The exercise:
Write about: the transition.
Back home, with a beautiful baby boy.
With all due apologies, introductions will have to wait until tomorrow. Right now, exhaustion is calling me to bed.
Mine:
We're glad to be back home, about to be sleeping in our own bed again tonight. It's been a long couple of days, but I'll get to the full story later.
Because, you know, super tired right now.
We've begun this strange and wonderful transition, moving from husband and wife to father and mother. And as all-consuming as the present truly is, my mind still finds time every now and again to think of the future.
What will he be like in a year? Two years? When he hits the teenage years?
It's all rather difficult to wrap my head around.
Thankfully, I've got a bit of time.
Again, apologies for no pictures or proper birth tale. I'll get to those in the coming days. For now, this transition requires my full attention and energies.
Congratulations Marc & Kat! This week has been crazy here, so I didn't see your earlier posts until today. Good luck with the new baby!
ReplyDeleteHuzzah, huzzah! Congrats!! Take as many pictures as you possibly can.
ReplyDeleteCongratulations again! I'm delighted that the birth seems to have gone well and you're back home with your son already. I'd get used to feeling tired though ;-)
ReplyDeleteBy the way, did you know that the transition is a specific part of childbirth, or is it just coincidence?
The transition
Passing from one state to another, that's what a transition is. Like passing from sleep into wakefulness as gently as an crocodile slipping into the river, with all the attendant danger. Like starting on the main course and discovering that the waiters have been so attentive and careful with the changing of the plates that you're on the cheese course already, with only coffee, petit fours, and brandy to go. Like far too many places in the desert.
I'd been walking four about four hours that morning, and the sun still wasn't at its zenith, but already it was hot and the sky was a pitiless blue. I was sweating steadily, and having to keep a careful eye on my water because of it. Then I crested a sand-dune like a wave, as broad as a whale but only of modest height, and found out I was walking on a half-buried paved path. When I looked behind me it was there too; the transition from sand to stone had been so gradual I'd not noticed it.
I followed the path a short distance, knowing all too well that the strange things that lived in the desert like to congregate around these lost and forgotten structures, and though some of them were mostly harmless (at least when kept at arm's length) some of them were most ill-intentioned. When the graffiti started though, I stopped walking and started worrying.
"Lord Dunsany woz 'ere" was the most-repeated phrase, tagged like a signature on almost all the slabs. I wondered who it might have been, and why he'd been so keen to make his mark. I wondered all the harder if he might still be around, carving his name onto other things now. It was only with trepidation, and a much slower pace, that I continued along the path, barely noticing that the sand dunes around me were moving in and growing taller.
When I reached the cavern's throat, I realised that another transition had overtaken me, and I was about to venture inside the desert in a much more meaningful sense. I stood there on the threshhold, uncertain, rocking back and forth on my heels....
Morganna - thanks very much :D
ReplyDeleteg2 - thanks! And I'm sure I will :)
Greg - thanks again :)
I was aware of that, but I'm not sure I was thinking of it when I came up with the prompt.
Oh, you tease! That's a fantastic intro that makes me want to read more.
Quite badly, actually.