Author: Jade SV

Week 36

| Jade SV

I’m terrified today. Don’t know what brought it on. The calendar maybe. I have nothing on it beyond the end of April; perhaps it would be better served to type large across those first weeks of May, “Have Baby.”

After the blank weeks, the next dates are B.’s graduation for the end of May. And by then we will have a baby.

I can’t tell you what I’m scared of. It’s reminding me of the panic attack I had this summer, my first in a decade, when B. and I were in Istanbul and we got lost in the blocks between the Spice Market and the Grand Bazaar. Although, we weren’t really lost. B. knew where we were, but I was completely disoriented, my inner compass shot that day, and I think I may have written about this already because the panic is the feeling of not having an exit; not knowing my way out, or knowing that there is no way out.

Yesterday morning we began reading to the babe. It was Sunday, and sunny, and lovely in bed; I wasn’t restless at all because I knew we had a day outside waiting for us. The cat, as always, making lounging look good. We began with the book I have read so many times the sentences are as familiar to me as breathing. Indeed, sometimes I write a sentence, and recognize it’s rhythmic origins from these pages. The book is A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. I think I was ten the first time I read it. On the title page is Bill Cosby’s signature. We saw him in Le Figaro Cafe on MacDougal, and my mother helped get me brave enough to approach him. He made a joke about my name. Yesterday was the first time I’d heard those lines aloud. I cried a few graceful tears. B. was tucked into me. I’m writing this because my urge so often is to write the scares and doubts. Also, because perhaps today I could use a talisman.

Ah now I know what brought it on. Last night I spied another droplet on my boob. I’m reading signs of impending labor everywhere. I keep on wishing for this babe to take it’s time; crossing my fingers for mid-May and I really need to let that go.

Not my timeline, and not my say. Which is sometimes comforting, but today, is…not.

Week 36

| Jade SV

B. activated my boobs.

He’s working from home this week, which is the best thing ever. We each have a nook with our desks and computers and talismans and pen arrangements, and most mornings we settle into our respective projects and don’t speak for a few hours but I love hearing him stirring. Also, he plays music when he works and I don’t but the volume is the exact right amount of muted to hold the silence of the house at bay. Sometimes when I’m working from home the world becomes scarily silent and I feel very alone; as if I am a forgotten speck as everyone wheels around me doing their thing. My mother calls it “existential angst.” Other times, she calls it “the fundamental loneliness of being human.” There was this book that always seemed to be on a table somewhere in our apartments called, No Man is an Island, but somehow I always read it, and remembered it as, Man is an Island. But B. is home, and so I don’t have to question my existence or my place in the universe. i can just type and wander up to his desk to steal sips of his sweet and oh-so caffeinated coffee.

Him being home also means that my midday reward has been much more rewarding.

I finally got that rug for the babe’s room. It is smallish, ivory wool, soft, and we put a nice felt pad under it for cushioning. For the babe. It was a sunny afternoon but miraculously I was in no rush to get outside and when I closed my computer I went and stood over B.’s chair smiling.

“Lunch?” He asked.

“Sure,” I said. Smiling.

“Hold on a sec,” he said, and then met me on the rug.

After, we were laying about in the radiant room (literally-the ceiling is a deep yellow, and in the afternoons it glows) when he went into my boobs once more, only to come up with a surprised smile.

“What?” I asked.

He just looked at me; grinning, eyebrows raised. I was slow to get it.

“No! No way.”

“I tasted something sweet.”

“No you did not.”

“Ummm. I did.”

I stared at my nipple, and then, using both hands, gave it a slow squeeze and, sure enough, two drops appeared.

I screamed and he laughed.

“Holy shit.”

I got the drop on my finger and tried to taste it, but for me, nothing.

“I don’t taste anything.”

“It’s sweet.”

