Valentine’s Post #5

The sexiest thing in the world is being pregnant with the child of the man who loves and protects you. It’s true; there’s a reason for that goofy cliche, “I want to have your baby!”

Mr. Adventurepants, thank you for fulfilling my dreams.

I am eternally grateful to Sheldon for snagging this shot. :~)

I came into the whole thing a total mess, and this man denied himself for me. He made me more precious than his own desires — okay, guys, let’s admit the word needs, because that’s the way it is — and by making me the most precious thing in his life, he pushed away all the scary bad stuff that haunted me.

He taught me how to cook. He taught me how to organize my bohemian self. He also taught me how to be spontaneous, let it all go, and just laugh. Go places for no reason, do things because it looks like fun. Forget rules. Forget what everyone says we should do or be. Let’s just be.

That’s my David.

A lot of things changed the first time I saw him hold one of our babies. I didn’t know a twenty-year-old could be so confident and capable with an infant. He was raised on large families, and he was delighted with his son. He took to babies naturally. Mr. Race Car Driver and his Mustang never drove so slowly and carefully as the day he brought us home from the hospital.

I lay in bed that late-June night, husband of six months asleep beside me, baby on my other side, and the warm summer air all around us. The tiny one-bedroom apartment left few options that way. Few times in my life have I ever, ever felt so relaxed, so complete, so utterly at peace. So perfect. I am still in that moment — it stretches all this way. It’s not a timebound moment. It is a kairos.

On the wall was the verse David asked me to do up for him as a bit of custom artwork, a verse he wept and struggled over, a verse his father taught him in his early teens. Made him memorize, in fact.

How can a young man keep his way pure?
By keeping it according to Thy word.
With all my heart I have sought Thee;
Do not let me wander from Thy commandments.
Thy word I have treasured in my heart,
That I may not sin against Thee.

~Ps. 119:9-11

And when his heart wandered, he carried its conviction deep inside. David is a man after God’s own heart, tender before the Lord. I don’t think all the troubles in the world can change it. It’s in the warp and weave of him. Sometimes buried and silent, sometimes flaming with the steady, deep heat of a well-stoked furnace. If you want to know David, encounter those verses. Be confronted by them.

I held my son close, and in that pure moment, I began to sing. I don’t know where the tune came from, but those are the words to Pie’s Lullaby.

Mr. Baby Pie, who is now 3 inches taller than mamma.

Now, I was terrified to be left alone with that little thing, Dave’s first day back to work. I was sure I’d do something horribly neglectful or who knows what. I sat there terrified, holding that baby on my lap, and my Baby Pie craned his newborn neck and looked me in the eye, sweet and curious and calm. Right then, I was his mamma forever.

Our next three children were born at home. After being marginalized by hospital routines, David was adamant that he be the one to catch our babies. It took a couple more tries. (So now you know why we had to have four.) I was leaning on him for the second one, pinned him down. I have no recollection whether he caught the third. Our last was born into water pretty much right where my desk sits today, slowly into both our hands together. Together, we cradled his head and brought him into the world.

Yeah, the Tiger Lily's pretty much always been the way she is.

That little rotter nursed for nearly 40 minutes before David was able to seize our Mr. Boo and tour him around the house. The daddy who made sure his babies knew his voice before they were ever born. He would talk to my tummy, and they’d respond. I could feel them move at the sound of his voice.

He is the centre of our world. Always has been, and always will be. He’s given me everything life can give. Yeah, okay, the house is rickety and we’ve pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps from absolutely no worldly worth at all. It doesn’t matter.

Let the house fall down and the rain pour in. Let the fights and the fears come and go, and the years leave their lines on our faces. When it all falls apart, I will remember what it is to feel life move within me, and know I am owned by the incontrovertible presence of his love. It’s all around me, in the broken plaster we’ve repaired, the leaky roof he’s patched. It’s on me, it’s my stretch marks and gray hair. It’s within me, alive and secret, like a fruit not yet ripe.

Beloved, we do not know as yet what we will be.

I used to fear that heaven would be a foreign land, completely alien and barren of everything I know. For we shall all be changed. Now I know, because heaven reached down into my wreckage: We shall be changed into who we really are, free of sin, and know each other like we never could in the shadows of this fading earth.

That’s when life really starts. Till then, I will remember: I have drunk deeply of everything life can give.