Third Trimester

The Week When I Try To Stop Counting What Week I’m Up To

| Jade SV

My last step in making stock is taking that big pot full of vegetables and meat and of course, the glorious broth itself, and pouring it through a strainer into a larger pot. I’m left with stock, and the spent vegetables and bones go to the garbage.

Yesterday I accepted that no amount of nesting is going to make me ready to parent this living, breathing being, but I was determined that at the very least I would get every last thing done in order to be ready to give birth. This determination had me walking to Duane Reade at 7:30 PM to buy bendy straws and giant maxi pads, and then popping over to my food co-op for lime froze fruit bars (which they didn’t have; which nobody seems to have; this neighborhood has officially gotten too fancy) and arnica pellets. Also, an onion, bay leaves, and chicken parts for the stock I planned to make and then freeze and then, of course, be ready. For giving birth. To a human being. It was on the walk home from this last round of errands that my eight hours of constant buzzing energy finally crested and washed away, leaving me yawning at every step.

Home, and thankfully, B. was all over dinner. I got the pot of stock going. We ate. Watched Broad City. And then he went to bed.

My brain, however, would not be still. It skipped over birth and landed on today, and how I would fit writing, swimming, seeing my mother, and heading to school for a student thing into a block of time that could reasonably hold two (maybe three) of these activities. As a visual for this brain activity which continued well into the middle of the night, I offer a child playing with a set of blocks for hours, obsessively ordering and re-ordering them. It must have been three in the morning, and I was sitting there peeing, going, “Well if I swim until 10:15, and am downtown by 12, then I can write at 1:30 and…”

This morning it began again, immediately, but I stretched and meditated and got some calm going. I went up to the kitchen, put a piece of bread in the toaster, put the strainer in the sink, and proceeded to pour 3/4 of my pot of stock straight down the drain.

There was a lot of screaming. I’m saying “motherfucker” more than I used to and this seems like an odd time to develop that habit.

I stood, kind of laughing, still muttering, “Fuck, motherfucker” while picking chicken off the bones.

Until, finally, came the sadness and the thing that I’ve been avoiding with all this whirlwinding about.

Today, three years ago, was the day my cousin died. My mother tells me that one way to say it is, “He died of suicide.” To try to find someway to show that he was a victim too, that it was a thing that took him, not simply an action he took. It was outside; he was found in the morning, and my uncle says the tree itself was beautiful as was the grass and the light and that he himself was beautiful. He always was. At some ages, startlingly so.

My cousin struggled for years. We all saw how the movements of a day did not work for him. Interacting with us required great effort; as if his skull were a prison from which his thoughts and feelings could not escape. It feels like we all failed him; that we were a clan in the most ancient sense and that we lost one of our own to the predators outside the hearth. Or that we were supposed to be his net, and we let him slip through.

In the days after he died, I felt like the air itself was pressing down onto my shoulders. All I wanted to do, my image of comfort in that week, was to be on my hands and knees under a table. I wanted the table to take the weight; I wanted to hide there. B. pointed out, “Like a child; that’s what children do.” I guess so, but I wanted to disagree, explain it again, say, No, it’s not a comfort-child thing, it’s that the air was heavy and if I was under a table then the table would help me carry it. For me, it was a literal, not a symbolic, need.

When I meet my mother today we’ll walk to the river and have a prayer and a remembrance there. Yes, that’s what that particular pocket of time was for; the thing I was shuffling around and penciling in. Really the only thing that matters. But I am writing now. And I think I’ll swim. And I’m crying as I type and I remember that there is no readiness; that these flurries of activity are what I do to distract myself from the wheeling of a universe that I cannot understand and whose forces can take me at any time; sweep me out of a day and bring me exposed and face to face with the giant infinite expanse of what it means to be alive.

Week 36

| Jade SV

B. activated my boobs.

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

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

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

“Lunch?” He asked.

“Sure,” I said. Smiling.

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

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

“What?” I asked.

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

“No! No way.”

“I tasted something sweet.”

“No you did not.”

“Ummm. I did.”

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

I screamed and he laughed.

“Holy shit.”

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

“I don’t taste anything.”

“It’s sweet.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Week 35

| Jade SV

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

Combinations of feeling invisible and hyper-visible.

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

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

Honestly, fuck you lady.

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

Also, it will be really nice to walk fast.

Week 33

| Jade SV

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well…it might hurt a little.”

And then we both laughed.

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

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

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

“Do you want to play cards after breakfast?”

“Uh huh.”

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

Week 30

| Jade SV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some stories done’t have resolution.

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

Week 29

| Jade SV

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

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

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

Which was definitely a good thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?” he asked.

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

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.