This post is for Elizabeth of Confessions From A Working Mom, who asks fellow bloggers to share a new truth each Tuesday. This week, she asked:
“Have you ever lost something….and came out a winner?”
This was an easy ask for me. As soon as I became pregnant, I lost my ability to be selfish. Now I don’t think I’m an overly self-centered person and Chris and I take on the world as a team and all that jazz BUT I never before had a human being’s life physically depend on me in a manner that led me to change many small but personal elements of my daily life. These changes, though subtle in isolation, speak to the pretty big new responsibility of birthing and raising another person; helping them to grow and put good back into this wild and wonderful world.
In pregnancy I said goodbye to brie, my figure, medium rare steaks, running (at about 25 weeks) and glasses of red …. but these losses are temporary and the reward we get, our little lady, reduce these sacrifices to the influence of a grain of sand.
In the longer term, as Chris and I look to carve out our new life balance, we won’t just be thinking about what we want, but about what we want for our family and how to still “do our own thing” within that greater and all important context. I keep mentioning this is important to us – it is – but we realize that it won’t just be us anymore, like it’s always been. That loss is slightly bittersweet when I think of all the little random things we do together (from spur of the moment runs in the dark to drinking a bottle of wine and then another to lazy weekend lay-ins) without another care in the world.
Now we’ll have a care. Our daughter. But you know what? We consciously made this choice and I wouldn’t trade the fact I’m pregnant and that we’re having a little girl and entering a new life chapter for the world. So our loss is really more our gain. For I’m sure life is soon to take on new, exhilarating dimensions that I won’t quite understand until they’re unraveling before me.
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