Marriage

Birth Story Part 3

| Jade SV

This morning I made muffins for breakfast while B. slept in with the boy. This is not at all our usual arrangement, but B. was up with the babe from 5 till 6, and then I settled him into sleep, and then I was awake and hungry. Also, it is it’s own pleasure to cook alone in a quiet kitchen with the radio playing. We picnicked on the rug with an eye on the boy who was sleeping in. I allowed myself one moment to rue all that sleep I could have been getting. We ate and then, my idea, stripped down to have sex on the rug, super quick, before B.’s work departure. But the boy woke up, and we had to rush the finish, and so my O was skipped over. Again, not at all our usual arrangement. I jumped into bed to scoop the boy, still breathing hard, and even my hand still scented with me, and he immediately latched on and began nursing. Seconds before my husband gasping behind me his hands on my hips and now my son, his mouth on my breast.

My body.

My body gives pleasure and sustenance; my baby wants to be held more than he wants words. And B. and I also often need each other’s touch more than each other’s words. It’s easy to forget that; the boy can subsume all our physical energy until we shrivel and snap at the other. Now that it’s getting chillier I stand under hot showers for a long time.

My water broke in a huge, hollywood gush on a Tuesday evening.  The second B. touched a knife to the frosting of a red velvet cake it burst out of me, soaked my dress, pooled on the chair and ran down our slanted wooden floor. There was not a reason that this night was special, and yet we had both made an effort to treat each other. I had cooked dinner; he had brought cake.

We called our midwife and doula, and they said, go to bed, go to bed, go to bed.

I began to clean. B. shooed me into bed. He read me a few pages from Fellowship and then I suppose we fell asleep because the contraction woke me. It was a tectonic pain. Period cramps the tremors to this deeper than bone shifting.

I didn’t want to wake B. yet. I peed, I think, returned to bed. Could not lie down. Went onto my hands and knees, breathing and rolling forward and back and then B. was awake too.

And it began and it did come in waves and then in between there was stillness. My labor was long and slow; the contractions never gathered into one rush of sensation, not even in the very end, always they were five, six minutes apart. At the fastest it was three or four. Every push was a decision to push. In that way he was moved millimeter by millimeter through me. Finally, my midwife said, “Would you like to feel him?”.  And she guided my hand and there was his head; rock hard and covered with hair. I cried. He was so close. He was in fact going to arrive. But still, it would take hours more to move him out of me.

I threw up a few times.

I did not feel closer to God or the universe or a higher power, as I thought I would. I did not feel that the curtain between life and death had thinned and that I was in the land between. I did not feel closer to the miraculous. I did not transcend my body. It was the opposite. I was only my body. I was held in it, caught in it, could not imagine a land beyond it. I stared at my belly and tried to imagine where he was inside me. Had he left my uterus? Was he in the pelvic tunnel? Where was he? I wanted to know exactly. His heart beat steady and sure. My cervix did exactly what it was supposed to; thinned and softened and opened. He moved and he moved; fractions of millimeters at a time. My uterus squeezed and released. Squeezed and released. Cups with bendy straws were held in front of my face and I obediently sipped and then buckets were held for me to spit up into. I paced and sensed B. trailing behind me. I pressed my forehead against a wall and he pressed into my lower back. We paced some more.

I lay on my side half conscious while the contractions pulsed through me. I dozed through them somehow. A cold washcloth was pressed to my forehead. Someone massaged my foot; my hand. The day began again. I listened to the movies we played with my eyes closed; Blue Crush and The Neverending Story. I heard B. and our doula and our midwife talking; they in their own dance of care for me and care for themselves and care for each other.

“Do you want to go outside? Walk around?”

No!

I gave up on pants. And then underwear. I wore only a shirt. I crouched and bore down and pooped little dark curlicues in front of everyone. I puked and I puked. I sat backwards in a chair while B. or our midwife or our doula pressed into my back. I sat on the toilet and contracted there; peeing and pooping and spitting up. My feet were swollen and I hated the sight of my fat toes beneath the horizon line of my belly.

They put me in a hot shower and I laughed at how good it felt.

I floated in the warm birth tub.

I asked B. to put on Paul Simon’s Graceland which I hadn’t listened to in years and years but with the first notes of the album, I said, “Oh no. Turn it off.”

I tried to open my sphincters by singing.  B. and I were alone upstairs and I relaxed my throat and I don’t sing really ever and we circled the floor and these noises came from me and B. trailed me and I heard that he was crying and I knew he was deeply moved and he said something like, “So beautiful.” He told me later that as we drifted through the rooms, he was listening to these incredible sounds coming from me, nothing ever like them before, and at the same time seeing the objects in our home, most of them given or made by people we loved, and he was overcome by the love and the beauty and the depth of our life.

And the boy’s heartbeat was sure and steady. And my body kept on doing just what it was supposed to. Just very, very slowly.

They call it posterior labor, or back labor, the baby flipped so that its weight, its back doesn’t press into the front of my body but into my back. It’s slower than standard labor and more deliberate. A baby born in this position is called “sunny side up” though I think when he came out he was on his side.

