hope and wait

In early autumn 1981, I spent a morning with a wild group of new agey feminists in the basement of a yoga school near Fitzwilliam Square.  We wanted to start a health group and in particular we wanted to promote natural childbirth as a sort of radical right, all very theoretical and somewhat militant (the early 80s...).

When I left home that morning I was a healthy young woman, slightly hippie-ish, broke obviously, full of wild ideas and ideals, absolutely none of them involving motherhood, and mainly interested in connecting with other likeminded women ready to shake up the establishment.

When I got home that night I just knew that I wanted to get pregnant. Nothing seemed more important or urgent. And there was no discussion, none of the predictable arguments from my feminist friends could change my plan. I had to work hard on convincing R and I mean hard, including one very rough and stormy sleepless night on Inishmore of all places.

That done I naively thought things would sort of happen overnight.

Haha. In fact what followed was a couple of months of waiting and hoping and dashing of hopes and getting to know physical signs or rather imagining non-existent physical signs and when it finally did happen there was none of that romantic glow and shiny eyes and whatever softness of body some women-who-know tried to convince me of.

But that's another story and I am getting carried away here.

It's the waiting bit and the hoping bit that I am reexperiencing these days. I don't  want to dwell on it because it could all be back to square one tomorrow.

But as I drove back from BG this afternoon, Kate Bush blurted out of the car radio as I was driving through the sunny tree-lined streets and I turned up the volume and - loudly - sang along and grinned almost happily at the poor unfortunate teenagers at the traffic lights who had to witness this crazy scene.