Chrysalis

It is a Saturday afternoon and I am at my favorite coffee shop, a place I love not so much for its ambiance as convenient location and addictive blended drinks. Today I am missing my Saturday and Sunday afternoon coffee shop jaunts, time I regularly dedicated to working on my writing. I have set my writing aside in this time of preparation and change. It seemed natural (and inevitable). I couldn't handle so many things at once. But I miss it.

I feel nervous. Will it come back? How will I be changed when all this is over? Will I have time for it? Motivation? Will I have the spunk it takes to try to get my novel published?  Will I have the inspiration to write another one?

I am hatching a baby inside me, but I feel as if I'm the one inside the chrysalis instead, transforming into some new shape that I can't predict.

The last two months have been relatively quiet and still - my own emotions and physicality requiring a slower pace. I am grateful, in retrospect, for this slower pace, hoping it is preparation for the time to come, when my life moves at the pace of a baby, with all the simplicity and repetition and all-encompassing nature of his demands and needs.

My emotions feel all mixed up, a tangle of strings. Sometimes I wish I had stopped working by now so  that I could put more of my energy into navel-gazing and trying to decipher all that I'm feeling. Maybe I'm trying to understand something, trying to get my hands around something that is impossible -  that will only come to me with time.

I know I am about to go through:

• A momentous experience physically and emotionally - childbirth, something I can neither control nor predict.
• A surreal and happy and sad and scary experience - stopping work, something that's been part of my daily routine for the last 13 years. 
• A challenging experience - learning to be a mama to a newborn.
• A major change as my husband and I grow from a family of two to three.
• And then I wonder about what I don't know...

What does a caterpillar dream of, while he sleeps in his cocoon? Does he have any idea what awaits in a new world of wings and wind?