I didn’t feel mythic or beautiful. I was sweat and piss and skin and hair.

I did what they told me to do, when they told me to do it. At least I tried. I believed what they told me. I gave myself completely to their care. I abandoned myself, my baby, to them, and that was the gilded net that held me. This is what kept fear or doubt at bay. I was moving my baby through me. He knew what to do. B. and our doula and our midwife; they knew what to do. My body knew what to do. I knew nothing.

The only conscious decision I made in the whole thing, my only exertion of will came at three in the morning, after what we called “the big sleep” when the midwife went home for awhile and the rest of us slept for about three hours. I went alone to the bathroom and decided that it was time to start pushing. And I squatted and began the long, slow pushing of the babe.

The last morning the game changing visit from the acupuncturist. My energy went up, my contractions came stronger and closer together, the babe in my pelvis; I felt the weight of him there; something to push into. The midwife brought my hand to his head and I cried.

I lay on my back on my bed. B. by one leg, our doula by the other, the midwife next to us on the couch. When a contraction came, I said, “Ok” and B. took one leg, and our doula the other, and then the midwife put her finger just inside me to show me where to push into, and I grabbed my thighs and lifted my head and grunted and pushed and then it was done, and we waited again for the next contraction.

I paced. I crouched. I stared at my belly.

We moved to the couch upstairs and somehow there I could really push. The midwife, “Do you want to see?”

Yes, but mistake! All that pain and just the barest oval of his damp, dark hair. It’s too small a hole, I thought. And, This is going to hurt.

Finally she said, “One more push like that and we’re going down to the tub.”

The push did more than she thought it would.

“Okay, we have to move now.”

To his great frustration, I wouldn’t let B. get in front of me on the stairs because I could not pause. I felt the baby as if his head was already out of my body. B. helped me into the tub and I draped my body over the side. I think I shouted out, “What do I do?”

And she said push, and I did and the pain was everything, mind scrambling, there was nothing to grab on to, there was no thought, it was a flash that lit my brain up and left not a single shadow to duck into. And then there was one more, and my mind skittered like a bead of water on a stove, and again, there was nowhere to go, but then it was done. And they handed him to me. And he was tremendous. Huge and solid and real.

Relief.

Wonder.

A quieter sweetness than I expected.

The rest is the simple miracle of it. The afternoon light in our room with the yellow ceiling. The water in the birth tub turned murky and I felt like I was sitting in the primordial swamp of all creation. My boy my boy my boy. B. beside us. Our boy. The women cared for the babe and for me and after some amount of time B. held him while I showered and there were clean clothes for me, and the women cleaned the rooms and I held the boy and we called my mother, but I can’t remember the words. It was dark then. The bed with fresh sheets and the babe measured and weighed and tended to, and the women left us with kisses and promises of return the next day. The cat re-emerged but she was frightened and had scratched a bare spot into her chin. We went downstairs briefly, to B.’s mother’s apartment to show her the boy. She had waited there through her worry, resisting her urge to knock on the door.

I ate a little chicken and hummus and salad because B. couldn’t handle it if I went any longer without eating but I was not hungry. The house was silent. We lay the boy between us on the bed and stared at him; the adoration that has been repeated for millenia. We eased into sleep. I woke up at dawn and my guys were asleep beside me. Finally I was hungry. I walked up to the kitchen and fried two eggs and ate them with toast and butter and watched the sky lighten outside of the window. I felt scrubbed clean and more awake than I had ever been. And everything was scrubbed clean; brighter and fresher and lighter than any day had ever been. I went back to bed and the next time we woke it was into the first morning to include the boy as, I hope more than anything, will every day for the rest of my time here.

39 days old.

| Jade SV

Today, B. and I solemnly pinky swore to the following items:

1.) To seriously lower our standards in regards to anything house related.

It’s pretty spotless right now, and the fridge is always stocked, and our laundry being done and, here, in week 5 (week 6?) B. is crashing. He needs to do less.

2.) To nap during the day!

It’s getting ridiculous. We’ve been told an infinite number of times to sleep when the boy is sleeping and we keep on not doing it and then we get crabby and tired and slip into circular conversations that don’t even count as arguments. In these, I talk about his “tone” and he talks about me not not hearing him. This goes on too long until we kiss, shake and make up and realize that while there is a kernel of truth to each of our points, mostly we’re just being stupid and acting just like the boy does when he’s too tired and doesn’t know what he wants and thus complains about every damn thing including his favorite things. (Which at this point I think are milk, cuddling, and wiggle time.)

3.) To build flexibility into our plans.

This is huge, and every time I do it, so liberating. What this looks like:  Friend says, “Do you want to meet up on Sunday?”, and I say, “I’d love to, but is it ok if we check in that morning and then decide?”.  And then Friend says, “Yes, totally,” and  I say, “Thank you!,” and then when Sunday comes around and I got no sleep the night before and the poor boy is stuffed up and breathing in too much air while he nurses (sounding exactly like a piglet at my breast) and then spitting up and he’s exhausted and crabby too and we just can not get out of the house and all I want to do is watch the rest of the Planet Earth “Great Plains” episode while he blows snot and drips milk all over me I can cancel on Friend without feeling horribly guilty.

