I wanted to go back to Toronto I was sticking up for a certain continuity - not to rush off and make all new friends and leave the past behind.

In houses it's reasonably simple, although the real estate market itself makes it hard: a safe house with good floors and spaces that invite images of toddlers rushing about without smacking into some weird thing, no mouldy old basements, no unfriendly lead paint. But the neighbourhood is a big deal. Not in the US way, dear Americans, or in the South African way Tertia writes so much about. There are bad neighbourhoods in Toronto but they are few and easily pinpointed by their lack of houses.

But for me this is what I want: a neighbourhood that encourages walking and exploring; parks and library and community centre within walking distance, or some facsimile thereof; some sense of a vibrant arts community - I am an arts snob in that I think life without storytellers, plays, puppets, paintings, and such is important; and somewhere for me to go to feel myself, Shandra, who would on her own live in a condo with minimal furniture and eat sushi or Thai or fondue or the latest other food trend with a friend or two every Friday.

Lyria wants if not a garden at least to be very close to one, and although I mourn the loss of my exciting urban townhouse with no backyard, the idea of sandboxes and water play and crawling about on grass is a good one to me.

Lynn wants to be close enough to drop in on the readings along Danforth without three hours of fuss, although she will settle for three hours of fuss as long as three hours of fuss actually happen. None of us particularly wants to have to get a second car because of the whole oil thing, although probably a second car will be in the future sometime when our child picks sports and instruments and those kinds of things, just because Carl's office is truly non-transit friendly (unless that changes, and it would be nice if it did).

And Carl wants space: space between houses, space for his tools and workshop and motorcycle, space to kick the soccer ball around in the backyard. And I definitely want him to have those things, especially if it means he will sometimes take our child outside with him to putter around so we can have our downtime too.

So neighbourhood is tricksy.

Even more though I find myself going through what I think of as my backpack list: the things I carry around with me as concerns and interests. Some of these need to drop off again, and in thinking about letting them go I realized that is one thing that was so depressing this fall and winter: I had divested myself of some commitments because I'd need the time to be a mum, and I never picked them up again, partly because of moving but also because of something else, some reluctance to start again what I'd carefully grieved and let go. And I didn't fill that space with other things.

But here I am again anyway, and I've surprised myself with some of the things I'm putting in the give-away pile, and some of the things I've moved into the keep!!! pile. My family of the heart (hi family) remains the same, exactly, as a year and a half ago, with some surprising new connections in there too.

My really close friends, some of whom border on the family of the heart - C&M, M&C, K, N(&G), S, D&M - have been so there that despite some of the kid/kidless tensions I no longer feel like I'll be making all new mum friends but rather adding some into the mix.

One thing I learned from Emily's death was that all the fuss I was making before about who was Teresa's friend and who was mine was rather stupid and that I made things out to be terrible in some self-centered way when really people were just busy, and once I was on their radar, they were there, there, there... and now I keep them on mine. Which was probably the problem in the first place.

(Well that and that historically a number of the people I think of as "my" friends are the glitzy, crazy, obsessive, charismatic-dreamer type people who also are prone to going entirely nuts because they have some shiny new thing, trailing broken promises - unfinished degrees, lost or quit jobs, discarded friends and boyfriends and husbands and girlfriends and wives - behind them, not unlike me, but I seem to be slowly in progressively less angstful waves growing out of that - on both ends: the attraction, and also for myself.)

But some of the people I thought would be a part of my greater community totally weren't, for whatever reasons (see above as some of them), and after battling out a lot of the pain of that not-ness in various bad and not so bad ways, I'm ready to take some energy out of that glittery world of Big Wow and plug it back into what's real. (Lohr love, the similarities between this and what you guys, esp. Sassy, are up to, strike me again but in case it bears mentioning here, you are already the real for me 'cause of how I always have seen things between us, and it's just seeing how that unfolds for you.)

Boy this got away from you, baby, but sometimes that's how it is when you're making room for someone: you take everything out of the closet and then you think "wow, I'd forgotten I cared so much about this at one time!" or "ooh! This is so nice and I'm glad I have it!" and get all dreamy over that for a while.

Shandra

P.S. I just realized that for a lot of people the Big Wow is romantic relationships. Whereas a lot of my own are more subterranean; my romantic attachments tend to creep up on me over time and then poof, there they are. For me the Big Wow I think is a group of people struggling over something - to make something, like the theatre crowd; to resolve something, like the survivor crowd; to change something, like the political crowd.

I suppose what I'm really talking about is Narcissistic Supply*, when I say Big Wow, which is getting awfully deep for a blog of any kind and I almost type way too much for a parenting-esque blog when I realize (or have just realized): actually not making your kids or their school or Parenting Methods a source of Narcissistic Supply is probably the central struggle in parenthood.

But there is a sunny day outside, so that may be something to write about later.

* If you look up NS, you'll find all kinds of stuff about how narcissists are the bane of everyone's existence and NS the source of much evil, which is true at one extreme end.

And certainly as the daughter of a narcissist (or at least, extremely narcissistically wounded person - I don't really hold with labelling her as if she were a criminal or something, but narcissist despite its dangers is the best word really, unless it's the vernacular drama queen) -and- the most narcissistic (or second most, as Lynn and I vie for it!! :)) person in the system - the person whose ego stood up to my situation's as a teenager - coming to terms with my own need for NS (known on the Internet quite a bit as drama:)) I have to say that the struggle not to become a full-blown narcissist in the pathological sense is a hugely important one and that slowly getting rid of the need for NS is a big deal.

But, having said that, I think a lot of the 'recover from your lousy relationship with a narcissist' sites focus entirely on the worst parts of it. (I also think that women are called narcissists for doing what men do that's considered strong, but that is a totally! separate! feminist rant.) Most people have something in their life that feeds their ego a bit more than their soul, and that's not a terrible awful horrible thing, provided it isn't defenseless children or something of the sort.

God, some hormone seems to have put my brain on crack for this sort of far-flung discussion thing this morning.

And NOW I go outside!