(Diary) Week 31: What Will Life Be Like?

As a new mom.

Welcome to my diary. These are entires I wrote during my own pregnancy. What you’re about to read is unfiltered, unedited, and perhaps a bit uncanny. But these are my raw feelings written in real-time. Everyone’s perspective and journey is different. This is mine.

Somebody once told me that the only way to slow down time is with newness - new things, new experiences, new adventures.

"Give it a try," she pleaded. "You will believe in magic again." 

I want to be a person who just loves old things, holds on to everything, even after it's expired, gathers piles of stuff and people and places and puts them all under one roof, as if to say: you're my safety, my home, my everything, don't go.

I want to be a person who falls in love easily, like a fool, who exhales when the new is approaching, without feeling an urge to fistfight it. 

"Give it a try," she pleaded. "You'll start to notice things you need to see. You'll feel the unthinkable."

I find myself flashing forward, quite often. I wonder what life will look like when I'm new as a mom.

"It's the firsts that make us feel alive again," she says. "And you need to feel alive again." 

So I close my eyes and try to feel what the first-times will feel like. 

The first time I see her, the first time we cry together, the first time her eyes travel toward mine and she smiles, I gasp. The first time I tell all about this family she's found, the adventures we've created, the flavors of love we eat around here. 

"But if you want to feel alive again," she says. "You have to say goodbye to something first." 

I open my eyes and try to let go of the lasts:

To the last time my heart will be attached to just Adam and Goofy. To the last time I might ever sleep through the night. To the last time I can sit in a dark corner of a coffee shop and write for 12-hours straight. To the last time my body will be this whole before a baby gets out of it. The last time I'm able to look in the mirror and say: You're an unpredictable mess, Jen Glantz, thank goodness you aren't someone's mother.

I want to be a person who gets unstuck from the past. I want to be a person who falls in love again, fast. I want to feel alive and I want to live inside the firsts.

But it's just that that is so fast and I have never been any good at being able to say goodbye.