In Suspension

I'm caught in an unusual phase of life. I had a full time job and lived in a city where I could call up a pal and/or jump on a train and head to a museum or take a walk down the river if the weather permitted. I'm now in a new city, there is no museum where I can simply traipse into, no pals in the same area code, and of course no job. BUT I have a baby that's going to make its appearance into this world in the next 6 weeks. Being 8.5 months pregnant is no joke. I'm a whale and my back can handle only so much activity before I have to sit or lie down. So, even if I wanted to do stuff, my activities would be seriously curtailed by the extra 17 pounds I'm toting around in my belly.

I did get a jolt of reality at my last doc appointment this week as I was told I'm already a centimeter dilated and that my cervix has started to thin. As in the little tyke is started to prepare for his journey out and I have nothing -- not even his room-- prepared!! So I took that as a cue that I need to run out to Target and get myself the basics. Nipple cream, nursing bra, diaper rash ointment, diapers ... I'm feeling a whole lot more secure even if it's all still sitting in shopping bags in the "baby room."

I hear I should take full advantage of the next few weeks since I will essentially essentially lose my life as I know it after the baby is born. As someone who stays at home, keeps house, and lives off her hubby, I already feel like I've ceded my independence to some degree. I'm now praying that I find a balance between being mother, wife, housekeeper, and being me. I know it's being done by countless women all around me. So help me if you have any idea how I can create out of my life something that I've willed rather than been forced into.

The Silver Lining

Will it ever stop snowing?

Blank screen. West Bend Wisconsin Starbucks. What am I doing here?

What if I just woke up and the last thing I remembered was getting on a BEST bus in Bombay my school bag stuffed with smelly gym clothes –navy blue tights and leotards. The smell of jute gym mats and teenage perspiration seeping out into the already saturated early morning Bombay air. No. that's too hard to imagine. I was too different then. Too unsure and shy compared to this married with child 30-something year-old. This new me may be in poe dunk wisconsin, jobless, and with no life to speak of for the moment –can't even drink the winter blues away.

My daily existence, though, is ennervating. This morning I felt like someone under house arrest. I willed myself to develop a routine so I wouldn't just sit in the middle of the living room dumbly staring into the 5 foot high drifts of snow outside. But I feel more solid than ever. I know this will all pass and that I will forge a new life here in WI. The difference between this 30 year old self and the 13 year old is an elemental sense of faith in myself. I know myself and I'm not fighting unknown demons. There is still so much I'm desperate to change about myself but there is now some perspective to my desire and my dissatisfaction. I feel like I have weight in my being so I won't just shrink and disappear into myself in this new solitude I find myself in.

Bracketed moments within eternity

We finished a bottle of Mondavi and it was 12:30 a.m. on a Saturday night when we foolishly set forth from San Jose with the crazy notion of driving north up the coast. An hour on the road was all it took to realize that this was foolish. But there was to be no other time, so we had to fit something in to make that night bracketed in our memories forever. It didn’t matter that what we were doing was highly aberrant. No one would know about it and after I left Calfornia, our lives would continue. The work we had started before we met would continue as if Muir Woods had never happened.

We made it to Muir Beach at 5:30 a.m. It was pitch dark for all of 10 minutes when the first blush of day broke on the waters of the Pacific Ocean. In the dark, the waters had crashed loudly around us as we walked towards the beach. Once on the beach I lost all sense of space or time—there was nothing but darkness around me and the sound of waves pouring into me like I was nothing—just another vessel for the vastness of the world to pour itself into and out of. Black turned into iridescent blue, which soon forced up the pinkness of a new day as it nudged up from behind an outcropping of rock. It was a new day and here I was in a cove with the woods behind me and a crescent of water in front. I stepped from rock to rock. Maybe if I got further in, I’d be completely subsumed by the steadily breaking waves and the morning light. Shaan was fitting his camera to its tripod. We barely spoke. There was no need to waste the moment with words that could never capture its essence. The moat of water around my perch on a rock was getting larger and larger as the tide made its way in. Daylight had barely broken when we walked to the car. It was still pink outside when we started out north. It never occurred to us to stop and take stock of where we were going.

When we stopped next we were at Stinson Beach. The parking lot was huge but empty. It didn’t strike me as strange that it was either huge or empty. At this point the starkness of daylight made us strangely aware of how tired we were. We didn’t think about it too much. The beach was fringed by a row of cypress trees. It was a bedroom with no walls but we slept under the canopy of cypress tress. It was broad daylight when we fell asleep. The next thing I knew, the noon-time sun was overhead and there was a dog’s tail in my face. The dog leapt over us in hot pursuit of a ball. The beach was packed with sunbathing men and women wearing next to nothing with their children. We were still wrapped in our made-in-India wool blankets. I was still wearing my hat and shoes and with large water-filled plastic Pepsi bottles near us we surely must have looked like two homeless people. It was an entirely out of body experience particularly since the beach was completely deserted just a few hours earlier.

The saltiness of the ocean rolled into the pungent smell of cypress leaves. This was going to be a moment in time suspended above all the other moments that marched on. We had stolen these moments that were never meant to be. I was bursting with a sense of being alive as I ate my salmon and goat cheese omelet. When we got back into the car, we looked out at the shimmering water and decided to just kept going north.

The beach, water, salmon--it was all a hallucination. We both belonged to other people. But that sense of abandon we shared driving north is now bracketed for time eternal.