I gave the other nipple a squeeze, and yes, there they were, two drops produced by my body, sitting milky and distinct on the tan, nubbly surface of my very own breast. I screamed again; also laughed and shouted “Holy Shit” a few more times. Finally, I gave those drops a swipe too. But, “I still don’t taste anything.”

“Well,” B. said, “My tastebuds are more sensitive than yours.”

I punched him in the arm. Though this does happen to be true. Back in the day, he was better at wine than I was.

And so. My body has made four drops of milk. Which is the craziest thing ever that has ever happened.

I recounted this little episode to my doula and friend, and she laughed, and then also reminded me, “Careful. Nipple stimulation is a good way to bring on labor.”

I’m still quite chilling with the babe staying inside of me and so, although I’m sad about it, the nipples have been declared off limits for a few weeks. Also the spicy food that I pretty much want to eat every day. Things are cooking in there. The babe is nudging. But not yet. Not quite yet. I still want a little more time. And, of course, a few more afternoons on the sunny rug.

Week 35

| Jade SV

To move about the world this way; as if I am an egg. On Monday evening walking down Second Avenue the bustle which is usually a comfort was too loud, too close, too hectic. And when the F train pulled in packed, a nervous tremor of how to get myself onto it and home.

Combinations of feeling invisible and hyper-visible.

On that same F train, heads buried in kindles and phones, one man staring blankly, no one offering me a seat. But there are other ways of not being seen too; in casual encounters, in the give and take of a day, those who see the belly and back away–frightened almost, confused. Some pretend it doesn’t exist. Some ask me about it and then have no other sentences to offer. God forbid a pregnant lady might chit chat. It reminds of my wedding; how everyone stood a few feet back just staring at me and grinning and not talking. That day one friend said to me, and it was magnificent honesty, “I don’t know how to talk to brides.”

My sense of my body in public spaces is forever changed. At least, I hope it’s forever changed. I see now how the world doesn’t have time for us; those of us who need help, who move slow, who are delicate, in pain sometimes, uncomfortable. The world, or this city at least, doesn’t want to be bothered, often doesn’t know how to look us in the eye. I hope I remember when I am no longer this egg being. And I hope I never, ever sound like the woman in the gym locker room who said to me in the voice with which one talks to a puppy, “It’s sooo great that you’re getting yourself here.”

Honestly, fuck you lady.

Not Americans are far better at it. At Punjabi’s the other week, the man behind the register, grinning, and at ease, and so kind.

How many months? Is it your first? I have two daughters. Are you eating healthy? Lots of water and vegetables. 

I want to go back and visit just to have the pleasure of being spoken to like a normal human being by a stranger.

***

My godmother says that when it’s time the best advice she can give me is to pass right through the center of that ring of fire; don’t try to skirt it. Last night on the couch, my hand on my belly, and the kick delivered a little foot into my hand. This person is fully formed and simply gaining weight now. In a sense, we’ve already accomplished it, this babe and I. We began this project in August and here we are; waiting. Everyone says it’s soon when I tell them it could be five weeks, could be seven. But if I was going away for five to seven weeks, if I was flying to Peru and not returning until early May, that would be a long time, wouldn’t it?

Last night B. was wondering about hair and eye and skin color. I’m doing that less these days. I feel less intertwined with the babe and more like we are two beings sharing one space. It’s funny, right now the babe imbues my body with something special–sets me apart; highlights me and gives me shine.  When the babe exists outside of me, it will take that dazzle with it. The babe will draw the admiration and I will be (only) the mother caring for it. The celebrated body will become the emptied body.

I think it will be more of a blow to my ego than I like to admit.

My consolation though, is that I am very much ready to not be this vulnerable.  I’m not fantasizing about alcohol and sushi–although, I am kind of dreaming of a tuna sandwich. Instead I’m craving extreme sports. (Well, kind of extreme. Extreme for me.) I want to surf (I really want to surf); I want to ski; sled; roll down a hill; ride a skateboard; jump off a bridge into water; go on a rope swing; walk on a tightrope; go to trapeze school.

