In my bones

On readiness

We just got back from the beach yesterday — a gorgeous week by the ocean that I didn’t think we should keep, given our recent move. (Hence the abbreviated nature of this newsletter.) But it wound up being a nice little break from the chaos. We sat on the beach for hours, drove down to the coast to meet with long-distance friends over rosé and buttery lobster, taught my cousin’s sons the finer points of skee-ball, and burned through both of my beach reads in the first four days. (Luckily, Ben brought some emergency Joan Didion — Blue Nights, which I’d read a few times before, but hits so differently now that we’re trying to have a baby.)

The energy healer I’ve been working with since we started our parenthood journey told me in a very cryptic way to enjoy my summer. She said she saw babies in the fall. I didn’t believe her when she told me, but I took the note and have been trying to enjoy our time.

This trip to the beach felt especially poignant, because my cousin’s sons are a little bit older, and thus a lot more fun, and it felt like we really bonded with them over the course of the week. It was like we got to play pretend at parenthood in small, sweet bursts of time.

The oldest of the two became obsessed with watching Ben work on his current animation project at the kitchen island, and would sit for an hour watching him tediously design cookies falling onto a tray and cartoon hands grasping for them. I got to watch Ben patiently explain the process to him and imagine him doing that with our own children. We ran around the boardwalk arcade playing games, the blinking lights illuminating Ben’s smile as he watched the boys win again while tickets poured out of the machines. And when the youngest wanted to go on a ride he needed a grown-up for, Ben volunteered, holding his shoulders tightly as they spun faster and higher.

We’d found out we weren’t pregnant again at the beginning of the trip, and we cried together in our room before pulling ourselves together to have coffee with the rest of my family. It was a devastating start to the trip. But by the end, I felt a little more at peace, because we’re ready. We’re so ready to be parents. After all of the questions I had about whether or not I could do it, I know that not only can I be a mother, I will be a mother, no matter how long or which direction it takes to get there. I know it will happen.

Ben had come to that conclusion himself, too. Another set of friends came to visit us on our last beach day with their daughters, and as I sat with them down by the water’s edge, Ben talked to the two under our umbrella about our journey to parenthood. “The thing that’s hard is just that we’re so ready right now,” he said. “We’re just so ready.”

And he’s right. It is hard. But it also feels like a relief in some way. Because we know. For so long we didn’t know, and now we do. And today, as I sit at the kitchen table in our new home with Ben throwing the ball to Edie in our yard, I know it’s going to happen for us.

As we were packing up to leave, I started to feel the creep of anxiety I usually get when we leave the shore. But then I remembered that we were coming back here, to our home, with our rambling lawn and birds chirping outside the window. And I felt my shoulders relax, and I looked over at Ben. “How nice is it that we get to go back to our home?” he said, reading my mind.

Our new chapter. A place for us to enjoy our summer.

We’re ready.