In case you're wondering why I have ceased to post various fruits and vegetables that represent Baby Gaz's growth, it's because the growth at this point is difficult to document using fruits and vegetables. Even websites are becoming more obscure in their offerings: your baby is the size of a Chinese cabbage! A jicama! A crenshaw melon!
Be assured that Baby Gaz is growing, Baby Gaz is moving (lots), Baby Gaz is hiccuping, and is healthy by all accounts. The produce section of the local grocery store just doesn't suffice in describing how excited we are to meet him.
My husband, a lover of poetry and a fan of Walt Whitman, sent me this glorious poem a few months back: I Sing The Body Electric. The poem should be read it its entirety - it is a stunning piece of art - but, if you're short on time, here are some of the excerpts that I thought painted a magnificent portrait of woman and her ability to incubate life.
This is the female form,
A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot,
It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction,
I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor,
all falls aside but myself and it,
Books, art, religion, time, the visible and solid earth, and what
was expected of heaven or fear'd of hell, are now consumed,
Mad filaments, ungovernable shoots play out of it, the response
likewise ungovernable,
Hair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands all
diffused, mine too diffused,
Ebb stung by the flow and flow stung by the ebb, love-flesh swelling
and deliciously aching,
Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of
love, white-blow and delirious nice,
Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the
prostrate dawn,
Undulating into the willing and yielding day,
Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh'd day.
This the nucleus--after the child is born of woman, man is born
of woman,
This the bath of birth, this the merge of small and large, and the
outlet again.
Be not ashamed women, your privilege encloses the rest, and is the
exit of the rest,
You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul.
The female contains all qualities and tempers them,
She is in her place and moves with perfect balance,
She is all things duly veil'd, she is both passive and active,
She is to conceive daughters as well as sons, and sons as well as
daughters.
She too is not only herself, she is the teeming mother of mothers,
She is the bearer of them that shall grow and be mates to the mothers.
