Everything In Its Own Time

Like many a good little emo coed of the early 1990's, I fell in love with the Indigo girls hard. I am a freak for lyrics, and the poetry of what they had to say, married to the sweet harmonies they presented-- I swooned. (I still swoon.) My smoking buddies and I-- a gaggle of 19-22 year-olds similarly flannel-clad and emo-- would sit out in front of our residence hall, smoking girlie cigarettes, gossiping, and singing Indigo Girl songs until quiet hours. (I can't say that in retrospect this sounds as cool as I thought it was at the time.) My evenings were spent poorly recreating Rites of Passage and Swamp Ophelia and ruining my lungs. (I suppose this was better than being drunk every night...)

This past Saturday, I found out that my baby's lungs were not mature enough to be born this morning at our much-anticipated scheduled c-section.

So, we wait.

Babies and buses, they come when they come.

And an old Indigo Girls song has been circling my head ever since I got the call-- do you know it? "Everything In Its Own Time?"

A lesson learned
A loving God
And things in their own time
In nothing more do I trust.

Oh, it's a good one. It's a hard lesson for someone like me, someone who likes to have everything mapped out, thought out, planned to the nth degree. I get a panic when the world spins off its axis, and things don't go as I expected. Obviously, this is a daily occurrence in parenthood. Things rarely go as planned. I have grown a lot just through living that reality. I have to trust in the lesson, trust in God (whatever that means to me on any particular day,) and trust that things will go in their own time.

Everything in its own time.

Another verse of the same song sticks with me:

We own nothing, nothing is ours
Not even love so fierce it burns like baby stars
But this poverty is our greatest gift
The weightlessness of us as things around begin to shift

It is another verse about our own powerlessness-- but instead of lamenting it, the song says, we should revel in the gift of it. Because we cannot control it, cannot own it, we can remain weightless, being carried along and malleable.

Because we cannot own it, we can know more precisely its value. We can hold it more dearly.

Here's a poor metaphor to compare: when are you more aware of how much money is in your bank account? When you have tons of cash to spare, or when you are watching every bill to see whether there will be meat with dinner on Friday?

I believe you know the value of things most when the resource is precious, limited, or unattainable. It would be ideal to live otherwise, but the reality is that it's not the way most of us think.

So, of course I am disappointed that I am not missing my day to blog here because I'm meeting my son. But I have a chance to enjoy my own weightlessness in the process-- go with the flow-- appreciate the waning days of my final, bladder kicking, heartburn inducing days of magic. It will be over too soon.

I will never grow another baby in this belly, and even though he is in me, growing and kicking, (and hopefully getting some monster lungs) he is not mine. We own nothing. He is his own. And he will be here when he gets here. I can enjoy this time or wish it away.

Everything in its own time.