Tell me about 20 weeks

Jude,

It's hard to write sometimes. Much of this pregnancy vacillates between long measures of held breaths and deeply undeniable love and joy. I linger on a tightrope that leads me back and forth along this spectrum, with either end tethered by my fears and hopes. Like everything else in life, the yin and yang are pressed together; the way all living things press themselves against gravity, bending toward the light.

Most days feel rather ordinary, and then I feel you move. Right when I start to worry that I'm letting myself embrace too much of the magic, you remind me that this is the stuff of life; It's longing for itself. It's persistence.

I think about you a lot these days. The world around us is in immediate crisis; The US is still the only developed nation that fails to recognize women as constitutionally equal. The criminalization of women's healthcare is both insidiously and loudly regressing into pre-suffrage states. Before I had you, I held the rights to my own body, or at least, the medical choices I could make; After I have you, who knows?

Before I had you, I was able to till the fields which had been badly damaged by normal and common bodily processes; inflammation held your dead predecessors in and modern medicine enabled me to repair via multiple painful, albeit necessary abortive procedures to ensure I'd have a safe space to harbor you when the time came. The losses, cruel and insurmountable as they were, proved necessary. A scar and trailhead for everything to come after. So while your existence is sacred, so were the losses I endured before you. And yet, in too short a time, I may be considered a criminal.

The world is a funny, fickle place little one. While you kick and turn and arch your back into my concavities, I watch the backdrop and calculate a time when we'll have to teach you about all of it. How the good and the bad are one stew of a lot of other things. How we lean toward the light but would be nothing of substance without the absence of it.

I love you the most and I love you always.

.Mom