Also, it will be really nice to walk fast.

Week 34

| Jade SV

I’ve been meaning to tell this anecdote since about 30 weeks. I was at a bar doing a reading, and beaten down by months of snow boots, I brought pink high heels to change into and I was wearing those. I’m sure it was the heels that began it. Amazing what an arched foot and a flash of color will bring on.

Walking back from the bathroom, I passed two men. One turned to the other and spoke in that voice that’s presented as a private voice, but is designed to be heard by the woman being talked about.

He says, “She’s sexy.”

His friend, “She’s pregnant.”

Then they both paused to appraise. I hadn’t felt that glance for months. I forgot how visceral it is; how I can literally feel their eyes measure me from head to toe.

And then the first man goes, the words deliberate as his gaze, “Happy Mother’s Day.”

Happy Mother’s Day! That was his line. I couldn’t believe it. When I got a few cat calls earlier on, my second trimester hidden in my winter coat, it gave me secret satisfaction, If only they knew. Thinking they’d be embarrassed. Thinking I was tricking them.

When my mother was at eight months she rode a Greyhound down to Tennessee, to maker her way to the commune where she was going to deliver. The commune couldn’t pick her up that night, and they sent her to a church mission in Nashville where she’d be able to spend the night. As she was walking–and she would have been statuesque; sweating, tall and blonde in the June heat–a car slowed beside her. The driver rolled down his window and leaned across the empty passenger heat. She watched, curious, until he smiled and beckoned to her, his fingers cupping and calling. Shocked, all she could do was point to her globe of a belly, and shake her head no.

It’s not that we’re not sexy. Because we are. The embodiment of sex in fact; a walking, rounded, display of what fertility is. But for me, I am sexy for one person only. I have never felt so strongly to be B.’s, and for once in my life it doesn’t chafe. There is a biology at work…we are oriented towards each other. Especially since the third trimester began, I don’t like being far away from him for too many consecutive hours. And he knows my body more than he ever has…I can’t hide from him the small embarrassments. The week that was seven days of constipation, I finally said to him, “I’m never going to talk to you about this when I’m not pregnant, but pretty much my reality right now is that I’m constipated.” He presses on my lower back with his knuckles; he smooths the kinks out of my legs; he watches me wince when I walk; he presses on the babe’s back through the wall of my skin and muscle.We’re both attuned to this body right now; it is one of the mediums through we’re communicating.

But wait, one thing is not fully true. I am not only sexy for him. It is for me too. Few days go by without orgasms. I am all the way my body; my skin; my aching back; my limping walk; my cheeks flushing; my belly stretching and moving; the babe stretching and shifting; every moment is a sensation.

I’ve gotten caught up in this way of thinking; that to preserve my sexiness with B. I would need to hide certain parts of my physical self. Keep me mysterious and unknown, hard to get. But that doesn’t seem to be the arc of it…These days my body is a thing in which we are both intimately involved. Turns out that’s super sexy.

Week 33

| Jade SV

And then sometimes your dad calls while you’re sitting and peeing, and you look at the international number, the screen does not flash the word “Dad”‘ that’s not how the two of you are, or how he is, even, tied to one number. But he had written you on Facebook, and you had sent your number, and then not thought of it, not waited for it, and then you are peeing and you see the number beginning +33…and you know it is him and you consider for a second not answering; hearing the message first. But you ask the universe, and the universe says yes, and you answer and it is him.

His voice is forever young sounding. Breathy. Melodic. Lightly lined with accent.

And you’re instantly happy to be speaking to him. You’re not sure how long it’s been.

He says he can’t hear you well. The connection is not good. You hear voices like a cafe in the background.

He is not in Mexico. He is in France. That’s good. He likes being there, though you believe that Mexico always pulls him back, no matter what he says, that it is a land he must time and again return to.

