Author: Jade SV

Week 28

| Jade SV

I’m becoming nocturnal again. I first remember it from when I was twelve and thirteen; my bed with my lamp in my room while the whole city quieted. When I turned off the lamp the night felt the same as hot baths do to me now.

This is not insomnia. Insomnia is fatigue and being denied the rest to relieve it. I don’t even want to think about the grating restlessness of insomnia. I’ve had enough nights of it and right now I have my lamps and my energy and this tapping of the keyboard.

I just finished reading this piece from a recent New Yorker called “Lottery Tickets: Grieving for a Husband” by Elizabeth Alexander. I loved it. I sped through it and now have it turned to the front page because I have to read it again. The husband dies, as the title tells, and I recognize in her words how I would have to mourn B. if forced to it, but the other part is the children…their two sons and how the four of them lived together. I can’t bear to linger on the basic truth that was also in the piece, that in fact I could lose B. at any time, but I can take in the feeling of the house she described and how they were in love and raising children together and it makes me see how B. and I are beginning something like that, and it made all of this feel romantic. All of this meaning being pregnant, making a baby, birthing a baby, raising it even–what an act of love this all is.

I know enough to know that this massive change is much more than just an ending.

Last night was session one of birthing class. I felt like I was in eighth grade health again, watching a video with my eyes bugging out of my head and laughing really loudly at inappropriate times. Yes, that happened last night. I was the only one to laugh even though it was hilarious. Whatever it was. I can’t remember. At one point I almost lost it the way I did sitting in the back row of a Bar Mitzvah with A. because the cantor’s lip curled up like Elvis’s. Last night also like the eighth grade in that I immediately began trying to figure out who was cool, who was not, who I wanted to align myself with, and how much snack was the right amount to eat.

We ended class with a movie. I cannot get away from the image of the baby’s head shining and dark between the lips of this woman’s vagina. It popped out and then just stayed there; the shoulders still inside of her and she’s breathing and moaning and they tell her to touch the head and she does and then a few seconds later she pushes and in a slippery rush there is a baby born and she says, “It doesn’t look like a baby,” which I thought was really endearing actually, and made me like this woman from the 1980’s birthing class video. But yeah, first there was the head, black hair plastered to its scalp, and it was just there between her splayed legs, round and impossible, an impossible shape and size, impossible that her body grew that, and pushed it from within her uterus through her cervix through her pelvic bone through her vagina and out. Completely impossible and yet one hundred percent real and finally the disconnect of the last two weeks lifted. I get it, or for now I do. I am going to do that. This is actually going to happen, an actual head of an actual baby is going to emerge from my own body.

My midwife uses the image of a hot air balloon a lot. It’s the shape of my uterus and as the baby is growing the air has been blowing into it, lifting it and inflating it. This also the reason why the pressure on my lower back eased as I got more pregnant–the balloon rose as it inflated up and away from my sacrum. So after class last night, the image shifted and instead of my uterus alone being the hot air balloon, now I myself am it, fully inflated and tied down to the grass with ropes. And seeing that, I saw next a giant pair of scissors come and cut one of the ropes. The one severed is the one that holds me to my work, to the kids and their thoughts and their plans, to our school.

Last night I saw that head in the video and the image made no sense to me; vaginas don’t look like that, nor should baby’s heads come from there, and yet it did, they do, and mine will.

That’s the work I have to begin to attend to now.

Week 27

| Jade SV

Time to rant.

The ice is a pain in the ass, and yet somehow the concern is getting to me too. To be careful, to be careful, and B. is so lovely with his elbow on my arm and yet it is the weirdest fucking thing in the world to be helped across a patch of ice the way I used to help my grandmother. I understand now that waving off of help; that, leave me be, I can do it.

And people who don’t handle their patch of sidewalk suck, as do the people who should be helping said people if they can’t do it themselves.

And also world, please stop telling me “I am carrying well.” I’ve touched on this before, but it is just code for I haven’t gained “too much” weight and at some point my brain can’t keep up my feminist levee against the rising tide of body obsession and just the other day, a leak sprung, the thought, “My thighs are getting big.”

