Ten weeks ago, I wrote this:

This morning: Sunday holds on to my index finger, proud to be walking up State Street on her two feet. I am feeling doomed after seeing it is 10 am, and I have to walk three city blocks with a stroller, car seat, toddler in tow; rent a car; install the car seat; and find my out of downtown Chicago to make my 11 am appointment with the midwives in my soon-to-be new hometown.

I don’t know that that GPS will not work at all today. That bending down to anchor the car seat strap to the passenger seat will be anatomically impossible with my belly at seven-months pregnant. It is windy, and we left the corporate housing wearing light jackets, like the foolish Californians we are/were. Sunday has a cold and it is probably going to get worse, smiling though she is. Somewhere between Menlo Park and the Middle West our worldly belongings are traveling surely to us by truck. This is the thick of it, the chore of moving. Sunday will be happy the whole day while I freak out over missed appointments, and broken websites of parking garages, and possibilities of catching the virus of my daughter and how that timing does not work at all.

At the end of the day, we will make it back to the apartment, and I will crumple into the computer and cry hydrant-style over the trailer to a documentary about mother artists—the daughter of one is asked, “Is your mommy an artist?” And she answers, “She used to be.” And there, in the heavy mix of feelings I’m so deep under, I’m brought back again to the kind of light that helped us to decided why we would leave paradise for Illinois. Whatever longing I feel for California is not as urgent as I feel toward having work, as the mothers in this video so keenly understand. I will miss the trees, but they do not send a siren call. They do not send marching orders. This interior life, next to a life with my daughter, and husband, and baby on the way, this tough, bone squeezing, life-making juxtaposition is what calls me. Here we are–a place that allows all this possibility.

Driving up the roads, so gray and cold here, I just felt very click, click, click? Like, here we are, we are so doing this. This is home.

a portrait once a week, every week, in 2013 (the 52 project)

We move from California to Chicago in twelve days. This is a hard one. We love it here, so much. These trees especially. We take with us one forest-loving two year old and our most true desires as could be determined: to grow our little family and make ourselves a home. We are banking sunlight, as if it’s all there is to do.

Because you are my second baby, and I can therefore keep my worries wrapped around your sister morning until night, I am not often enough quiet with you. You have been growing so surely for five months now, all seemingly on your own.

I want to say that sitting here with you, I’d hardly know that I was pregnant. But that’s not quite the feeling. I so very much feel the living weight of you. I feel heavy in my body, and I’m not about to do anything without checking the balance between you and me.

You are here. And in this moment I am not scared over your amazing, fragile presence. We’re here, still together at the end of a day, which is the feeling I think a mother is always trying to find or to return to after she plunges too often into fear and overreacts, again and again, to any suggestion of danger.

You are quiet in my belly, sleeping for sure. I am at work on the computer, trying to find the words.

So, the writing practice dissolved in September. I had been writing every day for three months, with marching orders from Aimee Bender’s most instructive article: “Why the Best Way to Get Creative Is to Make Some Rules.”

Then, Sunday stopped napping, and though I did hold on for a good few weeks by writing at night, I simply lost the structure to our day and any kind of doing energy. Which, as it turns out, was not so much despair as my being newly pregnant.

This news was the happiest news we’ve had in a long time! With all the cloudiness we’ve muddled through in deciding where and how to set up our lives, we’ve always been so clear and certain about having another baby. This tiny little prayed-for creature sopped up every last kilojoule I had in the early weeks, and I just had to stop everything and let the astounding fatigue and nausea of the first trimester take their course. But here, at week eight now, I’m finding bursts of energy to type again, which I did not know how to come by a week ago.

I feel the fact of needing child care so heavy these days, but I keep stopping short of finding it. It is the next step, I know. We’ve made so many hard decisions so that we could afford to have a little help during the day, and now I’m afraid to get it.

I’ve been straining to hear how the mother writers who work from home are managing to have their work and their babies. I feel sometimes like a joke, because I am only starting with writing, and it’s as if I’m struggling to describe clouds, while the others are on contract with deadlines. They say write every day, through the cracks as necessary. Be kind to yourself during the setbacks. Find a way, some way to get help.

So carry on, right? I am going to daydream up a delicious schedule for us with some quiet, guaranteed hours to write, and imagine who and how this help will be.

Last night I read:

I used to lie on beaches stoned and think I was hearing the sound of the universe breathing. Where else can you hear this? Hardly anywhere, although sometimes crickets have the same wonderful sound of infinity, of something lightly sawing away.

Thank you Anne Lamott, because every day it feels like California has a monopoly on nature, handing out religious experiences like cookies. When G and I return home from one of these holy encounters with the rustic ocean, clarifying scent of eucalyptus, identically idyllic afternoons, stillness of redwood trees, we shake our heads and ask how can we possibly leave it?

