Love

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.

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 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.

Week 18

| Jade SV

I wanted to write last week about the glow, because I was finally in it. Nausea gone. Fatigue gone. Hair luscious. My rounded body lovely to me, and B. and I thoroughly enjoying the second trimester sex of which I’d heard so much about. So I am beginning here because I want a record that that’s happening too. Pleasure and days on end where I feel like I’m playing my way through the hours and tasks. Days and hours when I feel radiant.

Because as you may be guessing I don’t feel radiant today. There’s this thing that started about a week ago, it’s at the base of my spine, it began as simply a sensation. An awareness at the very bottom tip of bone that lives right in the center of my ass. And it’s not pain exactly until it is. In the middle of the night last night I began to envision it as an egg-not like the eggs my body makes, like a chicken egg, a 3-D oval-nestled at what I’ve learned in yoga is my root chakra. This little egg is the palest blue and charged with static electricity, radiating sensations that are not pain, but are not comfortable, over into my hips and down into my legs until magically no position is comfortable. And as I lay there cursing the cat for daring to try to tuck into me yet again, I visualized just popping this egg out of it’s place holder in my back and leaving behind this blessed, empty space where it once nestled.

This is how the night passed, and as I was laying there this morning, having not realized that for a quite a while it had been my alarm going off and not B’s, B. goes, “Can I ask you a favor?” And I should I have just said no right then and there, but I didn’t. I said, “What is it?”. And literally all he asked me to do was turn the thermostat up, which means climbing down one flight of stairs and then up again, but I was instantly furious. My first two emotions of today were resignation and fury. It was already an innocent thing to ask, but making it even more so is that B. rarely asks me to do those kinds of favors if he can possibly do them himself. All he wanted was thirty more cozy minutes in bed, but sensing my mood turn, he went down while I was in the bathroom, which then made me even more angry for him doubting that I was going to do the favor which I was planning on doing with such righteous indignation. I snapped at him. And then I apologized. And then I scurried off to meditate before I did any more damage.

I don’t want to be the grumpy pregnant lady, just like I didn’t want to be the nauseous pregnant lady, just like I don’t want to be the tired pregnant lady. I want to be the radiant one who just loves being pregnant. Which is why this record has to show that those days have happened. Today is simply not one of them.

Week 16

| Jade SV

I just finished sitting by my kitchen window eating a grilled cheese. A.) I ate a whole grilled cheese and 20 minutes later I still feel fine. B.) I normally have a hard time sitting still in a quiet house. Not all the time, but in the afternoon. From midday until dark, it’s often a challenge for me to be home. Especially when it’s sunny. During the summer this can get tricky because I’ll want to stay out until the set sets, which leaves me taking meandering walks until 8:30 no matter how busy the day’s been, with B. trying to convince me how nice it would be to just relax. Sometimes I’m not so good at relaxing.

But today I’m not antsy at all. As I was sitting in the quiet and the sun, looking at the backyards, I thought, “Enjoy this now because in not long you’re not going to be able to sit quietly by yourself by a sunny window.” And I’m glad to feel all calm, but I’m really trying not to get into this game. For me this thinking can lead me to much more hazardous behavior than eating a peaceful grilled cheese. It’s definitely why I smoked cigarettes in Turkey this past summer. And before that, it’s the thing that had me wanting to have one more drink, try more drugs, do more, always more, before it was too late. I officially stopped doing drugs and drinking ten months before I got pregnant, though it had been winding down for a while. But until I woke up one day and realized that, for me, these substances were no longer a good idea, I had been planning my big comeback. I kept thinking to myself, “One of these days I really have to get my game back on.” I bought tickets to a music festival the year before in pursuit of this game. I was sure I would do some proper drugs there. But the universe aligned to keep me from going, and I didn’t have the money to buy the plane tickets. I lost $300 (and the cool quotient) but I have this feeling that things would have gone very badly for me if I’d made my way down there: An outdoor and more significant version of the night I tried to drink like my old self and found myself, a 31 year old, puking a full dinner into my friend’s toilet and then crawling to her couch, unable to stand until morning.

I’m scared that I’m never going to stay out late again. I’m scared that I’ll never be as cool as I’ve always wanted to be. My twenties ended badly in a haze of secret eating disorders and fearing the loss of my grandmother and then mourning the loss of my grandmother, and I’ve spent the beginning of my thirties working a very responsible job that has me rising before the sun, and falling asleep on the couch at ungodly hours. 10, 9:30, 9. Even, yes, more than once, 8:30. And now I’m pregnant. I had a whole life of shows and bars and friends always out and it’s as if I thought I was taking a short detour, thinking I’d be back in just a sec, and the detour turned out to be my life. It’s like Frodo says Bilbo says, in Fellowship, “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door. You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no telling where you might be swept off to.”

I’ve always imagined that there was a wilder, more fabulous, unafraid, confident me waiting just around the future’s corner. In high school, I knew it would happen in college. In college, every next semester was the one. After I graduated, it was the next trip, the next country, the next job. As my twenties went on, it was every new New York bar, restaurant, thinking that if I was just going to more clubs, doing more, better drugs. And then I slammed into what I’ve dubbed, “the hard years,” and now here I am. Sometimes I feel like I’m standing, blinking, trying to see clearly the place I’ve arrived in.

But. I am happy. I am really fucking happy. Yesterday B. and I went to the Met with friends, and then to delicious (though silly expensive) hot chocolate and then we showed up for his mom, who’s had her hip replaced, and then we ate dinner at the Veselka, the restaurant I’ve been eating at since I was six years old, and then we went home and (I’m sorry, but it must be said) had mind-blowing sex, and then I woke up, and meditated, and drank decaf tea, and made pie dough, and the fact that I can sit by the sun in this silent house, content, calm, not thinking about the next thing to do, is really kind of a miracle.

Assessing it then: I can’t say I’m fabulous, but I am unafraid; I am confident; I am enjoying this solitude; and I am over the moon to meet this babe.

So.

All right then.

Not so bad.

Week 15

| Jade SV

I had my first glowing day this week. I also finally told the the students at school, and the full release from that secret has been huge for me. My whole body has relaxed and I can wear whatever I want, and being rid of that tension is incredible. It helps that the outpouring of excitement from the kids is the sweetest, funniest, best thing ever. They can’t get enough; want to talk about it all day long, and ask any old thing that comes into their mind.

“What will you name it if it’s a hermaphrodite?”

“Imagine if the baby came out with your exact tattoos.”

Students I don’t well, all genders and ages, have found a moment to congratulate me. Plus, it turns out that half of the high school knew already anyway. My little bump seems to have been spotted way earlier than I realized.

I am loving my new shape.

The other night as I was changing out of my robe, B. passing by saw and stopped. It was evening. The lamps were doing their golden glow. Before I could re-clothe B. came over and ran his hands over my new belly, and my fragile breasts, this new expansion of me, and us, and he was grinning. There was delight, and such happiness in his face. And I remember those other days when he, fearful and helpless, watched me carving myself down; when he tried to stop me from running in the cold, or injured, and I brushed him aside, and went and was gone for hours. And I remember how I ran my hands over the sharp planes of my hips and how he did not do the same, would not admire them with me. That person is a part of me too; she’s still in there, but the joy of my body now…even my skin feels stronger and softer. I’m grateful I get to have this–this body, this time, because it is more, better, sweeter than anything I could have known to ask for.