Insemination Nation

Do you ever just drop off a cliff, or is it just me?

Two weeks of flu, hips and back all funky, fertility drug in the middle for psychotic measure, daily temp and tests, blood draws, and the extreme swings of a new home business have me feeling a tad busy. Oh yeah, and my three year old seems to have sprouted taller and older. She suddenly looks like a girl. She corrects, "A wittle garl, mama!" Ok, so she's a little girl and no longer a toddler.

Could this mean freedom? Are we just emerging from the chute, ready for the warmth of summer grass?

Not quite. Instead, I'm walking around town every afternoon, holding my bladder for four hours so that I can test for ovulation. Four days down and I'm thinkin' today may come up positive. That means we inseminate tomorrow. Or maybe we'll inseminate on Sunday?

I never thought I'd be calculating conception. I also never thought I would have to schedule a birth, which I have, indeed, already done with River.

While I'm waiting around for the moment of creation, I'm also dreaming up a life for an orphaned child somewhere in the world. Since I am an official member of the social experiment family club, I'm thinkin that maybe we'll adopt a baby from Ethiopia and give them our Portuguese/Spanish/Mexican last name, Sanchez. How American is that? This white girl, fake blond, blue-eyed mama, will pick up my African American child at school. Negasi Sanchez. Kind of has a ring.

I felt weird growing up because my parents were just old. Ha, I'm older than they were. It's a complete freak show, totally outside the box of what I ever imagined for myself. But it's a conscious freak show.

I've always felt like a stranger in a strange land anyway, a refugee from the midwest, alien to my own family, outsider in my own culture. Why not weave a family from that web and those roots.

Recently, an astrologer explained that the defining phrase of my life could be: Journey to the Oracle. That describes what the stars have in store for me this time around.

No matter how weird, that's all I want to be doing with my days, in whatever form it takes - finding my way to the oracle. Only now the teachers and teachings are not in front of me. Now it's just my own body and the way consciousness spills and forms in the spinning globe of my heart.

Seeds and sun, moon toward full, planting for new life in the weathered soil. Prayer and more prayer for ease in the joints, ease in the mind, and for full song and a shared circle.