It’s not that your whole history falls away. It’s not that. Nor that you think that you two will never be angry at each other again. No, not that either. It’s that you’re having a baby. And he is your father. He asks the birth plan and the due date and about B., one question after another. He is happy with your answers. “Good,” he says. “That’s good.” And he says, “B. must be the happiest man in the world,” and it is such a fatherly thing to say. So it’s not the way it’s been before, when you thought with each phone call and letter that all would be healed and you two would stroll city streets in bilingual contentment. You know more now; how the past does not fall away as easily as shed skin.

But when you get off the phone everything matters less; the frustration with in-laws, the family dramas, the worries and people who don’t talk, and people who do, the resentments you’ve been lingering over, your temper, your house, your clenching, aching muscles. It’s all still there, nothing is magically fixed, it just for a second takes its proper place in a puzzle that spans generations. The perpetual imperfections of family. And how heartbreakingly we try to love each other.

He says he will call again. You believe him. It’s snowing.

Week 33

| Jade SV

So what’s it like to have a baby? To birth it, I mean. What will that be?

My mother is worried. This has caught me by surprise. The story of my birth, the story of my conception even, has been told me my whole life, and in the telling, it was mythic and powerful. Surges, Ina May’s rushes, while she stood by a window staring at the Tennessee trees. In the trees, she saw a red, white and black woodpecker–huge, two feet tall, more; a rare bird; no one else but she saw it. In her telling, it was power and force and not pain exactly but something else–sensations of great intensity. I was a summer baby born near Summer town, Tennessee. I was two weeks late. I was huge. Almost ten pounds. Though I did not know that was huge. Like most things in my life, I thought my way was the norm and everything else not. Thus, I thought all women were short compared to my mother’s five feet ten inches. I also assumed I would be five feet and ten inches tall too. And I thought my breasts would be the same size as hers. I remember distinctly the day that I realized they were not growing anymore. I was sixteen. I looked down at my little boobs, and went, Huh. I guess this is all I get. Until that moment I’d just been biding my time; sure there was more to come.

Six weeks ago my mother said, “I’m mad at your baby.”

“Why?” I asked, instantly at the babe’s defense.

“Because it’s going to hurt when you give birth.”

I laughed. “But I thought labor was surges of power.”

“Well…it might hurt a little.”

And then we both laughed.

“That’s the first time you’ve ever admitted it.”

Her laugh is more commanding, but when we get going together, we do take over a restaurant.

My mother and I were a team for most hours of most days of most years of my childhood. Before I could even imagine falling all the way in for B., before I had the capacity to contemplate what sharing a life could be; as in way back when I was a teenager, I only ever imagined myself as a single mother. My mother and I used to ride the train twice a year to Illinois to visit family. She always gave me the window seat. At night, they dimmed the lights in the car, and even if they were awake (and we were all awake) everyone got hushed. This was my absolutely favorite time. I’d put my forehead against the cold glass, watching the blurring, on lucky nights there’d be a moon, and I’d watch for the one orange light, the one window lit in the one house in the clump of trees gathered from the wide and flat spaces of the farms.  I’d tuck my feet into and under her hips while she shifted and tried to sleep. Sometimes we leaned into each other back to back, the counter pressure keeping us propped and curled, coming as close we could to actual rest. In the mornings, we went to the Women’s Lounge to “freshen up”. My mother stretched and groaned and her silver bangles clinked. Once properly ready, we headed to the dining car for breakfast. While we waited for food, she sipped coffee and I ate strawberry jam out of the packets with the tip of my butter knife. Everything outside would still be flat, but sunny now, sharp and shining, the houses white.

“Do you want to play cards after breakfast?”

“Uh huh.”

Everyone keeps saying, “Your mother must be so excited.” And I’m sure she is, and I’m sure she will be, and i know she’s going to be an epic grandmother, but she’s not a grandmother yet. For now, she’s only a mother and I’m her only daughter.

