I’m telling myself that it’s nothing, but yesterday and today the babe has been much quieter than normal. Often we have quiet days, and then come evening, it begins it’s rolling and sliding and pushing. I like it when the skin at the top of my belly moves like it’s being pressed from the inside by a windshield wiper. And Saturday we had a raucous day all the way through. Maybe the babe just wore itself out, and Sunday was the time for rest. But last night was subdued and not even dark chocolate today had much of an effect.

My midwife and I are talking and texting, of course, and for now it’s some fetal movement monitoring for me, simply counting it’s shuffles and kicks, to get a sense of it, and then we’ll just see what’s next. Deep deep down I think that all is well, but how quickly the fear becomes an acid thread. It doesn’t nag, it burns. My image for it is the poison saliva from the Alien movies when the creature’s mini-jaw stretches forward from the giant gaping jaw to snap at Sigourney Weaver’s quivering profile and between its teeth we see one thin, clear, viscous line that we know by then has the power to burn through metal, and of course, skin.

Funny, to be reminded of Alien in this moment. It’s one of favorites, but at the top of my not-allowed-to-watch-while pregnant movies. (Also on that list: Rosemary’s Baby and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.) But one could write a whole lot about the mother theme of those movies. Remember the third movie? I personally will argue passionately that the third trumps the second by far; a feat perhaps also only pulled off in the Die Hard series. I’m not going to dissect the mother politics here, though I’m getting a strong urge to break my rule and watch the first movie. Which would perhaps be a mistake.

So yes, there is this acid thread, but there is also the grandma circle of love that I was pulled into this morning in the gym locker room.

The water aerobics class must have finished just before my laps did, and as soon as I left the shower area, I turned a corner into a whole bevy of them calling to each other between lockers and bathroom stalls. Maybe grandmothers everywhere are like this, but I associate them with Brooklyn–women who do not care what others think about them, who talk loud, keep you in conversation as long as they damn well please, and give unsolicited advice.

“Bev come here and look at this beautiful belly.”

They were all clothed or in suits and I was standing mostly naked with the tiny, scratchy gym towel around my hips. They did not mind one bit, chattering around me, fluttering me with, “Bless you” and discussing my pregnancy amongst themselves.

“Not her first? But what about that line?”

(This about my linea negra, the darker line drawn by my hormones up to my belly button, where it stops, shifts over half an inch, and then continues up to the north pole of my global stomach.)

“That’s normal. And see how her belly button has popped? Her first. So cute.”

“She’s got some time though.”

“She’s still carrying high.”

“Gorgeous, honey. God bless.”

One stood outside the bathroom door while I peed to explain the yiddish word “naches.” As I squatted, she told me that it means joy, but a joy that one can only be given by your children. She wished me many naches. We said goodbye, but then when I went to my locker, she was in the same area putting on her coat. Resistance would have been futile. No matter that she was fully coated, once I let slip that I was a teacher, she sat down, “My back hurts”, so as to be more comfortable for our chat. I was still naked. I like it when women really talk to each other. Her daughter carried triplets, one of which she revealed eventually, “I didn’t want to say it to you”, died a few weeks before they were due. The one that died was named and buried and the two remaining sisters always hold that they were three originally, visit their tiny sister’s stone. The twin sisters were followed by twin brothers, all of them over 5 feet 10 inches tall. Also, Sean Carter, aka Jay Z, was her student in high school. She didn’t like him at all.

Earlier, when I was getting ready to swim, I saw a woman with a long grey and white braid strip off her suit and bathing cap, and take her wheeled walker to head slow to the showers, stopping to drink water, no towels, her hips and skin a lunar landscape. At this gym, there’s a separate girl’s locker room, and also family locker room, and that’s all fine except that at my old gym I used to get a kick out of the little ones who stared, completely hypnotized, at all the bodies passing by. When that gym was busy, the locker room held a lifetime of female bodies in it–from babe to crone. It was a deeply comforting thing to realize my own body simply had it’s own place in the array of bodies rounded, scarred, and healed. As it was again today.

When the naches woman was ready to leave, she leaned over and gave me a lipsticked kiss to the forehead. As a farewell, she told me, her parents always said, in place of goodbye, “Live and be well. And so, live and be well.”

I’m terrified today. Don’t know what brought it on. The calendar maybe. I have nothing on it beyond the end of April; perhaps it would be better served to type large across those first weeks of May, “Have Baby.”

After the blank weeks, the next dates are B.’s graduation for the end of May. And by then we will have a baby.

I can’t tell you what I’m scared of. It’s reminding me of the panic attack I had this summer, my first in a decade, when B. and I were in Istanbul and we got lost in the blocks between the Spice Market and the Grand Bazaar. Although, we weren’t really lost. B. knew where we were, but I was completely disoriented, my inner compass shot that day, and I think I may have written about this already because the panic is the feeling of not having an exit; not knowing my way out, or knowing that there is no way out.

