1998: I write in my journal about a dream I had. The dream has no clear story, just quick, fleeting images like those a music video or something: a baby girl with hair the color of straw swooped into a point like a kewpie doll. A couple months later, I dream that I’m having a baby, and I’m so tired and I hear someone say, “Open your eyes and look at your baby girl!”
1999: My first daughter, Jayna, is born just as the sun rises over the cornfields and vineyards of the Central Valley in California. After laboring all night and not sleeping well the night before and pushing for almost two hours, I’m exhausted. Someone puts her warm, wet body on my chest and I hear, “Open your eyes and look at your baby girl!” She has the wispy blonde hair and blue eyes of her father, my husband, and as she grows, people tell me all the time that she looks “just like a kewpie doll!”
Fall 2001: Another dream, so brief but so vivid. Jayna and I are tiptoeing through a room, her little hand in mine. I whisper, “Don’t wake up your baby sister,” and point my chin to a baby wearing a pink sweater. Her back is to us, and her hair, though also blonde, is much thicker and longer than Jayna’s was at this age.
January 2003: My second daughter, Skyler, is born. She has lots of dark brown hair, but soon it grows in thick and blonde. One day, as I was watch her sleep, in that cute little curled-up bug position with her face turned away, I realize I saw exactly this picture before I even met her.
This happens with all my babies–a glimpse before I meet them, before I even know they exist. It’s rarely an ideal time to have a baby; I have to move halfway through pregnancy with three of my babies, and Matt has deployments. But those dreams, those brief and fleeting images, speak quiet assurances to me.
Fall 2024: I dream of a baby’s laughter. It happens a few times. One morning I hear it just before my eyes open, and I wake with a smile on my face. Who was that? I wonder. Every time I hear it, I feel a strange mix of warm happiness and an ache to meet whoever’s voice that is. I smile every time I think of it. Then suddenly, a thought makes my heart pound: Could I… be pregnant? I just celebrated my 46th birthday in August, so that and other issues make it seem extremely unlikely. But then, while on my morning walk through the woods, I listen to an episode of The Moth about a woman getting pregnant at age 46. As soon as I’m home, I jump in the car and drive to the store for a double-pack of pregnancy tests.
Negative.
I breathe a deep sigh of relief because at this point, I really enjoy sleeping whenever I can achieve the right balance of darkness, temperature, magnesium glycinate, tart cherry juice, earplugs and white noise. Annalee, my youngest, is nine and the perfect caboose to our family. I’m ready to close that chapter.
But that laughter… Whose is it?
January 2025: I’m standing at the sink of our upstairs bathroom, brushing my teeth. The door is open to both the bathroom and my bedroom, where Skyler sits at the end of the bed. She leaves early tomorrow morning, and I’m asking her all the last minute questions about what she has packed and what she’ll do to get home from the airport in the middle of a predicted snowstorm. With a sigh, she rubs her stomach and says something about how it’s weird, she has heartburn and she doesn’t usually get heartburn.
I have a strange sense of deja vu, and then I remember it’s because I said these very words to my mother when I was pregnant with her. Suddenly, the blood rushes from my head. I bend over the sink to spit out the toothpaste and lean on it for support.
“Skyler,” I ask in a shaky voice, “are you–or–do you think you could be, anyway–pregnant?”
I have missed so many important days and moments as she has been away in college: parent weekends, move-ins and -outs, the accident that totaled her car. The same is true with Jayna. The miles between us feel like a weight tied around my heart and the longer we go like this, living lives so very far apart, the more exhausted I am from carrying the weight.
But right now, in this deeply significant moment, we’re together. I sit down on the bed next to her. We speak in whispers, raggedly edged with tears as we consider who we are in this moment and who we might soon become.
I don’t tell her yet about the dreams, the laughter, the smile lingering on my face as I awoke. But I do say, “I love you so, so much,” words that, this time, I can speak with her hand in mine. And I can say to her with certainty, even with so many unknowns, “You’re going to be an amazing mother.”
Friends, here is my newest love:
I’m going to be his Gigi.
This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Become."
All those dreams! What precious gifts for you, but also your children and now grandbaby to know that you loved them before you even knew they existed. Congratulations, sweet friend. I am thrilled for you!
Awww!! This is beautiful! Congrats!!!