NYC

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.

Week 15

| Jade SV

And what if I don’t stop feeling sick? What if I’m one of the women who doesn’t get to feel the magic of the second trimester? I have not yet snapped to and felt surges of power and vitality; isn’t the placenta supposed to be done forming by now? Isn’t that the reason for so much of this nausea, this exhaustion, this…all of this? I’ve been banking on that magic moment, that pay off, but what if I don’t get it?

I get rattled when I look forward into two years of my body being taken over by these sensations; pregnancy and then nursing and then I suppose beginning to get back to normal. What is my body going to be after all this? There is a varicose vein behind my right knee that began forming in college. It’s gotten bigger.

The problem is that there’s a good chance that if I got more energy back I would simply expend it. I think the universe gave me such a rough first trimester because that’s the only way it could get me to slow down. I tried bargaining a few times: “Please universe, I promise that if you lift this nausea then I will rest more and take it easy.” Am I tired today because I stayed up late reading and then did a whole bunch of stuff? Or am I tired because my baby is now the size of an apple?

I don’t get even the illusion of control. And I haven’t even written about the gas. Miraculously, I’ve only gotten caught farting once and it was kind of a cute one; a classic whoopee cushion sound while talking to my co-worker in a silent hallway.

I will say this though. The sex really is amazing.

Week 14

| Jade SV

I just finished reading Cheryl Strayed’s Wild for the second time, and like the first, I finished it weeping on my couch, lit by one lamp while B. sleeps. Both times felt late at night, though my version of late is now much earlier than it once was. The lamp I read under was given to me by my grandmother.

The night I decided that I indeed, someday in the future, wanted to be a mother was a night, an evening really, when I was sitting with my mother by my grandmother’s bed. Nearby was the same lamp lit that I read under tonight. My grandmother lit every space she lived in with a careful, golden glow. She’d always turn on the lamps before the room grew dim, and then when the dark outside really began to set, she’d walk around and pull the curtains to “keep the night out.” On the night I decided I’d want to be a mother someday, my grandmother was in pain. She was lying, facing us, curled like a spoon though she was alone in the bed. Other weeks in another year (I think later, though it might have been earlier, her pain had it’s own chronology) she’d spend some time living with my mother and ask my mother to climb into bed with her. In those weeks the pain and the pain medication had made her half-crazy; she viewed us all except my mother with suspicion. She thought we were plotting against her.  My mother did not climb into bed with her. Could not. That was just one of the times we thought my grandmother was an inch away from death. There were many. But on the evening when she lay on her bed like an empty spoon, facing my mother and I, we were talking about hospice. And while we talked, I noticed on the bedside table a jar of ointment that my mother had brought from the hippie store. On the jar of ointment was a drawing of a pregnant woman, her hands wrapped around her belly. And it was then I decided that I wanted to continue what I was a part of right there, the line, I wanted to be old someday with a child and a grandchild by me.

My grandmother died on March 31, 2012. A year before that to the day I cut off all my hair, nearly three feet of it. I don’t miss her any less. Some days I catalogue the things I’m going to tell her when I next see her and I don’t even realize I’m doing it because it’s what I’ve done all my life.

I don’t know exactly why I cry when I finish Wild. Just as I did the first time, I went back over it tonight, more than once, trying to find the line or the moment, but I can’t. I love many of her sentences but I can’t even find one in those final groupings of paragraphs that I go crazy for. And with each pass, looking, the tears come again, a fresh burst.

But this is my guess: my mourning of my grandmother has not felt unlike joy. And my joys now carry the salt tinge of missing her. The place where they meet, the place where the two sensations hover just the barest hair apart, well, for me, that’s the place where babies and books and Monet’s Lilies come from, and it’s that place that Cheryl Strayed leaves me when she finishes her book.

It astounds me that this babe will never meet my grandmother. I once would have said there was no knowing me without knowing her. And this still feels somehow true. That I will be known, but not. I wonder what will give this new person their own glimpses of the infinite. They will have to find their own. I hope they’ll tell me about it when they do.