Have you heard this one? Girls steal your beauty. Apparently mine hasn’t been stolen. Yet. Also my belly is “pointy”. Sure signs. It’s a boy.

Ah, but a rant intermission here to say that I really love these women, the aunties and grandmothers, who rub my belly in the ladies room without asking and tell me not to eat salt.

I love them much more than the woman today who suggested I help her stock apples during my co-op shift and there were lots of other people around and I looked at that low shelf and the big box, and had to say, “I just can’t bend like that these days.” And do you know what she said? “Some days I don’t want to bend either.”

And while I’m on the subject of the co-op: I’m just home from the last half hour of the shift spent loading fruit onto those low shelves and there I am standing there and honestly, just send me home. I am not even remotely ambiguously pregnant these days; just send me home. There was a Latin man working with me, and he kept waving me away, “Go sit. Go rest. There’s nothing you have to do here.” Reminded me how a friend traveled to Columbia at five months pregnant and said that every woman should have the experience of going to a Latin country pregnant. My mother said the same thing of being a new mother in Mexico. That she felt like a queen. I always planned/hoped to make it to Puerto Rico once I got pregnant, and today has been a day in which I might murder for the feeling of sun and sand on this belly of mine. Today also a day when I understand why I don’t have a proper credit. B. tells me all the time that I’m actually super financially responsible, and I think I am, but I don’t trust myself with credit because of the fact that I can always find a reason to buy a plane ticket. (Just as I always used to find a reason to go out to dinner; drink the best drink.) Then again, if I did let myself have one, I’m 99.9% sure I’d be flying to San Juan this very Friday.

Ice storm coming tonight.

Okay, now I’m having trouble holding back the visions of heat and water and swimming and fruit and Spanish and sun and diving into the ocean in a tiny bikini and oh man, now I’m imagining skinny dipping in a calm ocean, and how good it would feel to just feel my skin. Only my skin in the air and the water and none of this armor of long underwear and wool and scarves.

Two nights now of better rest because I followed a pillow diagram and am sleeping with six pillows. I’m not kidding. Six. My head hovers a full foot or so above B.. When he kisses me before sleeping he has to fully lift himself up to reach me because once I’ve achieved the position of maximum comfort I’m too nervous to move for fear of jinxing it.

And the reward for all this is a baby. I watched babies today. None of them seemed cute, and most of them annoying.

It’s just that there’s not enough time left. This baby is going to be here too soon and then I’m going to have a baby and then I’m going to be a mother and I have plans for many of the weekends coming and they’re hurrying me towards my due date, rushing me along, and it’s too fast right now. I’m not ready and it doesn’t matter because the babe will come anyway.

But.

I love the bumps and wiggles and shimmies. I really do. Me and it in this private dance.

I’m having an experience without reference point or comparison.

It’s just hard some days, the not knowing my way.

Week 26

| Jade SV

I can’t sleep.

I saw the snow begin. The tree branches are laced with it now. A cab drove by. Nights like this could be lovely at the bar actually. I’d have done last call by now. On week nights we closed the bar at 2. Slow nights, off nights, everything would be clean by now so that when I locked the door and hung the curtain over the big square of plate glass window in the front, it would only take me about twenty more minutes to do a final clean and count the bank and tip out everyone and be out the door. Thursdays could go either way though; it could be a forgiving and charming night in which case I’d be chatting now, elbows on the bar, not rushing, melodic rap playing. The bar was long and narrow and we always kept it very dark and candle lit, everyone looked good in that light, and it fronted a narrow cobble stone street that was an image of New York as the city likes to see itself. On a night like this, the street would be wonderful, silent, a leaning couple walking home, a high heeled woman picking her way like a heron, snow dusting us all.

My alarm is going to go off in three hours and five minutes.

There is an actual human being inside of me.

Week 25

| Jade SV

The dream I had last night will make a lot more sense if I add that in the last week I’ve watched Selma twice, and just last night sat down with Dear White People.