I’ve never lived any place where my senses have been so drenched in beauty. It is a sanctuary here. And I have not felt so deeply rested since maybe the long summer vacations of my youth. And yet. The non-resting portion of our lives, the part where we want to have friends over for dinner, and little friends for S to play with, and family for the holidays and birthdays, and the deep conversations not strained by work affiliations, and the sustenance to have help and our own work—all that seems to point to the overwhelming metropolis of Chicago. We love both places for opposite reasons.

I am so afraid of not having the impossible mix of open spaces and the deep forests that are here. And sometimes I wonder if my longing for nature would be as keen if I could finally keep a regular meditation practice. Am I counting too hard on the trees to do the meditating for me? To sweep me into their stratosphere?

We’ll give a final decision in the next few weeks. So much feels decided already.

Last night, when I was finished reading Traveling Mercies, I lay in the dark and I could hear one lone cricket. And it reminded me that this time of year Illinois is teeming with the forever seesaw sound of crickets. So we would possibly have that going for us in the Middle West, right? Lapping waves of ocean, no. Infinity of crickets, yes. (And of course a sticky summer night in the Midwest is always blessed by blinking fireflies.) (Let’s not talk about mosquitoes.)

Sometimes she doesn’t nap. I don’t know why. I feel grave.

On Sunday, we visited a donkey. I don’t know what he is doing in Palo Alto, but he and some other animals are there for the viewing behind Bol Park. When we had announced the plan for the afternoon, S., now one year and a half new to the world, began shouting, dong-kee! dong-kee! She sang dong-kee in the car, and dong-kee on the trail, and when we finally got close up, she whispered to him, dong-kee, to which he smiled, small-like and peaceably, pictured here.

I think of Grégoire and myself older and retired, no more children in our house, a quiet, still Sunday afternoon to fill. Would we think of going to visit a donkey? Would we remember how we all anticipated him, and how it felt to behold his longish ears? Who will ever again cast the ordinary world so fresh for us, so new?

Did you catch the Olympic Marathon on Sunday or, namely, Kara Goucher, fellow mother of a one-year-old, my running hero? She is 34 years old, which means we began running about the same time as teenagers. She’s living my number one career fantasy. I find her work very beautiful.

She did not win the Olympics, but to see someone so spent and true in her effort has been inspiring me the whole week. There’s this amazing interview with her, days before the Olympic Trials (take a look!), where she says about six months after her son had been born, she had a wake up call:

Who was going to argue against, “Oh, well I just had a baby six and a half months ago”? Who was going to be like, “No. You could have done better. You could have gone to bed earlier. You could have eaten better”?

There’s all these things I can legitimize in my head. I just had to make a choice. I can continue being a good runner. Or if I want to achieve the things I really want to achieve, I have to face that fact that I’m not doing everything I can do. I’m not working as hard as I can be working. And I just had to look in the mirror and admit to myself I wasn’t doing all that I could do.”

She pinpoints a moment in new motherhood, I think, when you’ve assimilated the reality of being a mother and you fully understand you’re operating on a whole new level of difficulty that will not lighten for many years. And yet. Who you were before the baby, the work that was being born or the work you were just in the middle of, starts calling for you again. You absolutely have obstacles getting back to it, some structural, some self-imposed, and no one dares holds you accountable in the old way, really. You are the one who must go about saving your self, even while you are being guardian to a new one. Its being hard is not an excuse. You know the places where you can work harder and smarter. Like, go to bed early. That one is seriously tough. Eat more vegetables. Mmm hmm. Have your work ready and waiting the moment she is asleep (note to self).

Photo credit: Timothy Luc Photography (Kara at the 2011 Boston Marathon finish)

This is her sweet head. This is my worldview: her facing out, my gleaning to see what she sees. She is very busy these days emptying shelves and then filling them up again, but when she finally wants a moment to be still she likes to open up our laps to climb inside, and then I get to smell the sweet, sure spot at crown of her head. It is life, this smell: warm flower, water-soaked sand. Last month, I read an interview with Regina Sirois on DesignMom who said she is always smelling her daughters’ heads:

Q: What is your favorite thing about living with your kids?

A: Their heads! The smell of their clean hair when I press my face against the soft strands. I can’t stop kissing my children’s heads. They’re used to it by now. If I don’t grab their noggins and tell them they smell like sunshine, they feel confused.

I love this. Ever since S arrived, I have become a head-smeller, too. All day when she’s running away from me and running right back to me, I am always bending down to breathe her back in. We are animals in our love, no?