I will admit I’ve been avoiding writing this last week. It seems like it should end with some Big Bang but it’s all very anticlimactic and technically it took me 41 weeks to grow Ian. 

  
From a physical standpoint I’m pretty much the same on a scale as I was when I found out I was pregnant, most of my clothes from 40 weeks ago fit again but that’s not really why I wanted to catalog all of this. 

I was completely disconnected when I got pregnant. I felt betrayed by my body and definitely did not trust it. I didn’t even know if I wanted to try getting pregnant again ever and then all of a sudden I was pregnant and mostly holding my breath waiting to have it all taken away. I still look at Ian some 40 weeks later and wonder in awe, where did you come from? Even if I don’t say it out loud he will sparkle his eyes and flash a smile of complete love only a 9 month old utterly in love with his mama can give. It’s all a blurry haze now, the losses even the pregnancy. Life moves so fast.

Facebook popped a photo 5 years ago I was just starting a new, opening a new, solo practice. I was so driven and organized and always on the move ( I was also teaching, working for hospice and other odds and ends) I found my business notebook not too long ago also filled with my monthly and weekly goals. It was amazing to see all that I had been able to accomplish in such a short time and then it bummed me out ( just a little ) where did that ultra organized, dare I say it successful woman go? I feel so scattered, washing the same pan over and over again, tending to my family. The days fly by and are challenging in different ways. I stopped being bummed and started feeling inspired when I thought of what a gift it is to be mostly home with work being a small snippet of my life. What a gift to raise my kids, to dig butterfly gardens and buy too many garden gnomes, to spend one day a week with my mom doing crazy projects, learning to use my hands in other ways. How on earth would I be able to manage running a household in this way if it weren’t for maintaining a community acupuncture clinic? I miss the buzz of a room full of blisssed out nappers, their tensions and pains easing. I miss using my brain and my heart in that way. I feel that buzz though when I get to watch the kids totally lost in play, I can almost feel their brains growing. I’m honing my emotional intelligence skills almost by the minute. And I know so very bittersweetly that this time will go by so very fast and I will look back on it fondly and whatever the next season is I will know without a doubt that this time being with small children will have prepared me for it. 

If you’ve been reading along thank you for being a part of this process of discovery, acceptance, love. I catch Lia lifting her shirt up and staring in the mirror at her belly. There is no critical stare, no loathing or self hatred. I hope she can always look at her body with wonder and awe and know it’s the vehical to move her through this world, not what defines her, that a scale or pants size is just a number and anyone who would love her more because it’s a smaller number isn’t worth having in her life. I hope you can look in the mirror at your own body with that same unconditional love.