I sleep in shifts now; I can’t make it more than a few hours without the babe doing it’s bladder dance and sending me sliding out of bed. Some nights I sleep deeply in every interval and the night stretches on and on in this luxurious way; always hours left to go if I check my phone. Other nights though, it’s all restlessness and peeing and this sensation in my lower back that I can only describe as static electricity. I fidget and turn and piss off the cat, and even disrupt B., who’s been known to fall asleep in the corner of the club with a speaker as his pillow. Other nights, like last night, I dream.

I was sitting in a long, spacious hallway with dark, carved, wooden walls and gothic windows set in high ceilings.  On the walls hung portraits of white haired white people lit with little lamps. It looked like what I imagine Oxford or Cambridge to be. I was in one of a cluster of armchairs, student center style, when up walked Oprah Winfrey and Harry Belafonte. Oprah was looking regal with braided and looped hair; she did not sit, but presided over us, disinterested, a being of an elevated state. Harry though sat right down with us. I don’t know who “us” was, but I wasn’t alone, and it was understood that we were student organizers of some kind. Then my mother and her brother were there too, and my mother, who is as blonde and white and Scandinavian looking as her brother, suddenly appeared as if she was a shade or two darker…it was if she had become another, darker ethnicity and when he was introduced to them, Harry commented on it. “Siblings?!” He was surprised. Then he got to me, shook my hand, and said, “And you, you look like everybody. It’s almost a race-less thing.” And I nodded and laughed, and it was clear I’d heard it a million times before. Then Oprah began walking through an imposing set of double doors. We knew to follow. Her braids were at my eye level, and I admired them. I wasn’t pregnant, and I was wearing tight, high waisted black jeans and a boxy, cropped black sweater and I felt Harry Belafonte admiring the flashes of tattoo he caught as he walked behind me. We walked through the doors and I woke up.

I think about the babe’s potential skin color.

My mother is Norwegian and Swedish and looks it–as I said, tall and blonde and green eyed. My father, well, we don’t know exactly. He was born to Spanish parents exiled to Mexico, but his mother was adopted, and the circumstances of this were hazy and secretive. In the photos I study, she sometimes looks Palestinian to me; Arab. He doesn’t look Mexican and he doesn’t look Spanish. His skin is a rich brown, his eyes opaque and dark; his dark hair curly. Some North African men remind me of him, and again, some Arab men too. B. is Sicilian and Polish, with none of the darkness of his Sicilian family. He is blonde, or used to be, his hair has darkened, and green eyed.

I’ve never figured out how to handle my whiteness.

Because for me my white skin is not simply that (as if skin color were ever simple)–it is instead an entire narrative, proof of things that I wish were not true. My whiteness advertises my estrangement from my family of color, tells the world that I don’t write my cousins enough, lists every word in Spanish I don’t know. Every time, my father sends an angry email,  my skin pales a shade.

And now this baby is coming, and what can I offer it of those lost countries, culture, and family? What am I going to be able to explain? My urge is to bone up on my spanish vocab and family history as if cramming for a test.

This must have been at least five or six years ago, I was in a small library when a very white father came in with his very white daughter, who was maybe 6, and he was speaking to her in a loud voice, using American accented spanish, his words slow and deliberate. He did not sound at all like someone who had grown up with the language; it didn’t seem a part of him, and I was sure that this man, this family, had simply chosen spanish as the language to teach their kid–take advantage of those early sponge like years, to help her grow up speaking a second language. And I was so pissed and so jealous. I wanted to be free to just pick up a language, scan my city for the largest immigrant group, and buy it for my kid. He didn’t care at all how he sounded, didn’t mind his gringo accent, he was so damned self-assured, while in the meantime, I sit and linger over Pablo Neruda’s poetry books, alone, whispering words to myself like incantations that will bring to me all that I don’t have.

This babe will not be race-less. No one is. It will have a color, a shade, and the world will read into it what it does, and the babe will have to learn to negotiate whatever those meanings, privileges, signifiers are. We’ll have to talk about it, and whatever I’ve lived in my body will not be what it lives.