Week 32

| Jade SV

From this Friday past:

The body and its needs. You can’t tell because I’m going to use the nifty scheduled publish thing to publish this later, but it’s the middle of the night. Or the very beginning of morning; 4:45. With daylight savings it feels like the middle of night, or maybe not—maybe more like my favorite word in Spanish; la madrugada, the hours right before sunrise, the ones I always wanted to be out in during high school when my mother, frustrated by the absence of curfew of my wealthy, private school friends, would tell me, “You have it easy; do you know how strict I could  be?”. A sentence that made no sense to me. She felt impossibly strict as it was. In those years, I wanted to be out and wandering the city and the want felt like a dire physical craving, as potent as the nic fits of spending a Sunday at the museum with my mother and grandmother; eight-ten-twelve hours with no feasible story to concoct that would allow me to sneak off and have a cigarette. First drag at thirteen and by fourteen buying packs and not long after every free moment punctuated by those inhales and exhales. I always think that I miss smoking, but B. and I smoked for three weeks in Turkey this last summer (my mother says we only travel so we can smoke), sharing a whopping 2-3 cigarettes a day, and my body hated it. Also, I couldn’t ignore it; every time I smoked a cigarette the last days of the trip I felt a tension, a priming for panic. Like being mildly stung by a jellyfish; the way when you leave the ocean you run your hand over your skin, confused by its rawness, as if you’ve been scraped. The cigarettes were doing that. I had a full fledged panic attack in the winding streets between the Spice Market and the Grand Bazaar; my first in a decade. And in Paris too, on the long lay over, the coffee and the cigarette and then we’re walking and I’m breathing through it, my heart beating faster, not wanting to mention it to B. because already I’m planning my next cigarette of the day, my last of the trip, and I don’t want to say out loud how badly the smoke has begun affecting me.

I don’t miss being a smoker. I miss the purity of not thinking things through. Of giving myself over to every single sensation; drunk, sad, horny, angry, happy. Each was the thing that I was. I was really into life-changing revelations. A new realization that I would pour out to my friends, sure I was forever altered.

Just a little while ago my body woke me up to start crying. Sometimes my dreams are anxious and insistent in order to get me up and peeing. Tonight, I was having a sad dream that I forgot immediately except to know that it was there, like walking into a room where someone just lit a match, and as soon as I was awake, my crying began. Hard crying, not sobbing, but painful and sharp. Today was my last day at school. I’m beginning my maternity leave now. I knew I loved the kids, but this tonight is sharper than I knew it would be.

It’s pouring rain. The rain is drumming on the skylight. Our scratched and rusted bathtub was re-enameled today. The bathroom is full of fumes and I can’t go in there, so tonight I’m peeing into a large lavender bucket. When I squat over it, my pee sounds thunderous in the empty room next to our bedroom. I am sure that B. can hear it.

Physically, I’m a bit of a hot mess. My cold has latched in and I’m coughing up flem all day and night. My hips are throbbing and the muscle in my left butt cheek has knotted up and won’t take my whole weight when I step so I’m cringing and wobbling and waddling down the street. Also just now my lower back tightened up, a wave, one of those practice contractions people tell me about? I’m certainly not sleeping through any night. The babe is doing well though; stretching mostly, and sometimes shuddering quickly as if startled. The other night it had hiccups; a steady drumming low under the bottom ridge where my globular belly reconnects to my pelvis. Pubis.

I can’t really understand the plain of time that has just opened up to me. No fence posts or landmarks on my future months; rarely have I ever been this unplanned and wide open. In this instant, I’m thinking rest. Swimming. Yoga. Writing. Rest. Buying a body pillow. Going back to bed. Trying not to plan it. Surrendering? I think I want the babe to take it’s time cause I always want more time, but I don’t know. As my friend reminds me, eight weeks is a long expanse. Is a whole summer. I’m exhausted. Sun coming up soon?

