Baby Face

Happenings abound. Our annual Artisan Fayre was splendid as ever and very welcome as a dip in energies prevented me doing extra markets before Christmas. The big day itself was good and happy. Pickle and I stayed with my parents in a very damp and lovely part of Somerset for a few days. I was not permitted to leave the sofa (to be honest, I didn't put up much of a fight) and Pickle had a great time amassing wonders. Mum was a bit twitchy every time the phone rang because my sister-in-law was due to have their first baby on January 1st. Luckily she has stayed put well past National Hangover Day and we're all now impatient to meet her, particularly her mum.

Meanwhile I have been working and readying our home for my new daughter. My laptop is going through a tricky patch in its relations with my external harddrive, so I can't access photos, but I do have this scan picture:

I had an extra scan because her growth chart looks disasterous, but it seems that is because she is trying out a new position every time she's measured. I've told her my preference for head down, but you know how hard it is to get kids to listen.

So all is well. Pickle has gone back to school having not had enough holiday to really recover from last term and the excitement of Christmas, but she is happy to do so and I, while predictably tired and experiencing mild versions of various pregnancy ailments, am basically hale and hearty and deeply grateful that my family is growing in this beautiful way.

Wishing you all joy this year - not simply happiness (although go ahead and have a bunch of that too), but the kind of wriggling, skipping joy which makes it nearly impossible to behave sensibly.

The Blooming and the Bud

There is so much I haven't said.

The seven-week scan with the two blinking heartbeats. Two! The horror in the eyes of friends as they congratulated me. The planning for two of everything. Pickle's pride and excitement at being a big sister to twins.

Then the weeks of rolling nausea and exhaustion which left me barely able to care for Pickle, myself and my two growing beings, and entirely unable to to do any housework or stay awake for an entire day. Pickle has been amazing. I am very grateful for how she accepted and adapted to my less fun state.

The 12-week scan, my first chance to see them properly. But... one heartbeat. Just one now. One healthy and very active baby; one sad forever-bud adrift within me. No heartbeat and no future. We will never know who it would have been if the folds had been crisper or the edges more neatly aligned and the whole wonderful origami of evolution had - Ta dah! - made a baby, a human instead of this tiny cloven-brained frog with no jump. We will never know.

Very, very much (I have pinned my sanity on this), I hope we will know who this other baby will be as it and I bloom together towards birth. Because I am still carrying my little frog, there is a risk of losing both, but I want to spend all the time we have together, 70 more minutes or 70 more years, believing in this life and preparing myself for the full-frontal heart collision that is motherhood again. 

It is time for something really spectacular and wonderful to happen to Pickle and I. Twins seemed the miracle which promised us happiness and joy. One baby is miracle enough.

Love in the Snow

Disharmony

Two days of chilly shoulders and frosty undertones. No more snow outside. It has gathered on our hearts. 

We rally round our daughter, coaxing her from tears to joy again and again. It is exhausting, but she keeps us in some kind of contact.

The Solstice fire has died. Christmas has been unwrapped. Another year looms and I am unready to meet it.

Another 365 days of nappies and hoovering and washing up and surviving from coffee with a friend until a cup of tea at playgroup.

I feel physically dis-heartened. Something has gone so wrong. I am tired, but I am always tired and I didn't feel like this last week. I don't remember feeling like this since I have been in partnership with my husband who is usually such a source of joy for me. Today he is an irritant, possibly acidic. Not even a bath of asses milk would be balm enough. I need something else.

 Feeling Rather Tense

My husband needs something else too. And though I ache to give it, I cannot name it, much less find it in myself.

He cannot stay in a space with me. He laces his boots in a silent, depressed fury, kisses our girl who sits on my lap goodbye and opens the door to leave.

My breath stops. He has never, ever, refused to kiss me like this. A desperate voice  from inside me calls,

'I love you.'

The door shuts. The tears track my cheeks and I hug the baby tight as I watch him descend our steps.

He turns around. He'll take his bike; get further from me.

But no. He has opened the door again.

He is in the room.

He says,

'I love you too.'

More tears. And we tell of the mirrored smallnesses which have sucked the heat from our lives.

We kiss. Find resolutions. Find comfort in each other again.

There is a bright flame in the dark and we gratefully warm our hands; thaw our hearts.

Later, I ponder what had led us to that place. Many things, of course, had interwoven the net which caught us, but I see one thing clearly: I had forgotten my machete. When the world is tangled and dense and catches at my hair I have a tool which never fails me if only I remember to use it: I can write.

I recall evenings too busy and sociable or too tired and miserable to write my journal and the dream-binding which followed; which always follows.

Fool

I am a fool. If I achieve nothing else this coming year, may I remember that writing is not only my passion and my talent and, newly, my job. It is also my lifeline, the lighthouse beam which sweeps an arc accros the unknown so I can catch a glimpse of my mind-corners and chase the scuttling creatures away.

And I am wise. 2 days of iciness out of 365? We're not doing so badly. I did call out. And he did turn around. He is the source of much of my joy once again.

And all those nappies? That's where the real love is. One nappy at a time, I am saying to my family,

'I love you'.

In Love; At Peace

Dancers

Another painting for your appreciation, I hope. 

Dancers is lighter; easier on the heart than Cosmic Mother.

As I painted this I was enjoying the unexpected shapes we make when we dance without inhibition, or at least with our cloaks of inhibition slipped a little off one shoulder.

Dancers

Oil on Canvas

40" x 20"

I have done several kinds of exploratory and expressive dance training and synthesised these, and other learnings I have eagerly gathered, into FreeDancing  which I teach to groups and individuals. 

I always delight in the revelation of beautiful self which comes, cautiously or brazenly, through our bodies when our clever, busy minds dare pause.

First, we cling to the music, to the physical space, and get kind of groovy, kind of rhythmic, kind of sexy.

 

 Sometimes at this point we have that crazy list of thoughts: Do I like these people? Why did I pay money to feel awkward? Does my bum look big in this?

And, when we have quite finished our anxieties and preoccupations (just for today; we can always do more another time), a touch of magic sparks up our spines and all those other people don't seem so 'other', and nor do we. We begin to think that perhaps we are just fine as we are. Perhaps.

And with this sense of 'okay self' comes a new daring to reach for what we need but so rarely ask for.

We pull into our centres, from the skies, from the Earth, from each other, that missing... that missing thing which we could name if only we knew what it was called. 

And our call to the world to help us ease this... this lack, perhaps... is always, always, always answered. We just need to ask. So simple. 

And it feels... ah, yes, thank you... it feels like home.

 

And although this home is a place where we are safe to be scared and angry and full of grief for the thousand unhealed wounds we wear; although it is tough, sometimes, to stay here, when we are so used to the 'What will they think?' place; although it feels, with good reason, that we may not come out the same as we went in, there is a joy suffusing our bones and being; an ecstatic love of just being alive right now, which we can keep safe for when next the dark clouds roll over.

 

Maybe the greatest gift of this holy practise is that for every little hurt we can heal in ourselves, we have a little more energy, more love, more self, to offer out to the rest of the world. 

So as we dance and pray and heal and work wonders in our own lives, we are also sweating and crying and laughing and shouting for our friends of all kinds in all places. 

We are doing nothing more, nor less, than changing the world.

 

And that, my friends, is most definitely magic.