Predawn

December 4th: I ran again today.  It was 6:00 AM, pitch dark, and it was only toward the end of my slow shuffle around the neighborhood that the sky began to turn.  The way the blue comes and takes over is so startling.  Sunrise never fails to take some small part of me by surprise.  It's the joke that stays funny, the book you read and finish and read again.  You expect it; you know it's coming; and yet, when the sky sets itself on fire, or when, at last, your baby slides up over your stomach in the delivery room, you think: Holy Shit.

That might be all there is: Holy Shit. 

Your Advent thought for the day.

Bed

December 3: Lying in bed with my baby next to me.  He's wheezing and snuffling like an old man or a very angry squirrel. 

Cold & Canaries

Three years into my sojourn in VA, I've officially gone soft.  I own one of those coats that does not really keep me warm.  My winter accessories are a hopeless jumble, and for all I know, the snow shovel disapparated years ago.  The temperature dropped into the high twenties several nights ago and I became wretched with cold.

And indignant.  Didn't I have a right to my mild winter?  Wasn't the universe obliged to provide me with the ability to run outside, year round, without feeling, well....cold?  It's funny what you begin, over time, to accept as your due.  It's as if entitlement is the canary of acclimation- the singing thing that tells you that, at long last, you've settled in. 

It was with the smack of righteousness then, that I greeted December 2: Sunny, mild, blue. A good day to start my shamble back to life.

Advent

Hi, my name is Anne, and I'm an Adventaholic. 

No, I'm not religious.  Nor do I celebrate Christmas with any particular vigor.  (In point of fact, I celebrate Christmas with the vigor of a spavined, mortally wounded mule.  Sometimes I manage a poinsettia.)

But Advent -hey now!  There's little quite so pleasurable as pleasurable anticipation- and to top it off, you get the day-by-day injection of awesome that is the Advent calendar. What's more satisfying then prising open the secrets of each day, especially if you can thereafter pop those secrets into your mouth? 

But I'll take just about any advent calendar, even the most unchocolatey.  Because there's more to advent calendars than the rather delicious illusion that you are eating time.   There's that moment - rarer and rarer in my life- of conscious, deliberate acknowledgement.  Instead of letting the days rush past, I take a moment to stare each one down and, as if I had all the time in the world, to bow.

December 1, 2013.   Nice to meet you.

Shhhh

Kiddo is sleeping.  It's dirt road sleep: rough and rutted.  He snorts and sighs and flails; he startles himself awake and then dolphins himself back down.  Asleep or awake, he wears an expression of  perplexity- forehead crinkled, eyes jacked wide as if he can't figure out how he found himself here, in this place, in this time, and wherever it is, it worries him.

I'm worried, too.  The furrows in his brow are the furrows in mine.  I hope this isn't all I've passed on to him -my worry.  I hope there's something else in there, too, some redeeming wrinkle, my quickness or my occasional joy. I hope I've left him some defense, besides sleep, against the great, wide, inrushing world.

Of course, this is crystal ball natter, pointless dowsing of the present for the future.  Who knows what will happen to him, what he'll be besides this sleeping, shitting nub of human.  Or what I'll be, days and months and years into watching him sleep.

Baby!

Yeah, alright, I had a baby.

And for whatever reason, it makes me itch to write -in a nervous, not-sure-I-can-reach-between-my-shoulderblades-to-scratch kind of way.  Having extruded a tiny human, am I capable of generating anything else?  Or am I, like an old seam of coal, mined out?

I feel picked over, broken up.  The baby-having is not for sissies.  Women may have done it for millenia, but you know what?   A lot of them died.  And if they didn't, they didn't get any sleep and were subsequently tired and vulnerable and got eaten by sabertooth tigers, leaving their tiny, mewling daughters to grow up and perpetrate the next generation.

Surely, if every woman knew exactly what she was getting into, we would have figured out how to pawn this off onto men.  We've at least figured out how to have fewer babies, so that each one we do have becomes the tiny, terrified sac into which we cram the totality of our hopes and anxieties.  Fun times for mom, fun times for babe!

But I'm told you forget.  Biology pulls its rabbit out of a hat- or, rather, stuffs the rabbit back in.  Your memories hop away into darkness and you're left holding the bag.  Or rather, the baby.

Good thing it's cute.  

Waiting

Birth and death: the last holdouts against the hegemony of the day planner.  Everything else you've got pinned down.  You set appointments; you cancel them and keep them; you schedule them and reschedule them; you generally operate under the assumption that you are the boss of yourself.

And then you give birth.

Or you don't.

I'm five days past my due date, no contractions, no anything doing.  So I'm waiting.  And waiting -real waiting, no deadline, no line in the sand- is uniquely humbling.

We used, of course, to wait all the time.  We waited for the rabbit to spring the trap, for the first green shoots of spring, for the rekindling of light above the horizon.  But we're consummate editors, we humans, and in the last few hundred years we've struck through wait after wait.   We want a rabbit, we head to the grocery store.  We crave greenery, we ship it in from Mexico. At night, we flip on the lights and fire up the TV.  Waiting, nowadays, lurks only in our darkest spaces: a great, moist stillness silting the roots of our lives. 

We are born; we die.  And, for once -or twice- we wait.