Dear Baby,
Almost a week has passed since I last wrote. These days are so strange. I keep cleaning the house, watering the plants, fussing over little details in your nursery, waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting for you to arrive.
The anticipation is beginning to make me crazy. Your father and I are so eager to meet you, so ready to begin this new life we’ve been working towards. We’re ready to put into practice all the books we’ve read, the dvds we’ve watched, and all that we’ve learned in our birth classes. It’s as though we’ve been training for a marathon and any minute now someone is going to pull the trigger that starts the race…but when??
Today is the two-year anniversary of the day your father and I first met. Two years seems at once like an eternity and like yesterday. When I think of all that has happened in the last 24 months I can hardly believe that it has been such a short time. But when I think back to the person I was on that warm May afternoon, it seems like forever ago.
I’ll never forget being on that airplane from Boston to Chicago, never forget the feeling of suspension as the plane swept across Lake Michigan, skirting the skyscrapers, the lake spreading out like an ocean for as far as I could see. What am I doing, I asked myself as we descended over the city. I was supposed to be home in Los Angeles that day. My friend Lucy was staying in my house. We had a party to go to that night. But instead I found myself on an airplane to meet Greg in Chicago.
I had been on Cape Cod for my grandmother’s funeral. We like to joke now that she died on my birthday so that I could meet my husband. All she ever wanted was to see me married off. Perhaps an antiquated thought, but I know that it came from her wanting to see me secure and part of a family again. Well, she got her wish.
As the plane touched down I turned on my phone and texted your father. I just landed. He texted back right away. He was waiting in baggage claim. I’m nervous, I wrote. You’ll be fine, he wrote back. I remember the escalator and the white skirt I was wearing. I remember walking towards him and then standing there in front of him. And knowing right then and there. It’s you, realizing that somehow, all along, I’d been waiting for him, that everything in my life had, in some strange way, led up to that very moment.
He was nervous too and got us lost trying to find the garage where he had parked the car. We rode the same escalator twice, beads of sweat breaking out over your father’s forehead. I didn’t care if we rode the escalator all day. I wanted to touch his arm. We smiled at each other. And then we finally found the little green Honda, the one I drive to work in every day now, and there we were, your mother and father sitting side by side for the first time in their lives. Can you see it?
We drove to his apartment in Lakeview and we walked up the street together to his building. The leaves were thick with green, just as they are now. It was a warm, sunny day and inside all the windows were open, laughter and music trickling up from the street below. I smiled at the bare kitchen and the boy-plaid quilt stretched neatly across your father’s bed. We looked at his bookshelves and he offered me some strawberries.
That afternoon we rode the train down to the Loop and walked through Millennium Park holding hands. We walked across the bridge, looking back at the cityscape and I told him that I didn’t know if I ever wanted to get married, that I wasn’t sure if I wanted children. I told him that if I did, it would only be because I loved someone so much that I couldn’t help but want to make more of that love.
I could tell even then that your father would love being a father, that to deny him being a father would be the harshest cruelty. I wanted him to know that I was uncertain of that future. But even as I said those words, even as I looked into his impossibly blue eyes, some part of me knew that he would be your father, and I your mother.
So, today, dear baby, is the anniversary of the day you were conceived, not physically, but psychically. And true to so many important dates in my life, today overlaps with your grandmother’s birthday. Your father’s mother was born today, solidifying just that much more your predestination.
Flying home the next day to Los Angeles I wrote in my journal. I knew yesterday when I boarded that plane to Chicago that I was setting in motion certain things, that I was irrevocably altering the course of my life…
I think it was my parents who taught me to take chances in life, to be the kind of woman who boards a plane on a whim to meet a man she’d never met. And I hope it is us, your father and I, your parents, who give you the same gift: That life is a wide, open thing. That it is yours for the taking. That it moves forward fiercely and that when something is as it should be, you will know.
Love,
Mom
p.s. Hurry up and come out so we can meet you!
