ABC radio is on playing choral music; it is just after 6 am and I am already bath-clean and smelling slightly of lavender.
I play finger-splash music in the bath, which has stirred up the baby. He’s feeling lazy like me though- just turning slow morning tidal rolls that are oddly pleasant.
It’s a good time to be up: obligatory birdsong, cats weaving through the tomato plants in the yard pretending to be great white hunters, and no human noise yet from my street.
My world is well. So well it seems almost naïve to feel this lovely lull when there is storm and chaos all around. But I think pregnancy does have its own purpose, one of drawing in to integral internal rhythms of physical needs, but also of drawing in to an optimistic quietude and peacefulness. Judith Wright said it well with ‘oh node and focus of the world’
Perhaps I need to feel that my world will be a warm and safe place for my baby or I wouldn’t give birth, just stay pregnant all my life, baby wrapped and gently rocking in the safe hammock of my self.
I used to think pregnant women seemed dreamy at best, and dumb at worst.
I think now I am the same. A bit dreamy, definitely dumb at times, but clearly battening down the hatches and preparing my rusty old ship for the onslaught ahead.
The ship is calm, or more perhaps becalmed- that time of floating still in the eye of a storm where the world is silvered and semi-real and we are held motionless by big weather unseen
.
Little waves lap at the hull; the crew carve wooden dolls and wait.