Week 30

| Jade SV

I’ve become enchanted by the pelvic tunnel. After the cervix fully dilates–and wait, let me tell you that before the birthing videos and the dated computerized animation, I had this image of dilation as if the cervix was opening while the baby was suspended above waiting patiently, as if for a portal in a future space ship hallway that will open with a mechanical exhale. But no, this is not it at all. The cervix is opening around the head of the baby as it pushes down down, the force of the baby stretching, the uterus pulsing, the uterus pushing. So yes, this portal does not gradually ease open of its own accord, the babe waiting patiently; no, it is opening because the babe is there pushing on that exit. After this stage the babe rotates in order to squeeze first through the bones of the pelvic inlet and then leaves through the outlet and this part of the process is somehow my favorite because (I think) I never thought nor even heard of, certainly did not focus on, this stage–the babe passing through a tunnel of bone and cartilage. It seems almost graceful. Swimmerly. After that (I’m pretty sure I’m getting my stages right) comes the active pushing and that is something else but right now I like the tunnel best…as if the babe is diving out of a cave with an underwater entrance. Or perhaps this; did you ever swim beneath a floating dock to pop up in a new area of the lake? Hah, like a beaver’s den.

I don’t know how to write myself fully. I’ve been writing a memoir, and have been shaping and changing it for years, and it is almost right, but always I come up against this wall–and it feels like a literal wall. I can tell that on the other side is a more authentic voice, a voice I can access when writing other parts of myself, but which I lose when I try to write the stories of my father, of Mexico, of my skin. I still, after years of thinking and talking and reading, can’t tell this all the way. I stopped speaking those parts of myself when I was fourteen and it has been so much harder to begin to tell it again than I imagined it would be. I thought the deciding to tell it would be the hard part. But no, I’ve decided, and I still often feel like I’m tunneling through a wall of rock. Or bone.

I am afraid and as much as I don’t want to be I still am. I want to be free in my body, in my skin, in my voice. To be free in my body will be the same as being free in the telling of my body.

Across the street is a school. At night various windows light up as, I think, janitors move through the rooms cleaning. My school is not cleaned by janitors at night. The students clean at the end of every day, and we help, and on the weekends two people come in and do the deeper scrubbing. My school is not orderly. Sometimes when adults visit they are turned off by the almost-chaotic jumble of it. It can be hard to see what it is happening beneath the precarious stack of books in the library; the glitter coating the art room table. But it is a space for kids, and not an adult’s vision of what those kids want from a space. This is my third year there and the lesson that has taken me some time to learn is that to truly hold a young person’s view at the center of their education is a much more radical re-thinking than I’d previously imagined. The simple act of accepting that I do not see a room in the same as a ten year old does, and that the ten year old’s vision has it’s own worth…Many of us prefer the vision of school in which rooms are cleaned at night when children are gone, rooms organized and maintained by adults. I wonder what the kids think of that? To leave a space and return to it magically swept bare of the detritus of the day before as if it never existed.

When I get into trouble is when I get feeling that there is no me, just versions of me, and that the gaze of others, what they perceive is what determines who I am. That feeling of being constantly changeable. Wait, that is not what I’m afraid of. I feel that way, yes, changeable, but what I’m startled by, uneasy with, is that…and here is the wall once again. I think I’m afraid of the chaotic room.

As if I could control how I am perceived in the world. As if anyone can.

I have not accepted the skin I live in. What an odd statement.

Some stories done’t have resolution.

But I am going to give birth. In one form or another. I’ll moan and move and make low humming noises to open the sphincter of my throat so that the sphincter that is my cervix will open wider and probably in all that opening and moaning I’m going to poop and it will be in front of other people, in front of B., who I don’t even like to fart in front of if I can help it. And everything will be opening and I’ll be moaning and making noises and movements and I will be in a land beyond care or concern or even thought of what others or the world think of me; I will be deep down in my body, letting my body lead me, and how could there be a thing as poisonous as pretense in the midst of all that?

