Thoughts for a Saturday when my husband is home and I can think again

R is home for the weekend and I've got some breathing room. I wanted to write something about how different this pregnancy has been from my first. By "different" I mean both physically unpleasant and emotionally unsettling but also just different; frankly, I'm happy to see it drawing to a close. A friend of mine in the States has been pestering me for a belly shot and it occurred to me that I don't have any. I don't seem to have a single picture of me pregnant this time around. R and I are going to fix that tomorrow, but I think a good sum up of how differently I've worn these two pregnancies - or how differently they've worn me - is that the first time around I had studio portraits taken - and yes, some of them are the obligatory nude pregnancy photos and I have to say they're all fantastic - and this time around I don't even think we snapped off something with the digital camera. I'm sure there is something very telling in that, but I'm equally sure that whatever it says doesn't really matter. The baby. The baby matters.

Or I wanted to write something about how at some point in the last month wee faeries have apparantly visited my son in the night and turned him into a full-blown boy. One day last week in the park he went tearing away from me and suddenly I saw how very different he's become, different in some untouchable way. More sure of himself, more rambuctious, more...I would say more there, but he has always been so very there. But he's older and more confident and there was a moment last week when I saw a flash of something I'd never seen before and I wondered where it had come from and just how long it had been there and had I missed it before? Or had it really just happened, just that day, just in that moment did I catch out of the corner of my eye the very instant in which a page in my son's life turned? Did I catch, just once, the very moment he grew?

Or I wanted to write how Thursday night in the dim light from the nightlight I turned to him in bed - because of course he sleeps with me when R is away - and he looked like a baby, curled on his side one hand on his neck, sucking his thumb. He could have been nine months old, or nine days old. He bends the lines of time, growing in circles it seems, swinging from boy to baby and back again.

I wanted to write about how today is my mother's birthday again and about how it doesn't matter anymore. I wanted to write about how it's taken forever to get here but that doesn't matter anymore either.

Because it may have taken forever to get here, but I'm here.