One detail of pregnancy that’s eye-opening is how fast everything changes. Week over week, there are new developments, changes, symptoms, changes, and side-effects. A few weeks ago, the little guy could hear us for the first time. There were kicks. There still are kicks (and punches!). His neuro-motor functioning is changing. He’s growing so fast inside of me, and I’m growing so fast on the outside. The scale doesn’t lie: every week I’m a new number. And it’s real: holding plank pose in yoga is much more challenging with added pounds in the middle!
Change is necessary, change is constant, and change is scary. Change is much like love.
As C.S. Lewis writes:
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” ― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
I find myself leaning on writing, reading, and hearing other people’s stories to understand everything that seems, at times, to be a whirlwind around me.
I take photographs to document change, to witness what’s going on inside of me. I asked Alex to take some photos of me (here at 24 weeks) as my body shifts shape and sizes, expanding to accommodate a new person joining out lives:
And don’t let these photographs fool you too much — it’s easy to see a simple story in the image. It’s all of it: the highs, the lows, the confusion, the ambling, the laughter, the tears. I am grateful for people who share their stories with me about how hard it can be, how confusing, and how up-ending. There isn’t a perfect story that we’re searching for, a moment that captures effortless bliss. This is the journey, all of it. As Gilda Radner writes:
“Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.” ― Gilda Radner
Every day is a new day.
Every day is different.