Sophie B. Hawkins' Blog: Exploring and Expanding Boundaries
Sophie B. Hawkins will soon be a mama of two.
The singer/songwriter, who is best known for her hits “Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover” and “As I Lay Me Down,” has also starred in Room 105 and on Community.
Already mom to 6-year-old son Dashiell, Hawkins, 50, is pregnant with her second child — a girl! — after being implanted with her own frozen embryo.
You can find her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter @therealsophieb.
Courtesy Sophie B. Hawkins
When I found out I was pregnant, I was working with a producer on my new songs and I stepped out of the room to take the call.
I think the nurse said I was definitely very pregnant, but I can’t remember. I heard her voice, but the phrase, “Yes, I know” trailed like a banner across my mind.
I did know, and I knew she would be a girl.
When I was in Los Angeles two weeks prior to that day, leaving my son at a friend’s house to have the thawed embryo transferred into my womb, I knew she would come, if I could get out of her way. That was my struggle, not the question, but the surety.
When I made one call from outside the fertility doctor’s office to my sister in New York and she said, “Go for it,” I felt the hand of Fate pushing me into the elevator.
Courtesy Sophie B. Hawkins
I wanted to lean back and let the elevator doors bang on Fate, and yet I had created Fate’s opportunity by freezing my embryos 20 years ago and now thawing them. I couldn’t refreeze the embryos if I wanted to.
When my doctor strongly advised transferring the only two viable embryos of the remaining 11 they thawed, I still knew just one child was coming out. “I know you don’t want twins,” she said, “but at this stage, it’s too much of a gamble to just put one embryo in.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Okay.”
I believe, because of my experience, that we are chosen for specific actions and responsibilities throughout our life, that our life is the work, and we fulfill as much of our “life’s work” as possible. We all have experienced shirking what we know is our deepest, hardest work, and we are familiar with the pain and self-loathing the avoidance causes.
On the other hand, when we finally get to our deepest, hardest work, the joy is immeasurable. When we finally sink into what we are meant to do, as many times in our life as we are called, we begin to really create. Because no one else could do the work we are meant to do, we can explore and expand boundaries, and discover our own rhythm.
Courtesy Sophie B. Hawkins
The science of freezing eggs without sperm now exists; the options for creating and bearing human life are plentiful, but if it’s not supposed to happen, it still won’t. If it is supposed to happen, it’s not any easier than it ever was, just different. Only the very important things demand our all, cause lots of struggle, and eventually make us happy.
I went through these rigorous processes becoming a musician and then artist, and now I’m going through them as a mother. It is not work for work’s sake, but for life’s sake. By constantly redefining boundaries, every moment exploring the edges of them, tipping over them like water, drawing new ones and having them challenged, we are creating new life.
In dreams and in death we are expanding, becoming part of something beyond ourselves. Contraction is also a way through, out, to something bigger. We need to contract in our own rhythm, giving birth to new life.
My pregnant belly keeps moving the boundaries of my body out. For six months I wasn’t comfortable with getting bigger, I didn’t feel safe taking up so much space, but now, seven weeks away from delivery, I am becoming part of a new space.
The changing boundaries of my body are attracting new relationships, creating two women I’m getting to know, my self and my child.
Courtesy Sophie B. Hawkins
For me, having a girl is so different than having a boy. When I was pregnant with my son, Dashiell, I felt physically comfortable with the testosterone coursing through my veins, as opposed to all this estrogen.
I’ve always had great working relationships with men, and growing up, I played with boys. My brother and my father were my easiest relationships in the family; I identified with them. I know how to be myself with males.
Now I’m learning to be myself with females, and perhaps finding a lost self, and letting her emerge.
On the kid’s musical I’ve been making with the first-graders at my son’s school, I’ve begun working with the girls more. I’m discovering how to help them open up to their primal creativity.
Drums.
I had forgotten, but I started my whole career by learning African rhythms, songs and stories on the djembe when I was 14 years old. I’ve forgotten a lot about being a girl.
Courtesy Sophie B. Hawkins
We are constantly being made to expand; by force, by gracious intervention, by loss, by need. I observe Dashiell and his friends as they make up worlds, change rules, become characters, and I wonder why each of us is expected to grow up and be a brand.
Dash and his girl friend scuttled off to a hidden part of a pool the other day and filled their bathing suits at the chest with rocks.
“Look! Now I have boobs!” he announced. “And now I have boobs!” she joined gleefully.
Many mothers in the pool shot disapproving glances, a sure sign the kids are all right.
My belly is like a drum, the girl inside is beating against it, my son is leaning his head on it to listen. I wonder what he’s hearing. I would never have had the opportunity to know if I hadn’t moved out of her way, and out of my own way, too.
Courtesy Sophie B. Hawkins
— Sophie B. Hawkins
More from Sophie’s PEOPLE.com blog series:
Solve the daily Crossword
