We've come a long way together these last 35 weeks. I am watching you now as you push or squirm against my belly, and I wonder if you're comfortable or if you're wondering, too, what life on the outside will be like. Your dad and I finally settled on names, so we're prepared if you're a girl or a boy, and we think you'll be pleased with your name either way as a simple beginning to a last name that you'll be correcting people on for all of your life. But be proud of that, too--Mailloux, MAY-you--for you'll be one of only a few.
Big brother Jack keeps asking why you're still in there. I tell him you have to grow big enough and strong enough so we can hold you, and he worries that you will come out bigger than he is. I assure him that he will always be bigger than you (unless you overtake him in height one day, but I won't tell him about that now). You two will share a room themed in nature--including dinosaurs--that's decorated with books and prints from books and pieces of our family, like the koala handkerchief that belonged to your Great Grandma Lentz.
Great Grandma Lentz passed away nearly two years before she could meet you, and I regret that you'll never hear her Aussie R's. Your Great Grandpa Lentz, too, has been gone nearly a decade. And your Great-Greats, well, I was lucky to know them when I was young. But you'll have four Greats when you enter this world: Great Grandma & Grandpa Jackson and Poppy & Great Grandma Turkle. And four grandparents, too: Grandma & Grandpa Jackson and Papa & Grandma Mailloux. I want you to know them, and I want them to know you. You will learn much from them, just as your dad and I have.
Daddy and I are anxious to hold you, to let Scooter greet you and lick your feet, to take you to storytimes and parks and on hikes. We long to know the sound of your coo's, the shape of your smile, the color of your eyes, the particular way you like to be soothed.
As for me, you've been kind to me as you've grown. I didn't have morning sickness, only fatigue and some nausea. I didn't have food cravings, only a preference for cereal and ice cream. But I'm ready to reclaim my body as you learn your own. I'll have pounds to lose and stretch marks to shrink and muscles to build back to some endurance for walking and lifting. But, though I don't recognize my face or my body right now with the shape and weight of you, I will need you and your dad to remind me that all of these changes are the most natural changes for a woman because they mean I have created and carried life. I am not myself because I am two: me and you. And when I am just me again, I will have the reminders of you--some for all of my life--and I shall be grateful for that. Because I will have you.
In the five weeks until we meet you, I will probably break down a few times, overwhelmed by the changes you will bring to our lives. But then I will go sit in your room in the rocker and realize I'm ready because forty weeks is so long when you start and so short when you think of the end result of a living, breathing, burst of love that you get for it all.
So, please let me sleep and eat and breathe without too much trouble for the next few weeks. I'll repay you with a love-filled life, I promise.
Love,
Mom
