Goodbye and I’m Sorry and I Love You

My last words before the ultrasound were, “now we’ll find out if it’s twins!”

I looked up brightly at my partner and laid back on the hospital bed, eager to see the shape of the life- or lives! — that had been growing inside of me for the past eleven weeks. This new little being had been dictating my own life in a way I’d never imagined: now we eat. Now we sleep. Now we perch delicately on the rim of the bathtub, our head hanging over the toilet. Now we cry.

It was humbling to be held hostage to this tiny bud of existence. Each waking moment I was aware of his living form inside of me, and my life became imbued with a lightness and unreality that defied imagination.

In return to his dictates I would say things like, “now we’re going for a run up the mountain. Can you smell the winter air?” “Now we’re walking by the river, can you hear it?” “Now we’re at choir. Do you like your first taste of Christmas carols, little one?”

Motherhood had come unexpectedly. I was thirty-five and unmarried. It didn’t fit into the logical “plan” at all- the “first-comes-love, then-comes-marriage” trajectory. My partner and I were new to each other in many ways, and, with the pregnancy, we were sorting out how to be the best people we were capable of for this life we’d created.