multitudes

My friend Amy from high school is having her baby today. Carson - that's what his name will be. Last week my cousin Linda had a baby: Emily. And last month I found out that one of my best friends since kindergarten, Kate, is having a baby - she's due in July.

This is a lot of babies.

To me, Amy is still in high school, and we still laugh hysterically with her mom at their kitchen table, drinking iced tea (they kept both sweetened and unsweetened in the fridge at all times, as was apparently the tradition in the area of North Carolina where her parents grew up). In my house we ate "exotic" things like Chinese food and portabello mushrooms; in their house they ate chicken. Lots and lots of chicken. I remember once I joked, "you guys should get that book, 365 ways to cook chicken," and Amy said, "um, yeah, we have that...we use it a lot." They also sometimes made things like pot roast, and at parties they served Swedish meatballs - I remember my husband came to Amy's graduation party with me and for years afterwards he'd happily recall those meatballs.

In the pictures my aunt and uncle sent Emily is cute and fuzzy and lovable. It's weird to think that now both of my cousins on my dad's side have extended our family with children who are connected to the same DNA I am... that in 20 years they'll be walking around as adults and they'll never know my grandmother, will never realize the ways in which they look or act like her. Will never know how much she loved parties, or how she played the piano, or how she made little creatures of out seashells.

I saw Kate's belly the other day and was reminded of the pure shock I felt when she told me she was pregnant a month or so ago. I somehow can't grasp that a life is growing inside her, that she is going to give birth and have a child... it is the first time I have encountered something too big to wrap my mind around. It's like all of a sudden I need to understand God.

I got married young, and marriage seemed completely natural to me... my husband and I had already been together for 5 years, and we knew we wanted to be together forever. In our first couple years of marriage, my single friends related to us as though we were a remarkable specimen -- either that or an intimidating one. I thought I understood -- now I do.