Cold, Bright and Quiet

This is Danny. Cute, huh? He was born in August -- but this is the story of why he's my Christmas baby. I hope you enjoy it :)

A year ago today, I woke up sure I was not pregnant.

It’s not like I thought about it specifically – I was just in that general state of not-pregnancy, the state in which I’d spent all of my previous life, minus Henry’s 38 weeks and 5 days.

Around lunchtime I did a little math, as women do … and then I re-checked that math … and then I asked Tim if maybe I should go get a test, just to ease my mind. At that point I thought about it specifically. I thought, I am obviously paranoid, not pregnant.

On my way to Safeway I made a nice excuse for myself. We were about to head out to visit family, and I didn’t want to be fretting about an imaginary pregnancy when I should be stuffing myself with cookies and pie. I might end up asking my mom to drive me to Walmart to buy a pregnancy test. (No one on earth wants to ask her mom to go with her to buy a pregnancy test.) So why wait? Know now.

Safeway was packed with people buying last-minute cans of pumpkin and rolls of wrapping paper and bottles of wine. I put the test in my basket and hid it under a can of chili beans and a red pepper. (No one on earth wants to go to the store and buy only a pregnancy test.) I managed to run into two acquaintances, mumble Merry Christmas, and scurry out.

Earlier I had flipped through radio stations to find one airing Christmas music I liked. I’d landed on NPR playing sweeping orchestral arrangements, the kind with choirs singing in languages other than English. On the way home I stopped at a red light, no other cars in sight, and listened to the San Francisco Symphony play “Silent Night.”

Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright.

I thought of something I’d heard once, that when a baby is born the world outside the womb is overwhelmingly cold, bright, and quiet. I realized something.

People who go to Safeway on Christmas Eve to buy a pregnancy test are not paranoid.

People who go to Safeway on Christmas Eve to buy a pregnancy test are pregnant.

And I was. Tim and I built Henry’s new train set on the living room floor that night. I’m sure we must have talked about the news but I mostly remember laying the tracks, driving Thomas around the loop and over the bridge and around the other loop.

I know we just kept saying it over and over in various forms, confirming the truth with speech: We are going to have another baby.

When we arrived at my parents’ house the day after Christmas we spilled the news almost immediately, figuring they would notice my exhaustion, raging heartburn, and sudden strange disinterest in hot toddies. Soon after we told my grandparents. At my family’s New Year’s Eve party, during our ritual making of predictions for the coming year, I replied to my sister-in-law’s joking, “Wouldn’t it be funny if you said you were pregnant?” with, “I am.” The only person who heard was one of my cousins, and she leapt up and shushed the room and made me repeat myself, and all my aunts and uncles and cousins shrieked and cheered and laughed.

It was wonderful to have those moments with them. When I was pregnant with Henry, my parents and extended family learned by phone calls from the emergency room. I had severe morning sickness and vomited myself into dehydration. I was terrified.

But the funny thing is, there in that room of celebrating people on New Year’s Eve, I was terrified too. Henry had been planned, wished for, worried over. This baby was … Out loud I smiled and said “a surprise.”  In my head I said, “an accident.”

I wrestled with that for months. I never got as sick as during my first pregnancy, but I felt far more frightened and sad and uncertain. We’d wanted another child, sure, but not now. Later. On our timeline.

I know I’m not the only pregnant woman who has ever felt like that—or felt all sorts of worse things—but I just never expected to feel that way. I made it worse by beating myself up about it, lying in bed telling myself to stop being a weenie, suck it up, and accept that I was having another baby and it was going to be awesome. Never that easy, though.

I kept going back to Christmas Eve, to “Silent Night.” When I was a kid I thought the lyric “Round yon virgin” was pointing out Mary’s big preggo belly. I thought of my favorite verse from the Christmas story, Luke 2:19: “But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.”

I love the idea of Mary pondering in the midst of the chaos of shepherds and angels. Rolling over the moments in her head again and again, examining them from new angles, searching them for new meanings. Making them a permanent part of her, because she knew she was experiencing something she would never experience again.

So I pondered the moment at the stoplight. The symphony, the clarity. Cold, bright, and quiet. I thought of the little being in me, curled in darkness and warmth with the beating of my own heart a constant cadence. I revisited the fear and the thrill and the strangeness. It didn’t stop me from being scared. But it made it real.

I’m excited for my first Christmas with Danny this year. I’m excited for my family’s New Year’s party, where we’ll pull out last year’s predictions and laugh over my big announcement. But today is special , because today is when I got the news. It’s a moment I like to hang on to.

(Interactive blog comment time! Share one of your best Christmas moments in the comments :)  )