What an amazing week. On Thursday the thirteenth, when your Daddy and I celebrated our ninth wedding anniversary, you gave me the gift of letting me feel you move for the first time.
It was mid-morning, and I was sitting at my desk at work. I started noticing a little tickling feeling like tiny bubbles popping under my skin. The sensation was low in my abdomen, where the midwife has shown me my uterus is. My intestines have migrated too far north in my abdomen for it to be gas bubbles, but it did feel rather similar. I was nervous. Excited but hesitant. Wondering yet unsure. Suspecting yet doubtful. I didn’t want to believe it was you until I knew for sure.
So I searched the internet for other women reporting what it felt like when their baby first moved. Popcorn popping, bubbles, gas, tiny pops, fluttering, butterfly wings. One woman even reported that she is ticklish in general, and the feeling of the baby moving also felt ticklish INSIDE her. While I was reading these things, I didn’t move my body an inch. I wanted to stay completely still, to see if the feeling would go away, or move, or remain.
Over the course of the day, I continued to experience the same sensations. Eventually some movements were stronger than just popping bubbles. They were more forceful than any intestinal cramping or gas bubbles I’ve felt before. Eventually I could not doubt something, or someone, was moving around inside me. It was too consistent and too strong to be anything else.
By dinner time, I told our family I was 80% sure I felt you move today for the first time.
By the next day, I was able to feel some of your stronger movements even with my hands, after placing them gently very low on my abdomen. You could bump me hard enough to move my hands a little!
By Saturday, your Daddy was able to feel you kick for the first time too. He had tried all day long to feel you, rushing over to touch my belly when I told him “Beta is moving now!” But his efforts were in vain. Every time he put his hands close to you, you curled up in and went to sleep!
Finally, when we were going to sleep that night, I felt a strong bump from you, and grabbed your Daddy’s hands. You gave him three strong kicks, and he looked at me, eyes HUGE and jaw dropped open a bit. “Wow!” Was all he could say. Eventually, he put his face down close to where he felt you move, and said hello. Then he told you, “We’re going to have so much fun when you get here!” He is such a fun person, so I know he is right!
Over the weekend and since then, your movements have been consistently coming and going at all hours of the day and night. Your sleep/wake cycles are theoretically about forty five minutes, and whenever you are awake, I can feel you moving. Yesterday I was convinced you had turned my uterus into an aerobics classroom, and my bladder into your trampoline!
Your legs are only about an inch long, so it is shocking how strong you already are, and how much force you put into those punches, kicks, jabs, and flips.
Last night, I had my hands on my belly while falling asleep, just enjoying feeling you move around. A big lump slid from one side of my belly to the other, and back again, in a circular motion. It was the largest, strongest sensation I’ve had from you so far.
In one sense, your movements feel so weird it’s hard to get used to. In another sense, they feel exactly like I imagined they would, and it seems totally normal.
In addition to letting me feel your water aerobics this week, the next big news flash is you can now hear! During our church worship band rehearsal and church service on Sunday, you bounced around constantly! For three hours, I doubt you slept. Instead, you bounced and danced to the music!
I have been singing to you each day, and playing piano for you several times a week. None of that seems to make you bounce around though. Perhaps the sounds are more soothing than our church band!
Feeling you move has made me fall in love with you so much more. When no one is looking, sometimes I hold my belly in both hands, as if somehow I could hold you. When you move underneath my hands, I can’t really describe how breathtaking each moment is.
So many other things are changing with you too! Fingerprints are beginning to appear, vocal chords are forming, vernix (a waxy lotion-like substance) is developing all over your body to protect your skin, and tiny air sacks are forming in your lungs. Your hands can grasp and grab, and your reflexes are sharpening. Your spinal cord is being wrapped with myelin, a protective sheath that speeds transmission of nervous system impulses. The placenta, your constant companion, is almost as big as you are! Both of you will continue growing, with the placenta always just behind.
You are the size of an orange! You can hiccup, swallow, and yawn. Your eyes are sensitive enough to light that you might change positions to avoid bright light. This is not stopping your Daddy from shining a flashlight in on you once a week or so. I’m sure you will soon associate his voice talking to you with bright , annoying lights. My sincere apologies! I’m sure it’s some sort of bonding experience that will unite you two in the future.
Here is a beautiful verse that talks about obeying the Lord with both your eyes and ears.
“He [or she!] will delight in obeying the Lord. He will not judge by appearance nor make a decision based on hearsay.” (Isaiah 11:3)
Life is fragile, Beta. In the first couple months of your existence, my greatest fear was losing you. I had to reconcile that fear with what I know about life, and God. I wrote about this a bit in your seven week letter.
As soon as I discovered you were alive, I painfully waited to reach twelve weeks, knowing the statistical chance of losing you too soon would drastically decrease. With much relief when that day passed, I began counting the weeks until you are considered viable outside the womb. That day is yet to come. Then I contemplated losing you when you are born, or when you are two years old, or five, or ten, or twenty. That thought is even more painful than that of losing you now.
Then I realized. There is nothing my love can do to keep you alive one more day beyond that which has been planned for you.
The knowledge of the number of your days is gently held by our dear Jesus. I cannot control it. I cannot cling to your life when you are the size of a blueberry, when you are a small child, or when you are a grown adult with your own children. It is not in my hands. It is not for me to know.
This is not to say I will be careless with my responsibility to care for and protect you. Instead, it is a realization that you are not mine. You are the Lord’s. He, and He alone, will shelter you all your days, and carry you into His arms whenever that day comes. Hopefully many decades from now, but that is not for me to know.
From the moment of your creation, to the moment of your passing into eternity, I will long and beg for the beauty of your life to remain full and rich on this earth. But I cannot keep you now, and I cannot keep you then. You are not my own. Your life is already bought with a price, and you are His.
“Don’t you realize that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God? You do not belong to yourself, for God bought you with a high price. So you must honor God with your body.” (1 Corinthians 6:16)
This week, your Grandpapa, my Daddy, shared with me his similar realization. It occurred for him a few days ago, shortly after a horrible accident that should have claimed the lives of two of your aunts - my sisters, his daughters. Unbelievably, they walked away with hardly more than flesh wounds.
Life is fragile. We cannot know the number of our days, or the number of those of whom we love. It is not in our hands.
Your Grandpapa, wrestling through these thoughts, realized he had never sat in the presence of God and given back to Him what is rightfully (and truly) His: the life of those on earth he loves most. His wife. His five daughters. His grandchildren. With choking tears, he knelt before Christ and gave us up. Spoke with audible words his decision to relinquish control, to lay before the throne of grace the lives of us each. You were on his list too, even though you have not yet breathed air.
“A person’s days are determined; You have decreed the number of his months and have set limits he cannot exceed.” (Job 14: 5)
“Lord, remind me how brief my time on earth will be. Remind me that my days are numbered; how fleeting my life is. You have made my life no longer than the width of my hand. My entire lifetime is just a moment to you; at best, each of us is but a breath.” And so, Lord, where do I put my hope? My only hope is in you. (Psalm 39: 4, 5, 7)
“Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations. Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the whole world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.
Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” (Psalm 90: 1, 2, 10, 12)
You are not mine. You are a gift. A field to tend where I am the tenant gardener and the Lord is the owner and master. I can’t wait to meet the bloom whose seed is you.