Week 13

| Jade SV

Last night my brother-in-law told me a sickly hilarious story about abortion and I was so grateful that he’s the kind of person that doesn’t hesitate to tell a pregnant lady a story about abortion and that I get to have him in my life. I’m guessing there’s more than a few who wouldn’t even say the word in front of me and it was a rush of relief and fresh air to not be treated like this delicate vase, this sacred cow, and just like me who happens to have a baby inside of her. I have a theory that a friend of mine has been out of touch because I know she’s really freaked out about ebola right now and I’m guessing that she doesn’t want to bring it up with me. I could be wrong, but we’ve known each other a long time. And I love this lady, and I love how thoughtful and traditional and right in her ways she is, but it was also really really wonderful to be laughing at this sick story last night.

There is a subtle thing that happens, and in my circles it is pretty subtle, that has my worth and value changing, being defined by this new being inside of me. The existence of the baby making me more precious, more holy, more…everything. As I read somewhere, a pregnant woman should only gaze upon lovely things, hear lovely sounds, breath sweetly scented air. And on the one hand, yes. I’m into that. In those first weeks, I wanted to be hailed as a goddess of creativity. I wanted rose petals and gentle touch and gentle everything. I wanted the world to stop asking things of me, to allow me to pause and devote all of myself to this fertile business of growing.

But my value increasing because of this baby can also very quietly become this baby’s value supplanting my own. I saw it around Week 8 when B. and my friend looked at me, “You’re still riding your bike?”.

I love this new being. I love carrying it tucked safely inside of me as I move around the world. I will fight for this critter and protect this critter, yes, absolutely. But I am not going to give myself over to it. I am still me. We are joined right now, linked, but we are not one and the same, this baby and I, and the value of neither of us is determined by the other. And here’s the thing that there is such a taboo against saying it’s hard to write: should the unthinkable happen, and something happen to this life I love so fiercely (and I know I can’t imagine how that wound would feel, except to be sure that it would be deep and lasting) I would nevertheless continue, my life would continue, and so would pleasure and pain and joy and adventure.

Right now, in this moment, I will give everything to this babe I can, without giving it everything. Without giving it me.

Week 12

| Jade SV

I heard the heartbeat, not last week, I think it was the week before. I was on my couch, and the midwife next to me, B. sitting on the floor and our cat on the other couch. She didn’t react when out of the echoing, whooshing sounds of my uterus came the rapid patter of this new person’s new heart. I shouted and B.’s face opened in surprise and the midwife laughed at us. I kept laughing which came super loud out of the Doppler machine, so that she had to keep lifting the wand off my belly. She moved the wand over to play us my pulse and it was slow and gurgly and heavy in contrast to the light hurrying of this new heart. Adult hearts beat around 80, and this new one beats between 110 to 160. It was steady and fluttering and, I have to say it, adorable. I won’t be needing to take anymore pregnancy tests. (I only took one after the first positive, but I really wanted to keep taking more. I just kept wondering if I was really and actually pregnant. It’s official now. I am.) But the other best part was how spacious it sounded in there; looking down at my belly did not match the echoing sounds playing out of that machine. It sounded like I had a cave inside of me, with water and wind flowing in and out, and the midwife told me that that is what the baby is hearing and my body, my belly, my core became this lovely place to be. This new little person has no idea what a small space it’s occupying; to it, I’m an entire universe.

Whoa, those last words just settled on me like a balm. I do this thing, have this knack for taking any plenty and making it feel like scarcity. And for me, it’s always time. I always want more time. I woke up today looking at the week to come and already it feels parceled out, a checklist I’m going to live out one item at a time with no space for anything beyond the daily tasks of living. And then the days become a locked in tunnel, all sense of possibility leached out. And when I’m thinking like that, it becomes the month, and then it’s the season, and then it’s the year, and then in my mind, the baby is born and I didn’t have any time to myself, any time to prepare.

“When are we going to get diapers?” I asked B. over dinner last night. “And, like, a bottle?”

“We have time,” he told me.

I’m trying to feel like we do. I keep on telling myself this baby is going to come a few weeks late, as if those weeks are the ones in which all the tasks will get done and also I’ll finish my book. That week of hearing the heartbeat I felt the horizon open to me–like everything was all possibility–and I want that back. It’s only Monday. Maybe there’s another way to look at what seems like a very small space and discover just how much is hidden inside it.

