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Earlier this year, when I was trying to decide how to celebrate turning 40, I teasingly said to Elie, “All I want for my birthday is a baby.”
When Elie and I got married, I knew he didn’t want children. He just wasn’t interested in being a dad. And even though I’ve wanted a child as long as I can remember, life had never given me the opportunity to try to have my own. At the point in my life when Elie and I fell in love and started talking about marriage, I had accepted that being a mom was not in my destiny. Elie and I have such a loving, beautiful relationship, I knew our life together was the most important thing in the world to me, above anything else. I made a conscious decision I could be happy and content without having children, but I couldn’t imagine a life without Elie.
And so we got married, and our wonderful life together began. We (read: me), still talked occasionally (Elie jokes: weekly, if not daily) about having children together, especially as we saw many of our friends starting or expanding their families. But Elie just didn’t have the desire. And then something changed.
Around last summer, Elie started asking friends—and even strangers—what they liked or didn’t like about being a parent. We had friends who became parents unexpectedly, and we watched them fall in love with their children and embrace their roles as parents. Slowly, Elie seemed a little more intrigued with the idea of being a dad.
In February of next year—almost exactly one year to the day that we decided to start a family—Elie and I will welcome Baby Samuel into our life.
As with everything Elie does, once he decided to become a Dad, he jumped in wholeheartedly. Seeing his enthusiasm and excitement in the baby has been one of my greatest joys, and the whole process of becoming a parent has filled me with an overwhelming awe for the miracle of conception and life.
While I haven’t exactly relished the almost-constant (but mild) nausea and overwhelming fatigue of the first few months, I welcomed those changes as a visible sign of Bubbles' (our name for the baby until he or she is born) healthy growth and development. And while I never knew I could be so tired I wanted to cry or that even sitting in a chair could be more effort than I could muster, I’m trying to learn to be nice to myself and replace my usual busyness and activity with the grace of resting and making a baby.
As Elie and I wait for Baby Samuel to arrive in February, we’re relishing this time together. We know our life will never be the same, but we’re looking forward to welcoming this new adventure with open arms and ever-expanding hearts. At the same time, we often wake up in the morning, look at my growing belly, and say, "Holy **&!, we're having a baby!" I'd better pull out that list of baby names I started making when I was eight and see how they feel now.
These pictures were taken the day Elie and I got our positive pregnancy test, which happened to coincide with a weekend away in Sonoma (no, no wine tasting for me that weekend!). A big thank you to Kelly Popejoy of KLP Creative, for sharing in our excitement and capturing our joy that day.
I love when I see an email from a friend, and that’s how I think of you. I hope you feel the same. In my newsletter, I share the kinds of recipes and stories I used to blog about. You’ll get the recipes I’m cooking for my family as well as anything else I think might bring more connection or more joy.
