Green ~ The Color of Hope

Call her green and the winters cannot fade her
Call her green for the children who've made her
Little green, be a gypsy dancer

Just a little green
Like the color when the spring is born
There'll be crocuses to bring to school tomorrow

- Joni Mitchell

Sometimes it's still easy to forget that there is a life growing inside of me. Mostly, my body and my life is still my own. At almost twenty weeks, I don't really look pregnant to people who don't know me yet, so it's still my secret. But all of that is rapidly changing.

We felt the baby move for the first time this week. I had my hand on my stomach as I lay on the couch and there it was. The unmistakable feeling of something twitching in my abdomen.

At first, I was sure I had imagined being able to feel it with my hand on the outside of my body, but then, there it was again. Jeff came over to where I was laying. I put his hand where mine had been and we waited, breathlessly until again there was a sense of an involuntary muscle twitch and Jeff felt it too.

We looked at each other and burst into incredulous laughter. It was all we could do. It seemed so crazy, so unlikely, simultaneously surreal yet so incredibly real.

Green is the color of spring, the color of new beginnings. For us, it is also the color of hope. As we tried for months that stretched into a year and beyond to have a child, suffering dissapointment and loss, I began to feel that my body would never be able to sustain such life. Any woman who has suffered infertility can attest that after a time, you begin to feel dry, arid, dead, brittle - anything but green.

As the holiday season approaches and I find myself surrounded by the emeralds and forest hues of fir trees and wreaths and garlands I am reminded every day of how incredibly fortunate I am to have this opportunity to nurture a life, of the enormous priveledge we have before us as we meet our child in a few short months.

It is truly the best Christmas gift I could ever hope to have.


****Today is December's Blog Exchange day and my guest is Tammie who writes at Soul Gardening. She lives in southwest Florida in a tiny bungalow with her husband and two cats and is expecting a baby in April. You can view my post today over at her site. Go ahead and take a peek by clicking on the Blog Exchange Participant button below.******





It's busy here as it's also Perfect Post Award Day for November 2006. I awarded my Perfect Post to Izzy Mom for her post on November 26, titled 'When is MY Day Off?'. I think we all feel this way a bit too often.