Sea Air

By Veronica

I have never lived near the sea, but I know what sea air means. Poetry and novels and histories have built it up in my mind to be the scent of freshness and freedom, wild unpredictability and restoration to good health.

I visited the Atlantic a handful of times before I had kids, walking barefoot in waves in Charleston, Norfolk and Boston. One cold, windy summer day I even wandered out of the Russian monastery we were visiting and stood on a dock by the Baltic Sea, watching its dark, wild waves and shivering in its chill wind. I do not remember what the sea smelled like, but I remember the feeling of the ordinary, routine concerns of life diminished and washed away by the immense rhythm of the waves.

Perhaps it was only because we were on vacation.

I spent most of today in the hospital. My doctors wanted to rule out preeclampsia in my current pregnancy. My blood pressure has begun to climb again, and I am losing too many nights to nausea and its inevitable conclusions. So today they strapped me to machines and cuffed and pumped and pricked until they were satisfied that it was merely gestational hypertension, and not the scarier preeclampsia. They told me to rest, and then they sent me home.

But while I was lying on the hospital bed, listening to the squeaky beat of my baby’s heart on the fetal monitor, I thought of the sea air in the novel I had been reading that morning. So much of pregnancy is routine worry and discomfort, unavoidable pains and anxiety about the things that can go wrong. Strapped to monitors, I longed for the scent that makes all those worries disappear: the scent of my new baby. Even though I have never met her, I know what that scent will be like. I know what her cheek will feel like against my lips.

Those scents and smells will overwhelm all the worries and inconveniences of pregnancy, and I will breathe deeply in the restoring air of my new girl. Just like the sea.

Veronica Mitchell blogs at Toddled Dredge.