Gestation
When Dan and I returned to California, the sweet taste in our mouths of the Pacific Northwest made us come to an easy decision. We were heading back to Oregon. Dan packed his family inherited dresser, his guitars and clothes into his Chevy van. I packed my family inherited maple rocking chair, my journals, books and clothes into my Fiat station wagon and, like modern pioneers, we carvaned up the coast. This time as we drove over the border into Ashland and then on to Eugene, we knew we were coming home.
Our first autumn with its brilliant reds, oranges, golds and yellows is remembered like an artist's dream. We camped inside the van on the doorstep of a friend's house. Dan and I started looking simultaneously for an apartment and for work. The crisp sunlit days turned into cool nights. These cool nights turned into freezing winter ones. During the first pre-Thanksgiving snow fall, we had been visiting another friend teaching near Dayton. We appreciated the warmth of her living room. I now fondly remember the thirteen comforters and blankets piled on top of the sleeping bags we used in our van bedroom. I never appreciated having a home so much as the first day we walked into our duplex.
Labor
Our seventh anniversary brought a searing transformation. I had been attending graduate school, working on the father/daughter relationship in literature and in psychotherapy when my father died from an accidental house-roof fall while gutter cleaning. His death came one week after his birthday and four days after Christmas. In the middle of counseling, working to heal the tempestuous relationship I had with my father, I was devastated. I grieved passionately. I wrote in my journal. In California I visited my dad's favorite haunts. In Oregon I meditated on a McKenzie River boulder where I had once brought my nature loving dad. Over a nine month mourning period I sobbed my way to my own rebirth.
Dan was supportive during this difficult time, but he was also set adrift by my emotional volcano. He listened intently as I bubbled over from my counseling sessions. I was growing in such leaps and bounds he couldn't keep up with me while his intimacy needs were not being met. We were each becoming more involved in parallel lives. We loved each other but change was in the air.
My need for a home, a commitment and a child were coming to the fore. Dan emotionally backed away from my needs without expressing his own. We began searching for a house to buy. During this house seeking process, however, I unexpectedly discovered that Dan had been having a romantic connection with another woman on his softball team. I asked for a three month moratorium on this other relationship and we started counseling with a family therapist we knew.
We bought our home; I took over ownership when Dan moved out. What followed was a turbulent year. We lived apart and drifted into our separate lives. Dan's other relationship ended and he continued the counseling he had started earlier. I got a roommate and worked and cried full time. In my late thirties I began to mourn the loss of a daughter I might never have. The name Aspen was etched into poetry and there I thought it would remain.
Near the end of our year apart I began seeing the whole of me rather than the loss of an “us.” I was doing house repairs with my roommate, plowing up the front lawn for a vegetable/flower garden, writing, hiking and learning to thrive on my own. I thought I could now finally be friends with this man I loved. One evening we set up a meeting at the house to discuss finances and our co-parented cat, Lupe.
As we talked we began to fuse in a way we had never been able to do before. He spent the night. I panicked and felt I had committed the gravest of sins. Wasn't I over this man? Hadn't I already been hurt? Was I asking for more pain? Gradually my tears begin spinning into gold. For Dan and I, remaining in our separate living spaces, began to “date” again. And we began weekly couple-counseling sessions which over a two and a half year period brought us to the intimacy needed for a life long commitment of marriage and the promise of trying to give birth to a child.
Birth
We planned our own wedding ceremony for the third Saturday in May, 1988. It was to be a small friends and family affair in a lovely, grand backyard. We ended up inviting over a hundred guests including twenty children. Four friends called the four directions of earth, air, fire and water and we ended with the community we had created around us, speaking out their tributes and strange/humorous remembrances. We had each written our vows separately and revealed them to each other on that day. We held hands and instead of crying, laughed our way through our spoken words. But what unexpectedly touched my heart was the vow Dan made to have a raise a child with me.
It was November and we had been trying for a baby for nearly eight months. In December we left for our planned trip to Oaxaca, Mexico. One late afternoon as I was sitting at Casa Arnel's communal table, a woman I had never met who was sitting across from me said, “You're pregnant.” On some deep, unconscious level I intuited she was right.
A youthful forty-one, I was joyfully and deliciously exuberant throughout my pregnancy. The summer months brought warmth and the nesting syndrome. It also brought a visit to a Native American Sun Dance near Salem. My friend Wren and I set up a tent on the outskirts of the ceremonial fire. I breathed in the peace of the forest and meadow surroundings. That evening there was a gathering of the elders. The fire blazed gently in the middle of the circle. After introductions and shared wisdom, we were each invited to step to the fire and ask for a wished blessing. As I approached the flames, I caressed my blossoming belly and asked that this child I was carrying be a child and caretaker of the earth.
Aspen Louise was born on a September 1st Friday near midnight. My midwife, Dan, the soon-to-be Godparents were all in the hospital room with me, as I chanted my way to her birth. “It's a girl, I think,” exclaimed my husband as our precious one was lifted from my body.
When Aspen first latched onto my breast, all the years of waiting and wondering, sadness, disappointment and hurt disappeared. Only the present moment of cradling this small being remained. And it seems that moment led to the next moment and to the next and within the blink of a fairy's eye, twenty-two years passed. This daughter is now five inches taller than I am, and I sometimes wonder if she was ever really inside of me. Three days after her birth, her tiny perfect physical presence still invisibly attached to my umbilical cord, we brought her home to our cats, home to our small house, home to our garden, home to our community of loving friends, home to the life Dan and I shared, home to Eugene, Oregon, where we have now spent thirty-four blessed years.
© 2011
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