I’ve been thinking a lot this week about change.
Change is something that is happening to us all, all the time. We just don’t normally notice it, because we grow with it, and so, in our constant state of change, or growth, it’s only when we find ourselves outside of our ‘normal’ environment that we notice the change, the growth.
I’ve been noticing this in strange ways over the last few days. Six months ago, I don’t think I knew what colostrum was. I didn’t know anything about childbirth other than what you see in movies (which I now know isn’t quite how it works!) In fact, there is an entire vocabulary that didn’t exist for me just a few months ago, an entire subculture with breathing, and skin to skin contact, and lotions and potions. Not to mention everything that actually comes after birth!
I realise now that I have been under the mistaken impression that I will become a mother the day my child is born, that Martin will become a father the day that new life breathes its first independent breath and that I’ve hoped that I would be ‘ready’. I realise now that as my child is growing and developing, so too, I am growing and developing in to a new form. I am already a Mother, waiting to be born with my child. My hopes and dreams for my child are already in place, my concern, care and love for my child already override most other things.
I read a blog today belonging to another ‘mommy to be’ Ali, and I think she phrased it so well in her blog when she said “I am already a new person, a burgeoning mother on the cusp of her own birth into the world. I guess more than a baby is being born, a mother and a father too, as well as a family”. (Hope you don’t mind me stealing your words Ali, should you read this!)
Change is such a strange thing, in that you don’t see it coming, you just live through it and then experience it as an afterthought.
I realised this last night when I went out with some girl friends to celebrate the pending wedding of my friend Gloria. We went to a cabaret show, and after the show, the venue turned in to a night club to which we had ‘free entry’ with our cabaret tickets. During the show I found myself very concerned with the volume of the music and the effect the amplification of sound through the amniotic fluid would have on the baby. I borrowed a scarf from my friend Laura and held it bunched up over my stomach to try to muffle some of the sound as the thought of my child in discomfort was quite distressing in itself. It was a strange sort of feeling, a deep concern for a child I’ve never even held, and I could only wonder how much deeper that concern and that love would grow.
After the show we all stood around waiting for the ‘club’ to start when we realised that really all of us would rather return to the hotel bar where we could sit and talk and have a (soft) drink and again I realised the changes that have happened in each of us over the years, and I was fascinated because I don’t recall seeing it happen, and yet I am peaceful and content in the fact that it has.
I find myself growing ‘older’ and I find myself eager to embrace that growth, to move in to the future that lies ahead of me. I find myself looking forward to looking back over becoming a ‘thirty-something’, a different person, wife,friend and eventually, and finally, mother.