It would be a surprise if this babe didn’t come out white; not impossible, but a surprise. And if my father’s genes assert themselves in this new being? Well, as B. pointed out, the world will probably just assume we adopted.

Week 25

| Jade SV

I’ve been telling people I’m “about” five months pregnant, but yesterday I got my weekly update and looked at this number, 25, and realized I’ve been doing wishful counting and holy shit I am six months pregnant which means I only have about three months left and I know how fast three months can go.

I did not panic.

My first thought: I need to make some lists. I designed the list in my head. It’s divided into four quadrants, and one corner is things I need, another things I really want, and then a third things I think would be fun to have and I couldn’t think of a category for the fourth. Diapers go on there for sure, and a thing to use to carry the baby around, but also, a rug. I keep on thinking that we need a rug. I’ve never bought a rug in my whole life. The only time I spotted one that I really liked, the guy nodded and said, “Ah yes, that is our best one. The wool was hand spun by women in the mountains of Afghanistan.” And then quoted me a price so far into the thousands that I just laughed.

I haven’t made the list yet.

And also, I thought we had the names all figured out, but now I’m doubting the boy’s name we picked out, and I can’t think of a single boy’s name I like. We chose the names in the midst of my last bout of unpreparedness.

And here is where I pause to remind myself of my own birth on a wooded commune in Tennessee. My mother labored from 9 to 5, and in the afternoon, moments before she pushed me out, she saw a large woodpecker with red, white and black feathers in the trees outside the window. The midwife caught me, and my father danced in celebration. We stayed for a month or so in that room in The Long House, as it was called, and then moved into a yellow van with a bed in the back. We first drove north, to visit my mother’s mother, and then south, to my father’s country. We spent a few months in that van before settling into our own place in Mexico.  And in Mexico too, there was no one house, no changing table, no one special rug.

I don’t really want to do anything. I don’t want to research or scan or peek or prod or shop. I feel like I am a complete ecosystem right now, and I don’t want to mess with it.

Maybe if I at least get the carrier, or sling, or whatever; the thing to carry the babe in, then we’ll be mobile and ready and able to go anywhere we want.

And also a rug. I can’t shake it. I really want a rug.

Week 24

| Jade SV

There’s a thing I’ve been avoiding.

Last week a student raised his arm to his chest, as if to begin a backhand, and asked, “Do you want me to slap you or something?”. He had been angry at me for two days, through two rounds of group meetings, because of a rule I was holding and the way I was holding it. This student is already in a man’s body; he is broad and strong, though not taller than me. In the moment I was relieved. I could even describe the feeling as happy. Odd, no? It was the second day, and his anger had been building, his tone when he spoke to me becoming more dismissive, his accusations both increasingly vague and vitriolic, and here finally was something that was indisputably wrong. He had crossed a clear line, and I could stop trying to handle it alone.

We began the necessary follow-up, he surprising me at first by not resisting our trip to the office, or the conversations that followed. I was calm, mostly, that whole afternoon, and into the evening. As the night progressed and I told B. the story, the certainty that I had handled the situation the right way, and adrenalin too, kept me alert, hyper even. This lasted until I wrote up the incident report. I sat down to type, recording the meetings and the conversations and then I got to the sentence, “Do you want me to slap you or something?” and I remembered suddenly that he had raised his hand to his chest when he said it, as if to begin a backhand. And instantly that I was sure and strong about, and the fuel of my adrenalin, drained away. And it’s still doing it, the angry glare, the sentence, and the hand, and I can see it and then I am not his teacher, nor he my student. I can’t see his actions in any kind of perspective, can’t weigh them against the challenges I know he faces, his unique needs and hardships in the world; all I can be is exposed.

The next day, when we began a new round of meetings I came to understand why he had not resisted our trip to the office, or any of the follow-up: He still thought he was right. He informed me that he had said that sentence, he would not use the world “threaten”, because I had “crossed a line.”

The drama of the incident is passing. The staff has had to shift to considering the over-arching questions of the relationship between this student and the school.

