On making something I can never outmake

It's weird, nothing has made me feel more myself lately than pregnancy. I feel this renewed energy just before his birth to create something wonderful, to create many things. Perhaps it's because as I sit here, I'm in the very act of creation. I feel a pull to renew my website, to fill it with interests, pursuits, life lately. But I also want to write my novel again, to embroider beautiful tapestries, to decorate a tray of goods and set a nice table. To make, to make, to make.

Maybe this will all fizzle away with my son's birth. Maybe it's the fleeting rush of productivity manifesting in new form that all pregnant women experience. Or perhaps just like his birth, it's something new being born for us all. I won't weigh myself with expectation, but the anticipation I feel for meeting my son is linked to my own excitement of what is to come. Suddenly I have a fresh start of what it means to be me, to define our family, to define our life, all for this little person, and that includes me, too.

Most women report losing themselves to childbirth, but when people ask me how pregnancy has been, I repeat over and over the word "transformatitive." It implies no perfection, days neither easy nor hard. Transformation bears the weight of many influences, many highs and lows. But transformatitve it has been. I've shifted from being the center of the universe to something both greater in purpose but lesser in focus. I'm no longer the star of my own narrative, but instead a side supporting one to this little human on the way, and what a relief it has been for me. All the pressure of being someone—a vague, general, unknowable term—great cast aside so I can be his mother—a specific role balanced by all the other me's. As I give myself more to him maybe I'll feel differently. Maybe the sleepless nights and full days will mean I will lose myself once more. But he's not even here yet, and I think I know again what so many women say when they lean on the age-old adage of how life started with you.

Life will be different. But together with the love of my said life, I've made something I can never outmake. The pressure is off. I'm free to just be a regular, forgotten person, in the blip of time. Have I waited for this feeling my entire life? Has making something extraordinary—with no real concerted effort on my end, just the course my body chose—humbled me into realizing I can exist without achieving a title, publishing something memorable, or eternalizing myself forever somewhere, yet still go on happily, if not more so, than before?

I used to roll my eyes at people saying their children were the best things that happened to them, the most important things, and then on and then on. What were children compared to that of timeless art, to the classics, to the tales as old as time? But they are the tales as old as time. As an exceedingly average, hermit-like woman, my own banality has struck me more than once. To aspire to be as I was felt inferior. And yet I have never felt more connected to humankind than now. I suddenly have such insight and clarity into the past of my father, my mother, my grandmother, my grandfather, my aunts, my uncles, my brothers. I see their full story from womb to whomever they are now. I see stories everywhere, the more banal and quotidian the better. They are there, and in each child is born a story. And I carry a story with me now. Through him I can reach out and feel the history of our humanity in a way I never could when it was just me. First there was the love between me and. his father, and here now we have a story of us, of our families, of their families, webbed into one little person. And he will become his own character, his own person, his multiverse version of himself.

With no more than a small effort on my part, no character-building, no drafts one, two, three, no rewrites and reviews and queries, I've participated in something larger than myself. Compared to a page of words, what is life?