Week 12

| Jade SV

My jeans didn’t close today and really that’s fine although of course I’m watching my arms and legs and face, trying to see if they’re getting fat. Am I really still doing this? What in the world will it take for me to free of these nasty, insidious fears of fat. Fuck I fucking hate it. I’m saying now I like the release from a flat stomach. I had one for like 6 months and that was when I was mildly anorexic. I say mildly because not everyone could tell; this is New York after all. I got a lot of compliments. But I was in full body obsession fears food control, the whole damn thing. That’s another story, and yes, I’m sure it will come out here because I’m pregnant and my whole body is changing. My nipples are changing. They’re becoming mom nipples. I remember looking at my mother’s breasts and wondering why hers were so different than my own, and now I know: they literally are changed by pregnancy. The areolas get darker and larger. Is this an evolutionary bull’s eye for the baby? I read something about it but now I can’t remember. So I kind of like that I’m never going to have a chance at a flat stomach again. It’s just off the table. But I think about toned arms a lot. I think toned arms make a woman look smaller and of course I’ve never really had toned arms. Am I going to have a mom-body? I’m going to have a mom-body.

I saw this girl last night, she doesn’t know me, she’s the daughter of a former professor and I’m guessing she’s 15 now, and she has become this gorgeous young beauty…and it’s more than the looks, it’s that particular moment of time. My mother says we all, boys and girls, experience this blossoming. That we are like buds opening in spring, desired by all, the bees buzzing, but also so delicate and fresh. She says it’s our society’s responsibility to protect these young, gorgeous ones in our midst. This girl was on her phone, the street lamps were orange but her skin was lit and glowing, newly minted as Hemingway once said, and I knew that whatever my beauty becomes I will never be that again. The closest I’ll ever come to it is when my child does their own blossoming. I am in this moment of feeling time work on me. Literally. But also yes, I am saying goodbye, once and for all, to my own girlhood. I hope to do it with some grace, but of course I mourn the loss too. The movement of time sometimes breaks my heart with it’s bittersweet edge. This is the bridge, these months, I am crossing into the new land. And I suppose any long journey makes it mark on the body; a passage in the oldest sense of the word. The difference being that this time my body itself is the passage: I’m not taking it anywhere. It’s taking me.

A note on timing and process and my first major insight into the concept of parenting.

| Jade SV

We’re about to jump far ahead in pregnancy time. When I began this blog, I was writing up entries I had handwritten in real time, and so there’s been a lag between the posts and the day count and where I’ve literally been in the pregnancy.

I’ve decided that I want to bring blog and life together, and so we are fast forwarding together. Because of the way pregnant counting works, day 15 was something like Week 6. I am now, at this actual moment in Week 11.

There was writing that happened in those weeks between, but also there were a few weeks that were kind of lost to me, when maintaining a holding pattern was about all I could do. Carrying my body through the day was about all I could do.

And then about two weeks ago, there was a shift. Not in the physical. I’m nauseous the majority of every day, and tired, and that just goes on and on. But there was another form of lightening. That first month of knowing felt like I was being just constantly overstimulated every moment of every day; like a confetti storm, and then suddenly, it just all calmed. The wind stilled. The air cleared. And other feelings could come in. Like happiness. Like optimism. Like excitement.

It’s a funny moment. Never before could I have imagined feeling this sick all the time and being happy at the same time. But I am. The thing being hard is not the same as the thing being miserable. I’m even joyful. And so I’m beginning to see…all those situations when I look at parents, and gape at the impossibility of what they’re doing, I just assumed that the hard-ness of it also meant that it sucked. But I see now that perhaps this is the secret crux of it that I at least could not imagine until now: that parenting realigns the patterns, that there truly is nothing like it, and that what appears shitty might not actually be. I’m guessing that there are going to be impossible moments, and that I will feel awful and overwhelmed again, many times, but also I like this moment. Everything feels wide open and full of possibility, and if I can be happy today, hours into a day that I’ve felt like throwing up in since I woke up, then who knows in what other situations I might discover these hidden caves of joy.