I haven’t gotten to the thing I’ve been avoiding; that thing is about skin, meaning skin color, and that will come, but this comes first, because of course this is not the first time a man, a boy, whatever, has reacted with rage to what they determine to be my crossing of a line. It’s not the first time a man has hated me. It happens on the street and on subways; it happened when I stood posing and hustling behind a bar; and it’s happened in my family.

I do wonder what memories my brain has locked away from me. I’ve wondered that for a long time. But regardless of what I may never remember, I do know the feeling of my body as symbol, as key that unlocks male fury, and I can never be quite sure what will do it. It comes at random, punctures days that begin peaceful and sure. Sometimes it beads right off me. Sometimes it seeps in and quickly, collects and stays and sloshes in me while I go about my day.

And sometimes there are days when my sense of who I am splits entirely from my body. I am me and apart from that me is my body: a thing that was done to me; a thing that traps me; a thing that draws attention even when I don’t want it to. Sometimes the very fact of being seen, of walking down the street, is exhausting.

I’m grateful that nothing more happened than a threat. That my life is not violent. But, and I can’t explain it, a few sentences and the sweep of an arm have been enough to shake me.

My body is the safest space this babe of mine knows. I thought that this was my grace period; the nine months I get to keep it absolutely safe before I expose it to the world that is. But that’s not true. And maybe that’s why I’m uneasy these days. Because I can’t give what I can’t get.

Week 23

| Jade SV

In the last twelve hours, I have become significantly more pregnant. It began while we were watching TV last night–we have a whole new world of options because a friend gave us her Hulu log in–and it’s funny because I’ve barely watched any of the shows that I hear talked about and now they’re all at my fingertips. I haven’t meant not to watch. Often it’s been a matter of limited resources. Of money for one, not wanting to pay, but mostly of time. These last two years, I’ve been so tired when I get home from work I’ve had about three hours of wakefulness and of the potential evening activities–eating dinner, talking to B., having sex with B., watching TV, showering–something had to go.

But also true is that nothing holds my attention. Again, I don’t want this to be true, but these shows, especially all these critically acclaimed giants, seem like the same plot with different costumes. And that plot always manages to center on a flawed, but charismatic, white man engaging with his inner uber-traditional masculine (and capitalist) self against a back drop of sacrificing, or naked, or murdered female bodies. The only series I’ve watched to completion in the last five years was Battlestar Galactica. Do you know that David Byrne and St. Vincent song? The first verse goes like this:

I used to think that I should watch TV
I used to think that it was good for me
Wanted to know what folks were thinking
To understand the land I live in
And I would lose myself, and it would set me free

That’s me, only present tense. I still think I should be watching TV. I do think it will set me free. I do want to know what folks are thinking. So I keep trying.

Anyway, last night, by the end of the first episode of the first season of Scandal (is anyone else annoyed that the kryptonite for this badass woman’s spidey sense is a man who is sleeping with at least two other women?) my belly had become half a planet. All day I’d been like a kangaroo, hopping around with my babe tucked neatly inside of me, and then suddenly, they’re kissing on the edge of the oval office and I’m an overturned turtle.

This morning it was worse. My leggings were too tight, and my long underwear had a tag designed to annoy the shit out of me, and my tunic shirt made me look the hippie mom character in a sitcom whose quirky politics are represented by her brightly, patterned leggings. Which mine are.

I handled all this by changing into a different pair of leggings; the ones I would wear every day if I thought no one would notice. As it is, I do wear them for days in a row if I know the only who’s going to see me on each of those days is B.. And even to him, I said, “You know I’m wearing tights under these so they don’t get totally dirty.” Not that that’s even all the way true. He, of course, just shrugged. “Whatever baby.”

The problem being that I look so very pregnant in everything I put on.

Last night it stopped making sense that I was pregnant. In my brain, I was just me, the same familiar me, same types of thoughts, same personality, but I couldn’t connect to the body below. My back was tingling and the skin of my belly taut, and when I tried to sit up from my sunken couch, I needed to push first and then roll, and it was awkward and weird and foreign. My body very much not my own

Movies I will not be watching: Rosemary’s Baby, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Alien.

