Usually, I will go for my iPhone to help my brain get started by a barrage of useless activities like Facebook and checking the weather. This morning, it is cold and rainy, what feel like the first day of fall just sneaking in, and even 6:53am seems a lot darker than it did yesterday. And I let myself be calm and feel it.
It is a slow motion, of something big, something heavy. It is the passing of time, the approach of my 40th year, the changing of the guard, the end of the summer I thought we might just get pregnant and without having to do all that soul searching just get thrown into the mess, and chaos and energy and fray of a new life. And I would put off thinking about my career a bit longer, or my age. We would have a few more years of not even having the time to notice that time is passing.
Mind you, this isn't really a sad feeling. It is slow, it is calm. There are probably still a few years in which, if I really want (or just accidentally end up there), I can hop on over to that glacier top. It isn't going anywhere fast. I could probably even just step a bit more vigorously and catch it, with its new baby and upheaval, and blinding in-the-momentness that a new child brings to a family. It wouldn't even require a jump. But where once that 40 years old mark was slowly approaching, it is now almost lined up with where I'm standing, and soon will be receding. It is the next stage of life. I will still enter it, sooner or later, and I realized yesterday afternoon that having another child will not make me 36 again. And many of those women around me that I've felt the second-child-having influence of so strongly, they are still in that 35-38 range.
So yes, of course I can still try for a child. I'm healthy, I've gotten pregnant at least twice now, it is likely possible. But it means something different to me approaching 40 than it did approaching 36. I'm not "too old" to have another child in the literal, can your ovaries and uterus do this sense. My husband is not 65, and on and on. But I did not realize that the cycle of having one child would last 6 years for us, starting with starting to try getting pregnant, through infertility and interventions, through a difficult beginning, a first ray of light and then through a miscarriage and then the recovery. When I started this baby having activity, I was 33 years old. I've woken up this morning and I'm 39.
And I have no certainty about another child or not. I know that this morning I was calm, I had time to lay in bed another 10 minutes and hear that slow movement of life. I had energy to make a nice breakfast and to not pull A to run to the bus. We had smiles and time to talk about how sometimes none of us wants to go to work or school. I had time to sit in the foyer, while she screamed about having her pacifier taken away, until she calmed down - I didn't have to wrap her in a jacket and carry her flailing with boots to the bus.
It is the first day of fall, and I've decided to have a month of calmer, thoughtfulness. I will not be giving up on losing it sometimes, but I will be trying to find one thing per day to do or actively choose that connects me with others. That makes the world a bit better place and funnels some of my energy of not being pregnant with a second child back into the world that could definitely use it. I will slow down this month, for the next 3 weeks at least. I will notice this month passing.
I may not be able to move the glacier back (in my mind it is majestic, grand, solid and slow, its coldness is not really a feature, it is not a sad glacier, it is just ancient and bigger than me), but I can make this time before 40 fuller and honor it.
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