4.) Be more honest with guests.

Aka, if Friend is over and the boy suddenly falls asleep and he’s really out, then we say to Friend, “Please enjoy watching our marvelous boy sleep while we go downstairs and do the same.” Ideally, then Friend and the boy bond. I can’t say. I’ve only tried this one with grandparents and god-grandparents and since they love every single second with the boy they’re not really a reliable test case.

Of course I am now breaking rule #2 because the boy is sleeping and I’m here awake and I’m so hyper and excited to be able to write and then putz that I have no interest in lying down. Also, I ate a brownie and drank an iced coffee not that long ago and am feeling like a super hero. Also, I really want to watch Insurgent with B. on the couch. And not be nursing while we eat the pizza he’s making. And send a few text messages. And make shortcake cause we have raw cream from a Jersey farm and I bought strawberries and I want to eat strawberry shortcake. For this last one though…I have a hunch that those berries will end up whole in a bowl, some cream poured over the top, a spoonful of sugar, and I’ll call it a delicious day while trying to simultaneously nurse and cuddle with B. and watch the movie that I seriously doubt we will get to the end of and actually all of that is sounding pretty dreamy. In my wildly ambitious grocery buying today I even bought a few lemons to zest. For the shortcake.

Yeah.

If I open that bag of flour, I’ll write about it and title that post “Flour Day.”

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 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 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 20

| Jade SV

I’m scared of never being alone again. Even from the beginning that was the one fear that could pierce my optimistic forcefield. Would you like to hear my ideal day?

Wake up at 8.

Morning rituals; meditation, stretching, pages, breakfast.

9ish-12ish-Writing.

Lunch. Exercise.

Afternoon out in the city somewhere: meandering, looking at stuff, museums.

Reuniting with B. and/or friends, family, in the late afternoon. Doing stuff.

Yes, some mornings I love more than anything lying around in bed with B. and then the slow rise and maybe we cook and maybe we go out to breakfast. Yes, I absolutely love those mornings. But for the rhythms of most days? See above. Notice that I have very little interaction with another human being until the late afternoon. A dear friend pointed out to me that I might be so fixated on alone time right now, because my job is such the opposite that I might be a little starved for it right now. Which is fair. But I also know that there’s a truth to this for me. I really like being alone. Which makes me feel a little bit like a terrible and crazy person.

Also, I’m completely lying about one part. When I wrote “9ish to 12ish” that’s me trying to be a little less crazy than I am. I’m really bad at that -ish. The schedules I am capable of putting myself on tend to not be flexible. I used to write them out. In those years before the full time job, especially in those years when I was deep in my fixation on body size and food, I wrote out the days to the minute. At some point I became aware that I was leaving no transition time. As in, writing done at 12; running begins at 12. I’d cut out the time it takes to pee, change my clothes, breath, exchange a sentence with another human being.

I’m having trouble sleeping again. I think the insomnia began when I was fourteen, and has never fully left me. I lie down to sleep and my brain whirrs on. I’ve tried every natural remedy there is to help me sleep; I’ve taken every herb, drunk every tea. I refuse to take anything stronger because I tend to form habits, I lean heavily in the direction of addiction, and anything you take to sleep tends to be especially habit forming. I had a break this fall from the sleeplessness. In the midst of all that first trimester physical misery, I slept deeply almost every single night. When I sleep deeply now, as in times when I’m not depleted or sick, I wake up with so much energy the next day I feel like a super hero. I almost can’t imagine what it would be like to feel that way on a daily basis.

I am not in a good mood today.

My co-worker gave me baby clothes as a secret santa present. I cried at first, then brought them home, and hung them over the banister–a row of four adorable onesies of the softest cotton you can imagine. One has yellow ducks on it. Another is striped in grey and white. There are snaps where I’ll need to unsnap them to change a diaper. I passed them, eyeing them for a few days, and now they are folded into a little bundle and tucked out of sight into my closet. They mean a real human being is going to be the end result of all this. This nine months of discovery and self-awareness and new sensations and a new body and thinking and talking about my feelings and how I’m doing and how my health is-all of that is going to end up in a human being who I am going to have to care for. All the time.

Many people have spoken to me about the selflessness of pregnancy; as in, “Oh, it must be easier to go through all of it because you’re creating a person.” It is spoken of as a turning over of myself, my physical self, to this greater cause. But I have to say, it often feels gloriously self-indulgent. I get a lot of attention. It’s like being a bride in white; everyone notices you and pays attention, there is a spotlight following you as you move through the city, your home, your job. You are special. And when this is all said and done, it won’t be me who is special anymore, it will be the babe.

Which does sound nice actually.

I’m okay with the babe being special.

It might be good for me to have this focus outside of my own self.

But this morning while I’m being grumpy and pissy at B., I imagine there being a baby here too, and I’m scared of being grumpy and pissy at them for the simple fact of them existing and demanding my attention.  I don’t think I’m going to stop loving being alone and quiet, and at this moment, those hours of solitude feel like an island I’m sailing further from by the day.

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.