I am 37 weeks pregnant.  I made it to 37 weeks.  For a while there, we weren't sure that I would.  My first son was born at 37 weeks and both this pregnancy and that one were ripe with the threat of preterm labor.  But here I am.  Here we are.  Baby still inside.

Of course last year they would have changed the perimeters of "full term" from being 37 weeks gestation to 39 weeks.  But who's counting?

My last day of work was yesterday.  My awareness of a need for hobbies skyrocketed at approximately 8:15 am, after I had completed my morning ritual of eating breakfast and checking my email and Facebook and then finding myself with nothing else to do.

This pregnancy has been a mixed bag for me.  To put that into context, I should say that it felt more complicated to me than my first pregnancy.  For one thing, I am 12 years older. Having two babies 12 years apart is an amazing thing.  I am a different human than I was 12 years ago.  My life is also in every way different; husband, job, home, friends.  In almost every way, this is a good thing.  I have a solid and grounded sense of self, feel enormously supported by my community, and am at least somewhat prepared for what parenting entails.  The only things that are not an improvement are my financial stability and my blissful lack of awareness of how difficult raising a child can be on a person and a relationship.  But perhaps the latter is a blessing in disguise.  Knowing potential problems and pitfalls can after all, help you avoid them.

Pregnancy is a profound exercise in letting go.  Letting go of the sense of control of your body.  Letting go of expectations of how things should go.  Letting go of attachments to what is coming since in all honesty, you can't know that.  You can only know that it will change you.  Or that it already has.  And so you need to let go of the past you and accept if not embrace who you are now.

I journaled only sporadically this pregnancy and predominantly when I was trying to work through something.  I wrote with pen on paper when I felt isolated and struggled to ask for help and then when I finally did I wrote about what I had learned about generosity and how I wanted to integrate that knowledge into the me I am always striving to become.  I wrote when I felt disconnected from my body and disconnected from my baby.  I wrote when I struggled to wrap my mind around the idea that I would be a mother to two and not one and I wrote when I felt scared about how that would impact my cherished relationship with my still only child.  I wrote when I could not seem to let go of my hurt and disappointment and anger at people who had negative or less than supportive reactions to our pregnancy news.

These were my private writings.  My unfiltered and unedited pieces.  This; what you are reading now, is what comes out the other side when I've done my processing and I'm ready to share.

The goal of this blog is to do what I was not able to do with the arrival of my first child.  Find the balance between mother and woman.  Maintain and tend to the thread of me that continues to knit itself into stories, stories that create my identity.  This is not a pregnancy blog or a parenting blog, though because both of those markers apply to me, there will no doubt be stories that focus on those themes.  The goal of this blog is to remember.  To tell.  To allow me in doing so to live with more presence and intention.

To what is known, to what is unknown, to the stories told and to those as yet unwritten.