Flutter

I felt RE flutter for the first time while seated on a puffy blue folding chair between my mom and Shanna Reid. I was attending Relief Society in CoMo’s original member-built LDS meetinghouse. Shanna, eight years later in the same room on the same chairs, would ease the pain of secondary infertility by saying, “Did not Sarah beget only Isaac?” Meaning, “Great women have had just one awesome child.”

I felt Archer flutter for the first time as I read The Shoemaker’s Wife between microplush sheets in Suzette’s chilly basement guest bedroom. The vignette of a water carafe, three individually wrapped gourmet chocolates, and the gold locket Suz had inscribed SHE BELIEVED SHE COULD, SO SHE DID rested two feet away on the nightstand.

I felt Baby No. 3 flutter two days ago while I was slicing an avocado open for chicken saltimbocca. Once upon a Wicked time Greg and I ate pre-theater pollo alla saltimbocca at FINO in San Francisco with the Powells; I’ve been knocking it off ever since. Greg and Archer were pushing fire truck back and forth on the floor and RE was upstairs curling her hair with two of three triplets in preparation for a stake dance.

The flutter is nausea's finish line; I can stop dipping king-sized Twix bars in raspberry Oikos at 9 in the morning.

I’m okay if I just felt the last first flutter. Three times my dormant body has surprised me with a silent cocoon that consistently breaks open after seventeen weeks. The tiny tear is big enough for a set of wings to push through, unfold, and gently remind me something beautiful is coming. The metamorphosis of my midlife midsection will yield one more monarch.

Photo quote from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice