i knew you

07.17.2008
This seems like a good place to start my beginning on this journey towards motherhood. Peter and I are in the early stages of trying to have a baby, and I wanted a place that I could put my thoughts down. Since we're keeping everything a secret until we're actually pregnant, this is essential for me. A place to leave everything I'm thinking and feeling without sharing too much information in the early days. People go a little silly when the hear that you're "trying". Too many very personal questions, too much expectation. Besides, soon enough, it will be the only thing anyone talks about. When I'm huge and wandering through the mall, no stranger will say, "Wow, those are adorable earrings you have on." It will be, "When are you due? Do you know what it is yet? Do you have names picked out?" (At least that one, I already know the answer to.) Don't get me wrong, I am looking forward to those things, oh am I ever looking forward to that. I just want to savor each piece of this journey. I want to live and feel and be completely present where I am right now and allow myself to enjoy the experience of this. Peter wants to have a baby. With me. Soon. This alone is such a wonderful thought that I could just sit and soak in it like a bubble bath. Peter and I are going to create something that would not have existed without the miracle of us finding each other. That would not have existed without the love between us that is so amazing and beautiful that I imagine it as the little piece of the old Narnia, that echoes the beauty of the new. And speaking of the new Narnia - this is, strangely enough, where my heart is today. The beginning of this journey is starting on a sad day.

One year ago today my grandpa passed away. Which for some reasons that I did not expect, impacted me profoundly. The verse in the title of this blog, I think must be one of the most beautiful in the whole of the bible. "Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you." I think that there are children in Heaven that do not yet exist upon the earth. Today, in Heaven all together are Jesus and Grandpa and Gabriel or Isabella. Both, I suppose, now that I think of it. One of the most difficult things to me, about losing Grandpa, is that he would never hold my children. Not one of them. There would be no pictures for them to look back on and hear me say, "that is your grandpa holding you when you were just little. You don't remember him, but he loved you so much." He will be an obscure piece of family history to them, not a person they know. That seems so strange and sad to me. But this verse makes me wonder about that. That before a child is ever upon this earth, they are known by God. I don't know what that looks like, because I can't wrap my finite mind around Heaven, but there it is in black and white. Sitting in Jeremiah, this tiny little gem of a promise. How incredible that we know Heaven and the perfect presence of Jesus before we know the heartache of our journey on Earth. No wonder we feel homesick here. Or better, as the Unicorn put it when he got to the new Narnia in C.S. Lewis' The Last Battle, "I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this."

Today, when I go out to Cathedral Grove to take some time to just miss my grandpa, maybe he's sitting in some big rocking chair, holding my baby. Maybe they're meeting Grandpa before they're meeting me. They won't remember, when they get here of course, but maybe one day long long years from today, we'll all be in heaven and they'll rush up to Grandpa and say, "I missed you, even if I didn't remember that I did. It's so wonderful to see you again." Won't that be amazing. Theologically sound or not, this thought gives me great comfort. Give my babies a kiss from me, Grandpa. Tell them I'll see them soon.