Owls

Last night I woke up at 2 am. Had to pee, of course, but I thought maybe the owls had something to do with it. They were hooting to each other with their "who cooks for you?" call. The stars were so bright. Everything was still... except for the baby. I'm never sure who wakes whom, but if I get up in the night, s/he inevitably enjoys some alert time after I get back in bed. I'm all ready to go back to sleep, and then: squirm, shift, roll, kick, repeat. How can I ignore that? It's not like white noise you can tune out. In the middle of the night, with stillness everywhere and silence broken only by the owls, it is even harder to pretend that anything about pregnancy is normal. I felt like the axis mundi--the connection between sky and earth, this world and the next--the navel of the world. Incomprehensibly distant and innumerable stars above, with a little celestial body growing and spinning inside. I couldn't get back to sleep for quite a while.