Week 29

| Jade SV

B. and I escaped out of the city this weekend. We borrowed back the car we gave to his brother (after his dad gave it to us) and drove to a tiny cabin tucked among mountain foothills with the world’s best diner 4 minutes away and a little mini kitchen to cook in and somehow all of this within budget. It snowed, and was bone chilling freezing, but I made a beef stew and we tucked into that little cabin and napped when we were tired and had sex when we wanted each other and ate food when we were hungry. After two and half days of this I woke up on Monday with sun hitting pine trees and snow, a layer of ice on the window, and flames heating the space of the bed from behind the gas stove’s glass door, and I felt a bone deep contentment that made me understand what it truly means to be rested.

And then, on the way home, we got in a fight. It began when we were approaching the GW after taking a wrong turn that cost us 20 minutes in both directions. The fight began with talk to paint the kitchen, and by the time we were in Bed Stuy we were talking about where we wanted to live in two years and discovering it was not the same place.

Immediately after that discovery, we had to pick up his brother’s newly ex-girlfriend, drive her back to our neighborhood, leave her with the car, and then B. had to hurry to an appointment in the city, and we had to put the whole fight on hold.

Which was definitely a good thing.

I’m wondering what it’s going to be like to fight in front of this babe; our future child who will indeed be able to both hear and see. How does one do that in a healthy way? In my world, there were not two parents, there was just my mother and me and I did not have to witness her negotiate the business of parenting with anyone else. It was her way and her word that led us. My grandmother was the other adult in my life; not there daily, but for many years I slept at her house a few times a week, and every single vacation was spent with her. But their arguments, infrequent, were different. My grandmother did not question any of my mother’s parenting decisions, rather when they moved into tense tones it was about the past, and that didn’t happen often because my grandmother carefully avoided the past’s tender spots. On those occasions when my mother insisted they get into it, I submerged myself into a book so completely that no sounds reached me. Truly. My uncle was once visiting and spoke to me directly, calling my name three or four times without me hearing until he gave up and left alone on our planned venture to the pool. I can still make this escape as an adult, though it’s harder. Back then, I often read books that were too old for me, and now, when I want to slip away, I read books that are too young. (Always the teaching excuse–I have to be up on what my students are reading.) But they’re familiar to me, soothing, a corner to tuck into when the outside world presses in too fiercely.

And so, will our child have to do this? Find escapes?

I can be cruel in arguments because I love the feeling of righteous anger; barbed words rolling from my tongue like jacks. Sometimes I’m calm until the apology comes and only then does the anger flicker on and it’s not easy for me to willingly walk away from that heat because the heat feels too good. Leaves me feeling too powerful.

(Oy, this winter–the skin on my cheek bones suddenly rough from, I guess, the wind and sun and cold of our mountain walks, and the skin on my butt cheeks rough from, I guess, the general business of living. I would like to be coated with shea butter and sat down in a sauna until softened.)

B. and I reunited later in the evening. And we talked it out over food at the diner (not as perfect as our mountain diner, but still good) because our kitchen is a disaster. And then we kept talking it out on the way home; our frustrations sparking then dimming. And then to the couch. Finally I cried in that good way that comes with telling the truth. It put out the self-righteous embers. He did that thing where he smiles. We apologized. At one point, he looked up, startled, that the babe had been hearing all of it (because it can now; can hear our voices and other sounds), had heard us being angry and sarcastic and frustrated. And what could I say other than that it was hearing us then too, being sweet and kind and forgiving.

I still can’t shake it though; how weird it will be to have another human being witnessing me being ridiculous, having a temper, making mistakes. It took me years to be willing to let B. know all these things about me, and he chose me. This babe is going to be assigned me.

Over the weekend B. was pulling into the snowy parking lot when he turned to me, and said, “Wanna get married and start a family?” And I thought, Start a family? Yes, but whoa. And then I laughed.

“What?” he asked.

And I told him. For that moment, I had totally forgotten that I was pregnant.