I’m trying to get this out, at almost midnight. Better late than never, right?
In case you’ve missed all the other Time Warp’s I’ve done, this blog hop involves looking back through your archives (or the archives of a blogger you love) and finding a post that touches upon a theme and then reflecting on that post, and how you’ve changed since you (or someone else) wrote it. Thank you Kathy, from Bereaved and Blessed, for creating and continuing the Time Warp. I always enjoy it.
This month’s Time Warp focuses on Peace. I really wanted to reflect on this theme because honestly, I am one anxious, stressed out pregnant lady right now. I really need to take some time and return to the topic of peace.
When I searched my own blog for “peace,” the first post that came up was one of the first I’d ever written. It’s called Finding Some Semblance of Peace and it was written in the early days of my second pregnancy, when I was terrified of suffering another ectopic.
Reading that post, I was struck by how similar my fears were at the beginning of that pregnancy, compared with the beginning of this pregnancy. I was also grateful to be reminded of a Buddhist teaching that I wrote about there, which I grasped onto in an attempt to quell my terror at losing my second pregnancy.
In Buddhism they teach that there is no birth and death. We exist before our lives as we know them and afterwards. We are not our bodies or our collective experiences, we are a part of everything everywhere, that has ever been and will be. One way to understand this concept that seems so impossible to grasp is with a wave. You can describe a wave as being tall or short, powerful or tame, destructive or fun. You can measure a wave’s speed and distance. You can say that a wave begins somewhere and ends somewhere. But really, a wave is just water. The wave is never born, nor does it die, it is always water no matter what form it takes. When conditions are right the wave manifests. It is this way with everything. When conditions are sufficient things manifest. When conditions are not sufficient they don’t manifest.
I really appreciate that reminder right now.
Looking back at this post, I wish I could tell the woman who wrote it that everything was going to be okay, that those two lines and doubling betas would become a precious three year old girl, doing her damnedest to thwart your attempts to get her to sleep. When I think of the piece of mind I could have given her, it hurts my heart to think of all the suffering I could have prevented.
But it is also a good reminder of how the me from three years from now might feel toward the me of right now. Probably, she would want to do the same for me, assuring me it would be okay and that my fears and anxieties are for naught. That I should choose peace even though I’m not sure the peace is coming.
I’m on the eve of a series of pretty big transitions: going back to work in the third trimester; making a very restricted financial situation work; introducing a second child to our family; becoming the mother of a newborn again. Each of these on their own is a big change, all together I feel on the cusp of a complete mental break down, especially when I spend a lot of my feeling terrified about losing this baby boy. I absolutely need some peace in my life right now and I think this post did a lot to remind me of how big and scary the unknown can seem, but how everything may just be okay.
Tonight I hope I can breath deeply and return, with every breath, to a place of peace. I definitely need the respite, from my own mind, from my own, manufactured issues, from my worries and anxieties. The reality is, things will most likely be okay. And even if they aren’t, I will eventually be okay. And remembering that should be enough to help me find some peace.