Day Twenty-Four: Expectancy

I bought LB a set of these little blue whale washcloths for Christmas 2008. I was still pregnant with her then. Back then she was known as "Little Bit" because we weren't sure if she would be a Lilybeth or an Oliver. I wanted to make sure Little Bit had at least a tiny present under the tree come Xmas morning. That little washcloth is looking rather worn after 8 1/2 months of face washing (one of LB's least favorite activities in the world).

Today, as LB and I walked, I was thinking about a line from one of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets: Sylvia Plath's "Three Women." The poem is about three different women and their experiences with pregnancy and childbirth: one woman has a son, the second has a miscarriage, and the third gives her baby daughter up for adoption. When she is looking at her son shortly after his birth, the first woman, known only as "First Voice," says, "I am a river of milk. / I am warm hill." I just love these images of the river and hill. I feel like these metaphors so succinctly describe the sense of nurturing and love I feel towards LB. The bounty of milk I've produced to sustain her little body, and my own body keeping her warm and close. I also like how the images are taken from nature. Not that I believe motherhood is somehow a natural state for women. Instead, I do feel like my love for LB is something pure and healthy, wholesome and good, like a river or a hill in the sun. Nothing manufactured or false but something complete and without blemishes.

The "First Voice" continues later in the poem, describing her desire to protect and comfort her son, her apprehension about him growing up, and her sense of vulnerability over loving someone so completely. I especially love the lines, "my words / Bright birds in the sky, consoling, consoling." Such soothing lines like a lullaby. Plath really was a master craftswoman.

How long can I be a wall, keeping the wind off?

How long can I be

Gentling the sun with the shade of my hand,

Intercepting the blue bolts of a cold moon?

The voices of loneliness, the voices of sorrow

Lap at my back ineluctably.

How shall it soften them, this little lullaby?

How long can I be a wall around my green property?

How long can my hands

Be a bandage to his hurt, and my words

Bright birds in the sky, consoling, consoling?

It is a terrible thing

To be so open: it is as if my heart

Put on a face and walked into the world.