I would like to say that my body and brain have been reunited with my outfit change into my favorite leggings, but so far, I’m still itchy and fidgety and discontent. And irritable. Also, restless. Probably one of those days where it’s a good thing that I work with a gaggle of energetic teens because in a very short while I won’t have the time or mental space to pay attention to myself.

I would like there to a right shirt to fix it, a right breakfast, maybe if I go get a muffin, maybe if I wear hoops. I don’t know.

And as a final complaint, the fruit and vegetable sizing system has completely broken down. This week the babe is said to be a mango, but last week it was supposed to be a spaghetti squash, and spaghetti squash are bigger than mangoes. And also, two weeks ago, it was a banana. Because of the length. Not the girth. No comment.

For now, it’s time for me to get this body of mine in motion; to bundle it up, take it work, and see if over the course of the day we can make up.

Week 22

| Jade SV

On the pleasures of being alone…

The first time I travelled alone I was nineteen years old and I went to Spain. Or, this is the first big trip I took alone, by then I had ridden countless Greyhound buses between New York and my grandmother’s in New Hampshire, between New York and college in Providence, and I already knew the exquisite pleasure of a solo bus ride on an off day; the bus mostly empty, two seats to myself, headphones, a book, the window, sometimes a bag of M&M’s, always plenty of water. On a bus, on a train, the land unspools beside you, for you, and you can pee whenever you want and your brain is soothed. My brain is soothed. My restlessness stilled by the fact of being in motion. Once, tucked into the back of the bus, I secretly masturbated while hidden under a giant shearling coat that had belonged to a man who had almost married my mother when I was ten but decided instead to move to Austin, Texas. (I had loved him, and cried when he told me he was leaving, and after him I vowed never to get close to a boyfriend of my mother’s. Something I pulled off until she began dating the man who became my step-father. But that would be later, when I was out of college, 23 and 24.) It was not even dark on the bus, only a grey afternoon, and the climax was a teeth clenched, muscle bracing, moment of complete stillness, which sent the sensations pulsing through the muscles of legs and back and neck. It’s been a long time since I’ve ridden a Greyhound.

But this trip to Spain…I took a semester off of college because currents of anxiety were pulling me under with frightening frequency and also I was smoking too much weed, drinking too much, all of it too much, and I had not seen nor heard from my father since I turned my back on him when I was fourteen years old and I thought it was time to explore that. I arranged to live at home, work, do therapy, but also to travel alone for a month. I extended my loan money to pay for it, and they sent me a glorious check. Spain is the land of my father’s parents and it was my first step towards him. I bought a round trip ticket. I had not been out of the country since I was six years old and visited my cousins in Norway. (That’s my mother’s side.) As the weeks brought me closer to departure, a pattern emerged: The very rich parents of the very rich kids at the after school where I worked looked at me with envy, with longing, wistful to the extreme, and said to me, “Do it now while you can.” Said, “This is the right time to go, soon you won’t be able to get away.” Said, “This could be your last chance.”

My last chance! To me, it was my first chance, the first of what I hoped would be many trips, a future dotted with movement and places and packed bags. But this too; these parents were so very rich, and yet felt so very locked in. They saw their own lives as limited, finite, without options for such adventures, and this most of all: They felt that they had no say in the matter. They were sure that outside forces were locking them out of things they might want to do. Not one of them saw, or could say honestly, that it was they themselves preventing them from those adventures. How much better it would have been to hear, “I used to want to travel, but now I’m content to be at home with my kids.” I wouldn’t have understood it for one second, and probably would have made fun of them to B., but I hope some part of me could have heard the honesty in it, the embracing of one’s own life and choices.

Everyone has warnings for me these days. According to the world at large it’s going to hurt a lot; i should definitely get an epidural; I will never sleep again; B. and I will never be alone again; moving is not a good idea; everything’s going to get harder; my breasts are going to be destroyed; and I better start wearing smarter shoes.

