Emily Dagostino

I believe in the sanctity of privacy. After a shamefully garrulous riff in my 20s, when I put pen to paper or key to screen whatever rot spewed forth, I finally grew up enough to begin erring away from over sharing. This coincided in a way with becoming a mother. Learning the value of protecting my children, I learned the value of protecting more of myself, my mistakes and the people who populated them.

But it’s after 9 p.m. and it’s a miracle I’m awake. It’s a miracle my son’s asleep and my husband’s at comedy and I’m choosing to spend some of my rare spare quiet time with my computer. It’s a feat I’ve dragged it out and decided, deliberately, to try to catch with my typing fingers a few words as they run through the wide and broken sieve of my brain. It’s an act of fortitude, truly, and stubborn commitment to a dream of myself that’s had to slumber off in some warm, dark and safe corner of my life for a few months. As a nod to that slumbering id, with my privacy editor dazed and with the desire to just write firm in my pulsing chest, here is what I share:

We are buying a house. The house of which we’ve dreamed, for which we’ve saved. We are working our tails off trying to find a way to make it real, to keep the jobs we seem to grow to love more each week, to keep this life we’ve dreamed of building together. We are having another baby. A baby who is at least, now, the size of an avocado, to give a sibling to our amazing, toddling son–who is my calm in the storm–and to give ourselves, to all of us, the family of which we’ve dreamed since we became foster parents. Finally, we are waiting to find out in less than a week if two foster children will be joining our family. We have been waiting to find this out since August? September? The court date that would decide their fates–and ours–has been continued twice already and we just learned today it seems likely to be continued at least once more. What’s another few months of suspension in two kids’ lives? What’s it in ours? The attorneys and judges apparently have other places to be and other cases to prep for. So it’s held and held and held up. And I’m too used to it by now to get too upset. I’m editorializing. Though I say I’m not too upset, it is upsetting. But I’m somewhat beat down by the process, and I have other big life things toward which to direct my energy.

Tomorrow begins a weekend of my third sibling’s wedding–the last one of our original bunch to tie the knot. I am not much of a party person. My son, the party boy, gets it from his father. Thankfully so.

I will cling to them this weekend as they whirl through conversations with strangers and turns on the dance floor, and I’ll cling to my siblings and their spouses and kids, and to our parents as the last Dagostino lace unravels and we all spill off into our own stories. As we wait to learn what happens next.

The house? The baby? The foster kids? I will keep living in this moment of indecision. To self-preserve and protect, my writer self will hibernate. At the end of the day, with a new child in my womb, I will carry my son to his glider and we’ll back-and-forth until his soft fingers and sharp nails stop pinching and scratching the backs of my hands, until he is the sleeping weight in my arms who pins me in place and fortifies me, again, with the grace to just be here, to just breathe.