Yesterday morning we began reading to the babe. It was Sunday, and sunny, and lovely in bed; I wasn’t restless at all because I knew we had a day outside waiting for us. The cat, as always, making lounging look good. We began with the book I have read so many times the sentences are as familiar to me as breathing. Indeed, sometimes I write a sentence, and recognize it’s rhythmic origins from these pages. The book is A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. I think I was ten the first time I read it. On the title page is Bill Cosby’s signature. We saw him in Le Figaro Cafe on MacDougal, and my mother helped get me brave enough to approach him. He made a joke about my name. Yesterday was the first time I’d heard those lines aloud. I cried a few graceful tears. B. was tucked into me. I’m writing this because my urge so often is to write the scares and doubts. Also, because perhaps today I could use a talisman.

Ah now I know what brought it on. Last night I spied another droplet on my boob. I’m reading signs of impending labor everywhere. I keep on wishing for this babe to take it’s time; crossing my fingers for mid-May and I really need to let that go.

Not my timeline, and not my say. Which is sometimes comforting, but today, is…not.

From this Friday past:

The body and its needs. You can’t tell because I’m going to use the nifty scheduled publish thing to publish this later, but it’s the middle of the night. Or the very beginning of morning; 4:45. With daylight savings it feels like the middle of night, or maybe not—maybe more like my favorite word in Spanish; la madrugada, the hours right before sunrise, the ones I always wanted to be out in during high school when my mother, frustrated by the absence of curfew of my wealthy, private school friends, would tell me, “You have it easy; do you know how strict I could  be?”. A sentence that made no sense to me. She felt impossibly strict as it was. In those years, I wanted to be out and wandering the city and the want felt like a dire physical craving, as potent as the nic fits of spending a Sunday at the museum with my mother and grandmother; eight-ten-twelve hours with no feasible story to concoct that would allow me to sneak off and have a cigarette. First drag at thirteen and by fourteen buying packs and not long after every free moment punctuated by those inhales and exhales. I always think that I miss smoking, but B. and I smoked for three weeks in Turkey this last summer (my mother says we only travel so we can smoke), sharing a whopping 2-3 cigarettes a day, and my body hated it. Also, I couldn’t ignore it; every time I smoked a cigarette the last days of the trip I felt a tension, a priming for panic. Like being mildly stung by a jellyfish; the way when you leave the ocean you run your hand over your skin, confused by its rawness, as if you’ve been scraped. The cigarettes were doing that. I had a full fledged panic attack in the winding streets between the Spice Market and the Grand Bazaar; my first in a decade. And in Paris too, on the long lay over, the coffee and the cigarette and then we’re walking and I’m breathing through it, my heart beating faster, not wanting to mention it to B. because already I’m planning my next cigarette of the day, my last of the trip, and I don’t want to say out loud how badly the smoke has begun affecting me.

I don’t miss being a smoker. I miss the purity of not thinking things through. Of giving myself over to every single sensation; drunk, sad, horny, angry, happy. Each was the thing that I was. I was really into life-changing revelations. A new realization that I would pour out to my friends, sure I was forever altered.

Just a little while ago my body woke me up to start crying. Sometimes my dreams are anxious and insistent in order to get me up and peeing. Tonight, I was having a sad dream that I forgot immediately except to know that it was there, like walking into a room where someone just lit a match, and as soon as I was awake, my crying began. Hard crying, not sobbing, but painful and sharp. Today was my last day at school. I’m beginning my maternity leave now. I knew I loved the kids, but this tonight is sharper than I knew it would be.

It’s pouring rain. The rain is drumming on the skylight. Our scratched and rusted bathtub was re-enameled today. The bathroom is full of fumes and I can’t go in there, so tonight I’m peeing into a large lavender bucket. When I squat over it, my pee sounds thunderous in the empty room next to our bedroom. I am sure that B. can hear it.

Physically, I’m a bit of a hot mess. My cold has latched in and I’m coughing up flem all day and night. My hips are throbbing and the muscle in my left butt cheek has knotted up and won’t take my whole weight when I step so I’m cringing and wobbling and waddling down the street. Also just now my lower back tightened up, a wave, one of those practice contractions people tell me about? I’m certainly not sleeping through any night. The babe is doing well though; stretching mostly, and sometimes shuddering quickly as if startled. The other night it had hiccups; a steady drumming low under the bottom ridge where my globular belly reconnects to my pelvis. Pubis.

I can’t really understand the plain of time that has just opened up to me. No fence posts or landmarks on my future months; rarely have I ever been this unplanned and wide open. In this instant, I’m thinking rest. Swimming. Yoga. Writing. Rest. Buying a body pillow. Going back to bed. Trying not to plan it. Surrendering? I think I want the babe to take it’s time cause I always want more time, but I don’t know. As my friend reminds me, eight weeks is a long expanse. Is a whole summer. I’m exhausted. Sun coming up soon?