While we wait to meet our daughter, I’ve spent time with the meaty novels and collections I’ve been meaning to read. After relying on memoirs of survival this past year and a half, I’m giving my brain back to fiction: Alice Munro, Barbara Kingsolver, Ian McEwan. If there’s time, George Saunders.

At the same time, I’m ready to take a step back from it all, push away from the desk and my own memoir of survival, and settle into a space that will soon be all about her. But she isn’t quite ready to join us. So, we wait. I read. Ryan plays the guitar. Ruby lounges nearby. The hot summer air floats to a stand still beyond our open windows. For the most part, things are simple. The bougainvillea is so lush and full it bleeds into the sun.

There must be a term for this—the waiting period, the in-between time, the hours on the clock right before everything changes. Inside which one of those hours on which one of these days will she arrive?

There is mystery still, as there has been each step of the way—from the day you find out a baby is coming, maybe to the day you find out one no longer is, to the day another begins—and grows—and beats—and kicks—and is finally ready to be born. All I want to hear are cries from her lungs. All I want to see are her eyes open. All I want to feel is the curl of her fingers around mine. All I want is for Ryan and I to look at each other and see, in her, how far we’ve come. Again:

It turns out our most revealing traveling has not come from being Californians living in Chile these past three years, or from side adventures on islands, along coastlines, or next to volcanoes. It’s come from this. This loss and this life. This grief and this effort to pull ourselves back up. This is how I’ve come to meet my truest self. The person who wasn’t necessarily always there, but was summoned.

Because you cannot see certain views and remain the same. Nor, I now believe, would I want to. The journey has never been back to who I was before, back to “normal,” back to the expectations or minor problems a charmed life may allow, or back to anywhere at all. It’s not a self-knowledge one seeks, but once it arrives, it’s you, down to your core of cores, nestled so deep within it couldn’t possibly be extracted. Unable to un-know it, you walk on knowing it all too well.

There I am, I think, when I read another stunning essay about grief. There I am, when one morning I can’t feel the baby kicking, even though I jiggle her home, even though I stand in front of the refrigerator chugging lemonade. The trauma and the panic re-surface. We call the doctor. We run down the street. I clutch my husband’s hand in the backseat of the cab, saying over and over: “I can’t live through this again.” I throw my head back when someone gets on the elevator at three and we need to get to four. I could push through the steel. I tell the guard, “No puedo sentir a mi bebé.” He gets the midwife, who is soon over me with the Doppler as if it is meant to jumpstart my own heart, until we hear hers booming from her peacefully sleeping body. There she is. 

We also have been traveling to her, as she has been to us. She has already brought us such joy. There I am, too, in that joy. Because I have loved being pregnant. Despite the past trauma, through it, my body has responded well and has proven to be a good home to her. With her very own body, she has accomplished what I so desperately have wanted to see: a big, round belly sticking out into the world.

Now, I feel my body, primal, readying itself to do whatever it takes to deliver her safely into the world. It’s not so different from how I felt delivering Lorenzo. The clarity rises from a depth. It doesn’t question. The body knows what it has to do. Lorenzo has already taught me and because of that, I am calm. There he is, too. This will not be my first delivery, but it will be my first birth. She will teach me how that feels. She is healing, but she is not the reason when people say “everything happens for a reason.” She is not even ours. She is her own person, as her brother was. Her journey will be her own, as her brother’s was.

The difference being she will be. She will be, will be, will be.