And then I met Greg.

He flew out to Los Angeles a couple of weeks after we met in Chicago, and we spent a magical weekend together. We walked all around Venice where I lived, drove up to Malibu to Matador Beach, and sat out on my little deck on the canals, late into the night. On the afternoon that he had to leave we stood in my kitchen talking. I’m in love with you, he said. Move to Chicago, he said.

I nodded slowly, fear flooding through me.

Suddenly I felt more vulnerable than I had in a long time. Gone was my strength and bravery. The love I felt for this man? It left me trembling. I realized that it had been so easy to be on my own all that time because I’d had nothing to lose.

After that conversation in the kitchen I drove him thirty miles south to Long Beach airport. In the car we both cried. Please be careful with yourself, I pleaded. I was so afraid that something would happen to one of us before we had a chance to finish falling in love, to get married, to have children, to do all that I wanted to do with him. I’ll be careful, he promised.

It’s been five and a half years since that weekend, and we’ve been careful. We’ve had two kids, two cats, two moves, several books, and a thousand days and moments that I once worried I wouldn’t be lucky enough to have. But the more we’ve grown as a family, the larger my fear has become. I wish sometimes that I could wrap us all in a little bubble. I wish desperately that nothing could ever touch us, that none of this could ever, ever be taken away.

But I can’t.

And sometimes I lie awake at night, trembling from the enormity of it all.

Last weekend in yoga class, my instructor quoted Rumi. He said something like, A sufi is someone who has had their heart broken a thousand times, yet still has the courage to love. This quote ran so deeply through me that I’ve been thinking about it every day since I heard it.

I have indeed had my heart broken what feels like a thousand times, and not just romantically, but with the deaths of my parents and friends. I’ve been cut down to the utter floor of myself and I’ve rebuilt myself back up over and over. Today I feel stronger, happier, and more open and more afraid than I’ve ever been.

But I now think that this must be what it’s all about. This is what my father was talking about on his death bed, that all this constant beauty and sorrow make life what it is, that life is worth living.

My heart is raw and wounded and wild with love.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

It’s Friday, June 15th and you were supposed to be here by now. At least I thought you were. I guess one thing I’ve learned as a parent is that you can’t plan on anything. Not anything at all.

And that’s fine, but really, we’re all just so anxious to meet you. Not just me, but your dad and your sister and your grandparents (who have been here from Ohio for a full week now!). And not even just them, but all of your cousins and our friends and even blog readers (some of whom even claim to be having trouble sleeping due to all the anticipation). Maybe you’re just enjoying all this attention, all the speculation and wonderment about who you are, but really baby, I can tell you, it will only get better once you’re here.

We all can’t wait to meet you and love you even more than we do already. You’re already intimately familiar with me, your mama, but you’ve got this amazing dad to meet (he’s so smart and funny and really handsome), and also this totally crazy-wonderful big sister who can’t wait to dress you up and change your diaper and lean so close into your little face as she coos at you that your eyes will cross. You’ve got a little house in Santa Monica, California to come home to, and I promise all the plants are watered, the laundry is done, your clothes are folded, and the bassinet is all set up.

Seriously, kid. All we need is you.

Maybe you’re waiting for Father’s Day, in two more days. While I’m definitely feeling impatient for your arrival, I will attest that your dad is worth making a fuss over. He’s a really good dad, baby. He’s so thoughtful and self-aware. One of the things that always strikes me about him is that when you argue with him, he actually listens to your side. Seriously. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve been in the middle of an argument and I’ve gotten all puffed up and ready to really get feisty about whatever it is I’m arguing for when all of a sudden he goes quiet, looks around the room for a minute, and then says, you’re right. And not in an acquiescing kind of way, but in a genuine, I-just-listened-to-what-you-said-and-realized-that-you’re-right-kind-of-way. I mean, it doesn’t happen all the time, since I’m not right all the time, but I’m just saying, your dad will be someone who will always really listen to you, and that’s one of the most incredible gifts anyone in your life could ever, ever give you.

