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to emerge amoebic...

I HAVE A FEW EXCUSES...

For my long-term absenteeism from Diaryland sprinkled with a few anemic posts as of late.

Primarily, I do not have the internet at home presently. This means I get to squeeze five hours worth of Emails, Online Banking, Bill-Paying and Angelina Jolie/Brad Pitt updates into a thirty minute window at work. (Not serious on that bit about Angelina Jolie - I get my updates at the grocery line weekly - and against my will.)

Second - we have the ten pound very opinionated little bald person who chose to join my life back in June - hovered with one foot on the planet for the ensuing three months and decided to stay for good in September.

She's now at home sans heart moniters and plastic tubing - just the way we like her best.

We ALL know 'kids are hard work' and yadda yadda blah blah yawn please GOD don't tell me another cute story about what Billy flushed down the toilet yesterday - but my GOD they were all hiding from me what kind of a gut wrenching heart wrenching sleep depriving stress on ten kind of experience it would really be.

I guess my third excuse for hesitation to write here has been the fact that my old caterpillar skin is lying in a dumpster somewhere and I've been drying some pretty different looking moth wings by the moonlight.

How the hell do I call myself Cecilia any longer - what a foolish little girl she could be.

I have sifted at length through other "Mommy Diaries" detailing ad nauseum their battles with poopy diapers, post partum depression and supermarket lines. Though I guiltily find myself laughing out loud at accounts of dogs slurping up baby poop - I don't feel tempted to run right out and join a "Mom Blog" Consortium. I don't think I belong in that cubby hole either.

I have battled already with what costume I might put on these days and found myself bemusedly shuffling through my old pictures of what I'd thought "Momhood" might be for me. Please see below:

I am not ashamed to say my little girl was a surprise to us - that we were both far from planning to have any children in the near future if at all - that to be honest - next to MARRIAGE - the only other thing that made me break out into hives and run lurching to the bathroom was the idea of motherhood.

How droll, how boring how terribly gauche.

I was the one in the office who, when Cindy Lou came a' visiting from maternity leave beaming with her stinky slimy little bundle of joy - would sink down in my seat playing dead while all the other hens went in droves to admire... clucking and cooeing away.

Stay with me here child lovers -

I gave birth to my little one (though I still debate that - kind of like the man on the moon theory - was it staged?) I held her five pounds of mystery in my arms - I kissed her, shrouded her squinting with my hair, I watched her quickly fade with illness, watched her belly become distended and tissue paper thin, watched them insert one needle-laden tube after another into her microscopic viens, watched them take her from me to cut her into pieces, sat hopeless in a heap when they told us we would lose her -- we would lose her.

I spent nine months scared shitless of something as mundane as diaper changing.

And now the possibility of life without her seemed meaningless and trite.

By some combination of fate and Gods and Goddesses and the love of everyone around us, and the sheer will of us and of her - she came home.

I took my daily walk from the office to the sandwich shop around the corner. It's a balmy December day (Thank You Global Warming). The trees seem less barren.

A small family emerged from a cell phone shop, the mother absentmindedly ushered her five year old down the sidewalk. Before I would have mentally rolled my eyes spouting in my mind some comment about overcrowding and other self righteous bullshit.

Today I felt her power - their connection - the ebb and flow of life, death, creation, extinction. I felt myself bleed into her and into her child and emerge amoebic on the other side.

I finally, for the first time in my isolationist existence- felt a part of the Universe.

12:45 p.m. - 2006-12-15
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