Healing

It was an emotional two days in my LC class this week. Pregnancy and death, sickness and health, normalcy and pathology, jokes and tears. And in the midst of it, a mama nursing, a child playing, a baby napping.

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The way I’d imagined it, I would have my first baby while I was in grad school, as a couple of other friends had done.  It was a welcoming department, and I planned to be be the kind of mom who brought my baby to class or a lecture, nursed as needed, rocked and swayed, took notes and asked questions. Life would go on, I imagined, not unchanged but certainly enriched.

I don’t for a moment regret my alternative. There are platitudes for this sort of thing – everything happens for a reason, maybe, or something about doors and windows.  Whatever the phrase, I know this: I would not be where I am, on the path I’ve chosen, without the history I’ve had. It didn’t turn out as I’d planned – I couldn’t manage the logistics of bringing two babies to a lecture (I could barely manage to get two babies to their doctors’ visits!) and I didn’t do much nursing in public – but it turned out to be life changing in ways I could never have imagined.

And yet, it’s hard to let go of that fantasy of myself, rocking a baby in a classroom somewhere.

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It was an emotional two days, to be sure. And the napping baby? I rocked him and rubbed his back, stroked his head and soothed him to sleep, looked over his head and shared a smile with his mama, then sat in the darkness in the classroom with him and took notes and asked questions as life went on.