It's time to begin, for real

So, there's no question I should be doing something else this morning. As we embark on our second move in just over three months' time, and Christmas looms, the next several days promise to be incredibly busy. I should be bubble wrapping something even as we speak, or at least putting something into a box. But as cable and the Internet will also be going away for the next couple of days, I thought I would take a little time this morning to put some words into a box.

While in general, this year has been a tumultuous one for my family and me, we find ourselves ending on some high notes, to be sure. Life gave us an "opportunity" to relocate and restart in a way that may not have been very welcome, but sometimes positive change doesn't come in a beautifully wrapped box with a ribbon that is too pretty to pull apart.

We started the year in "the winter of our discontent" to be sure. It's not as if 2013 was the beginning of hard times for the Blanchards, but I think we would both say that our faith in everything around us, except perhaps each other, was at an all time low. Things, especially hopes and dreams, seemed to be coming to an end left and right. I don't think we were always cognizant of how powerful the overwhelming sense of hopelessness had become in our everyday lives.

With the sadness of losses we could not calculate, failures we could not face, and unraveled relationships we could not rebuild, I never imagined that there was any hope of anything new coming our way. But almost six months ago today, I was proven wrong.

I had most certainly given up hope that there would be a little Blanchard to run around our home, but when we least expected it, or would have thought it a fantastic time, hope shifted. We were three weeks into Jeph's desperate job search, I was getting ready to start a new work situation, and our future was anything but certain. I guess that's when things could begin again.

Probably one of the few "angelic" moments in her little life.

In spite of the timing, and all of the crazy things that had happened, and were still happening, when I realized a baby was on the way, I somehow knew everything else would be all right. Suddenly, every sense of fear and uncertainty I had was erased. I do understand that I should have been scared shitless, but we had lost and given up so much, I guess there was just part of me that understood nothing was really up to us any more and we just had to go where life was taking us.

When dramatic things are happening, and redetermining your path, you don't always have time to understand or process them. We relocated three hours south of where we were at the beginning of September, and have found ourselves in one of the quietest places in existence. We have both been very used to a lot of noise. I assumed that I would have major adjustment issues--after all, for much of the last decade and a half, I have been a "runner" and "escape artist" when it comes to life, and now I live someplace that I finally don't feel like running or escaping from (and let's face it, during this pregnancy, I have hardly physically felt like running or escaping were plausible options most of the time).

Toward the beginning of our third month here, we finally started to feel like we should settle in, and we found a place to put down some roots. As we worked to buy our home, to start the process of furnishing it and making it a place we would be able to have company and raise our daughter, it started to occur to me that it was a very different feeling than I had experienced before. We had bought a home before; we had bought furniture before; and we had thought about the future, but not in any realistic or concrete way. When I look back at the last time we did these things, it's almost as if we were "playing at it."

As we circulated in and out of furniture stores, sitting on sofas and debating the merits of this or that purchase, all the sudden, I felt like we were just starting our lives together. That's a weird feeling to have at nearly forty-two, especially given the fact that we have spent the last twenty-one years together. This is hardly a "new" relationship. But as we have chosen every stick of furniture, as we have considered paint colors, and even whether or not to put a rug beneath our first real dining room table, a new relationship is exactly what we have.

Every part of our existence is indescribably new.

As a stay at home house Frau, I have a lot of time to think and reflect. I've probably spent more time thinking about this than I should, because occasionally I feel flashes of guilt about where we are--not in the sense that we are in a bad place, but that we were so busy doing other things that we never got to feel this newness in our lives before now. Maybe all of our running, traveling and doing had very little to do with how long it took us to get here, and this is just the natural order of things for us. We have always been odd by comparison to those around us. We have always approached our path very differently than everyone else our age. We have always done things our own way. People have frequently looked at our lives through green lenses, not realizing that we were looking at things through a kaleidoscope, not really knowing what direction we were going or what color we would see next.

There are more than a few things to be said for certainty and stability. I think we ran and escaped because we were afraid to make the wrong choices. That's probably the number one reason why we waited precariously long to have our daughter--leaving it to the nearly impossible last second. What if we got it all wrong? The fall out wouldn't just be on us--it would be on her.

In the last few months, as I have had time to be pregnant, and I have had time to think, I have become more acutely aware of my mortality than any time in my life. I am safer and more secure than I have ever been, and yet I am finally becoming aware that the thread has two ends. I think about our daughter and worry about being there for her for enough of her future to give her everything she needs. I worry about having enough of her myself. In one moment, I have not felt so young and new in forever, in the next moment, I have never been more aware of my age and its limitations.

Always before, I worried that choosing to have a child for the sake of having a child was a selfish thing to do just because you were trying to stick to a timeline. Now, I worry that choosing to wait until there was no time to waste was equally selfish.

What I expect to be norm.

Through technology, we have had the ability to see our daughter multiple times in the last several months. I already have memorized the shape of her eyelids, her lips and her nose. I love her grumpy expression as much as I love her serene sleeping face. And I assume when she looks at me for the first time, every new and old fear I have will be put in perspective. It's not for me to decide how she will view this new start in life that her father and I have made. It is for her father and I to love her everyday without thinking about how long we will have with her, and to hope that when she looks back on the time, she will think whatever that time has been, it was all well spent.

Ordinary Love--U2

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