Even now, seven years later, I can’t stand to look at the magazines. You know the ones.
Pregnancy and You. Perfect Pregnancy. Pregnancy Where You Get To Stay In The Same Place And Not Move At All.
Those did not apply to me. If there had been a pregnancy magazine for me, it would have been called Vomit. I experienced nine months of nausea with both kids. Even now, I can’t walk past the maternity section at Target without feeling queasy. And yes, that was the worst of it, but coming a close second, and the real reason I hate to look at pregnancy magazines, are the articles on Planning Your Perfect Nursery.
That was never an option for me. Chris and I moved three times during my first pregnancy, and we brought home both babies to temporary apartments. In the case of my daughter, I didn’t even have a nursery, just a refurbished and beautiful, but patently unsafe, antique wicker bassinet in a corner of the living room. Her clothes were in a drawer of the bureau that came with our furnished apartment. Five weeks later, we moved to Tokyo, Japan, to another furnished apartment for a month, then to a permanent apartment, but our furniture was delayed for weeks. My baby furniture, bought when I was four months pregnant, finally arrived when my daughter was three months old. For a month, we slept on blankets on the floor with mattresses of old packing boxes, and I was grateful for them.
We moved from Japan when I was seven months pregnant with my son, into an unfurnished apartment in Dallas, Texas. By this time, we knew the drill: I packed kitchen basics, sheets, and pillows in our suitcases, the first trip we made was to the futon store. The shipment with our furniture arrived two days before my son. We managed to get everything unpacked and the next day, I had a baby.
I’m 99% fine with all of this. If I had to choose interesting life over boring life, I’d choose interesting every time, and I know how lucky I was that the temporary apartments I brought my babies home to were, by any definition, swank. It shouldn’t sting — but it does. What hurts most is that I will never have the opportunity to spend six months getting ready for motherhood. I won’t ever be able to pick out nursery colors, with matching curtains and a rug. I did a little bit for my son who was five months old and we moved (at last) to our real house. I picked out the paint and the art, but it’s always been what I could do while managing to keep track of a toddler and an infant, and, by the way, cancer. My kids’ rooms look okay now, after yet another move and a lot of putting-my-foot-down, but oh! what I wouldn’t give for six months of time to focus on them the way I could have focused on my first baby’s nursery if my life were a lot less exciting. I don’t do a lot of alternate universe daydreaming, but the one that lures me in every time is the one where the nesting instinct isn’t perverted into packing mania.
The epiphany came early for me after my son was born. As we went through the season of Advent, seven years ago, I realized exactly what it must have meant to Mary to have been told, “It’s time to travel” during her most miraculous of pregnancies. I wonder whether she had had a lovely nursery all ready to go. Her husband was a carpenter, and Joseph knew what kind of baby his wife was bringing into the world. I belt he built a doozy of a crib and changing table. And then they had to leave them all behind and travel to Bethlehem, and thence, with a toddler, to Nazareth. I wonder, did Mary have to stop the donkey every few hundred cubits to throw up? Did she complain about her aching back the whole way? Did her feet swell? And, then, was she mostly grateful for a room in a stable, or resentful that she had had to leave behind her home, her family, or a little of both? We’ll never know.
But now, when I see all the streets, all the shops, all the houses all decked out for Christmas, it makes me happy. The holly. The tinsel. The lights. The bows. The beautiful nativity scenes, with Mary and Joseph and the ox and the lamb and the shepherds and the angels, and the three wise men, all wrapped up so carefully from year to year, and then taken out, dusted, and arranged just so. I imagine Mary smiling down from heaven, remembering, all those years ago, about the time she had to have a baby in a stable because there wasn’t anywhere else.
And now, this year as we do every year, as we get ready for Christmas, as we clean and cook and decorate; as we make sure everything is just the way we want it, what we’re really doing is getting ready to make a warm, safe place for Mary’s baby.
It makes me happy.