There are lots of things you’ll come to know about me, baby, but one of them is that for a long time after my parents died I felt really misunderstood. I just felt like I had been through this huge, terrible experience that most people couldn’t relate to. This caused me to resent the people around me and that feeling was an awful burden to bear. For a long time the only way I could cope was by surrounding myself with other people who were just as damaged as I was. That was the only way I felt understood — by being around other people who knew pain as well as I did.

It was when I finally got over that part of my life that I met your father. He was the first person I really loved who wasn’t damaged. Part of me being able to love him had to do with me having worked really hard to get past all of my resentment and pain, but part of it was also due to your dad being such a true listener. I knew he could never truly comprehend the things I’d been through, but you know what, baby? That didn’t matter because he really listened to me and listened to my stories and he looked in my eyes, and he didn’t just nod his head like some people do. Instead, I could tell he was searching inside of himself for ways to understand me and let me love him, and it was the most overwhelmingly lovely gesture anyone had made to me in years and years.

Anyway, all this to say that if you have to wait until Father’s Day to show up, I understand. He’s worth it, your dad.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not tapping my foot.

Love,

Mom

(Mother’s Day 2010)

I’d never loved anyone like I love Greg. When I fell in love with him it was surprising and swift and immediate and I wanted so, so much more from it than I’d ever wanted from love before. I wanted an endless future with him. I wanted to call him something more than boyfriend, which is all I’d ever called the other boys I’d loved. And I also had the deepest, simplest urge to create something with him that was made from us.

We stopped trying to be careful two months after we were married, and Vera was conceived out of that very first time. But the waterfall of changes that occurred as a result of pregnancy were just as swift and immediate as the way we’d fallen in love. Motherhood suddenly loomed, bigger and stranger than I’d ever imagined. In fact, I hadn’t ever imagined it really. I’d only thought about me and Greg and what we were together, wanting something more from that, but not quite realizing what.

Three years later and I am constantly surprised to find myself making preschool lunches and applying Elmo bandaids to scraped, little knees. The incongruence I feel when I find myself pushing a stroller to the playground or bargaining with my fussy toddler as I try to get the grocery shopping done is startling.

That’s not to say I don’t love her. I do, I do. And I love her in that same deep way in which I fell in love with Greg, helplessly and utterly.

(Mother’s Day 2011)

It’s just that in rare moments these days when I find myself alone with time to think (usually in the car or on an airplane), my thoughts are a jumble of who I thought I was going to be compared to the pressing vision of my daily life. Last night driving home from a friend’s house I couldn’t stop the images of myself in other roles: traveling abroad, teaching, researching, hosting, connecting. All things that are surely still to come, if I want them to. And if only I can remember to peek my head above the life in front of me. The one in which I dream daily of owning a home, of a second car, of a nursery for our new baby or of the swirling calendar of toddler birthday parties and playdates.

All last summer Greg and I went back and forth about whether or not we wanted to have a second child. We simply couldn’t decide. There were a hundred reasons on each side and for those first long, warm months of our new life here in California we debated endlessly. In September there was just one time when we weren’t careful, and a few weeks later we realized the decision had been made for us.

I’ll never know why some of my friends struggle for years to become pregnant, enduring loss and heartbreak and the utter rebuilding of futures imagined. And why I myself, a woman so unsure of motherhood in the first place, has so easily entered into it. Some will say it was meant to be, but of that I’m not so sure. These days I struggle to make sense of the idea of destiny versus free will, of creating the lives we want, opposed to the lives we were always going to live.

But I do know this: I know that motherhood has made me into a woman more complex and layered than I’d ever imagined. I know that the woman I have become in the last three years has only made me even more capable of being all those things I always dreamed of being. I know that my dreams are even richer and deeper and more daring, because the world is that way too, and being a mother has taught me so.

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Read more about how motherhood affected my marriage in the new anthology Wedding Cake for Breakfast

Finding My Mother Again, an essay I wrote for Salon.com

Want to buy my book? Do so at any of the above!