My parents were here!
            
It was a lovely three days. The weather has changed. We went out in the sun and didn't melt.

Before I came to Abu Dhabi I went to Santa Cruz with a friend, Sarah, to visit another friend, Brooke. We'd all gone to elementary school together. It was my last chance to soak in the green spring of California and to be with old friends. I was six months pregnant but still agile, and parenthood still felt distant and unimaginable. We sat around in her little cabin in the woods, on a hill in Bonny Dune, and tried to imagine parenthood. My pregnancy had not just given me an identity crisis; it had given Brooke one too; that's how close we were. One detail from that conversation struck me, something Sarah's mom had told her. Before you have kids, she said, your heart is inside you. After you have kids it is never inside you again.

Now my heart is so exposed it catches me by complete surprise. I want everyone to acknowledge the importance of my heart, sitting there outside me, wiggling busily. And when complete strangers in dishdashas stop in their tracks to give her a kiss, when waiters swoop her away from me to tickle her, when construction workers bend over and coo at her -- they endear themselves to me. My heart flutters. Flutters and wiggles. She thrives on it, so I do too.

When you live so far from home, in a boomtown full of homesick migrants, you can hope for some of that but not expect it. We are mostly anonymous. It's from family and old friends that you expect it -- people who know exactly what a big deal this life change is for you. The morning sickness, the sore hips, the exhausted whale-like body, the two thousand bounces per day, the heart-wrenching cry that you will do anything to comfort, the burping, singing, holding, carrying, nursing... all that is suddenly worth it times a million when Iola delights a grandparent or an old friend.

You can expect it. It's in the disappointments of unmet expectations that you realize how painful taking things for granted can be. My parents shortened their trip because concern for the economic melt-down and global stability loomed larger than life. If I hadn't expected them to stay for two or three or four weeks I would have been less disappointed. If my heart hadn't been so vulnerable I wouldn't have even cared -- Abu Dhabi can be seen in three days.

We drove them to the airport last night, and I cried the whole way home. Iola was asleep beside me. It was her two month birthday; our two year anniversary. She's getting big, as you can see in the picture. She's probably almost 12 pounds now... Jackson still has a four pound advantage, and a huge intellectual advantage.