When I was in high school I played the cello - sadly not very well. It didn't take me long to realized that I was never going to have a career as a musician, but I stuck with it.
I learned many valuable lessons from the experience, but no more so than one particular time during an orchestra rehearsal when we were playing a piece that began with the cello section, which was pretty rare. As soon as I began to pull my bow across the strings it became abundantly clear that I was horribly and terribly off key. I stopped quickly and started to blush as the rest of the orchestra stumbled ahead.
After the rehearsal my music teacher pulled me aside to talk to me. I was terrified - he was an intimidating man, with a slight Napoleonic complex, who never minced words.
"Hannah," he started. "If you're going to make a mistake, own it."
He might have smiled, I can't remember, but he said it with unexpected kindness.
He was right of course. If I was going to start a performance off key, I should have done it with confidence and owned the moment and the mistake.
Over the past twenty years I have reflected on that moment a lot. We owe it to ourselves to own our lives, every aspect of it. We need to own the good the bad, our mistakes and triumphs, the lessons learned and how we learned them, our bodies, our voices, our opinions, and always our feelings.
It's hard to feel ownership when you're pregnant because everything is so different, so new, and so constantly evolving. But what better time to own yourself and your body than when you are nurturing another life. Yes my boobs are huge, yes my belly button is popping out, yes my ankles are swollen and yes I can rest a bowl on my tummy, but I have a life inside me and I'm about to become a mother, and what could be better than that.
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