I bought my ticket to Madrid for October. On September 11th, September 11th happened. I lived about a mile away, but was protected by the span of the East River. The ash coated the playground, and we prayed that the parents of all the children would appear to pick them up. They did. And Christa’s husband didn’t go to work and survived, and somehow Danny’s three brothers survived, though he would not know it for hours. At sunset I stood on the Promenade, beside me a man with a bloody bandage wrapped around his head, and watched the ribbon of ash blow over us and further into Brooklyn. We’d breathe it in for days.

On October 1, I flew. I had thought I was scared of flying, but I’d learned that death comes and that miracles and tragedies are lightening bolts that can strike two people standing inches from each other. That we truly have no say. I decided simply that to fly was to risk death but that it was worth risking death to get me to Spain, to live a life I wanted to live. And then when I saw the clouds below me, it was only confirmed: to fly was a foray into the afterlife. And ever since, flying has become the same as embracing the fact that I can die at any moment. Over a decade later,  every time I board a plane I think I am risking death in pursuit of a full life.

I swear, it feels like an optimistic perspective.

Here is one prediction that does seem true: Once this babe is born, I am never again going to be fully alone in the world. I am bound to B., my friends, my family, yes, but I have a hunch this is going to be different. I am housing her. Him. This babe. I am its first home, it is literally forming inside me, and won’t my heart always be lodged a little inside this new person? Won’t this new person take a portion of me wherever it goes? My fears, my love, my hopes: I will want so much for it, and yet it will have to go forth without me and won’t it pull my heart along with it…aching, celebrating, worrying, exulting? I really don’t know what solitude is going to mean to me in a few months. And I am quite sure I can’t know until it comes.

In Madrid, it took me about two hours of chain smoking to leave the airport. I rode the metro, a monumental achievement, and disembarked into the center of the Plaza del Sol, an immense expanse of stone in the middle of the city. It was morning, maybe nine or ten, and throngs of people were criss crossing the pavement around me. The sky was a brilliant blue (every blue sky a reminder of that one Tuesday blue sky; that knowledge never leaves us, does it?) and the sun both warm and sharp. The buildings were white stone and grey stone, and intricately carved. I stood and it felt as if sky and stone were rushing through my legs and arms to meet in a long denied embrace. I was humming with it. I was exultant. I am in Madrid. I am in Madrid. I am in Madrid. The fact of it, that I had lifted my body out of New York and landed it there, in that city, in Madrid, in Spain, it was a miracle to me, and absolute proof that anything was possible. In my life, it was all possible. I am going to be ok. This is going to be ok. Life is going to work. It is still the moment I return to when the currents return to tug at me. Whatever else happens, that day happened.

I am at the close of a two night solo vacation all the way across the river into Manhattan. I’ve spent two days and two nights eating alone and walking alone and reading and writing and sleeping. It was a much shorter trip than that first voyage across the Atlantic, but it was still hard for me to get myself here. I thought of a million reasons I shouldn’t go, shouldn’t spend the money, and on and on. But I did. And when I checked into my room alone and thew my bag on the bed? Total bliss.

A last chance? A first? I’ll let you know in a decade.

Week 21

| Jade SV

I’m really pregnant now. Taking this little globe of mine out in public, and people can see it. Today I’m liking it a lot. I also really like the language of, “Are you expecting?” I am. Very much. Expecting and expectant. This morning, a polite request to touch my belly, from a stranger, but I said yes. He asked so nicely. This is a new and strange phenomenon. I would never ask a stranger if I could touch her belly, but I was raised in part by a very polite grandmother.  I am a power source. No. I contain a power source, and people are drawn to it, hands extended, they can’t help it. For those who don’t fear it, avoid it, uncomfortable, there is a desire to be close.

The babe has been moving. A few times over the last few days, it feels like it points its head down, extends its arms like it’s doing a breast stroke, and then dives down towards the bottom of my uterus, bouncing there a few times. It’s pretty cute, despite the fact that it’s treating my bladder like a trampoline.

Last night, while I was sitting in the glow of the christmas lights, my belly shiny and coated with shea butter, the babe began pushing and rolling more than ever, and I called B. over. And yes, lo and behold, he felt it for the first time. That look in his eyes–“Shhh,” he said when I laughed–what I can say? Wow.