Me and B’s big talk yesterday. It’s been so much better since.

First day of work. Seems tremendous and all encompassing and all exhausting and I’m having trouble rallying enthusiasm but then at the same time if my due date really is late April I find that terrifying. It’s so soon. B. feels/felt far away when he got home and we got in a fight about hummus. I came down here to take some time, and just now he came over with a kiss and a smile and a joke and he feels near again. But still, his capacity to be still and private scares me. Sometime, so often, i want to know exactly what’s in his head-hard for me to let him just have his feelings and thoughts.

As I’m writing all these words, I feel like I’m watching a scene in a movie in which a woman is writing in her journal—I don’t feel connected to the words at all.

I feel really scared and guilty about the potential late April due date. It’s kind of exactly when we wanted to avoid, with his school schedule, I really didn’t think the timing was right to get pregnant. Does B. know? Has he done the math? I don’t want to bring it up as if…it’s my fault. This is a weird one, this feeling guilty. Not sure what to do at all. What should I say? I seek sleep.

Being pregnant is weird. It being a secret leaves me feeling as if I’m living in two worlds at once.

Is this what it feels like to be a spy?

I like B.

I’m crazy. I feel guilty for telling him all my sick symptoms because I don’t want him to feel bad. I think this all loops around to me resenting that he is not experiencing this the way I do. Perhaps this is the guilt about the due date too.

Not in the front his mind!!!

I’m tired and feel separated from B. by how differently we experienced the last 24 hours; as if my physical rootedness in this creates a barrier between us. I am only pregnant. That is all I am right now. No thought, or sensation, or breath happened today that was not filtered through pregnancy. I am transformed; it is dizzying. I had no idea how complete and immediate this would be. When I anticipated a first trimester, I just imagined being me with the added excitement of containing this new thing, this new being, and spark of cells. I had no idea what this would really be. Now I understand that tone of mothers, of parents, that look in their eyes, speaking from the bottom of the cliff while I was still standing there peering over the edge, hypothesizing what that leap would look and feel like. They must have senses my secret smugness as they recounted how crazy pregnancy, parenting, is; Well, maybe that’s how it was for you, but for me, I’m going to do it much differently. Yeah. Turns out I am not doing shit. I am being done.

I went for kind of a run today. Intervals of running and walking and it’s funny, definitely have been exhausted by running for a few weeks now. I’ve been pregnant this whole time and just didn’t know. Before pregnancy tests it must have been quite a thing; the symptoms accumulating, and there are those women who don’t feel all these other things, the so-tender boobs, the cramping, and then suddenly there is the bulge and the flutter. But actually I can’t imagine the not-knowing. I am consumed by new sensation. So I ran. And actually it was a relief; it made me feel powerful, like I wasn’t so foreign to myself that I couldn’t still move my body in a familiar way.

I spent the rest of the day by myself. Didn’t tell anyone the news. Late afternoon, I put on a snazzy outfit, high waisted, flowing, patterned ’70’s pants and a tight shirt that I knotted to show off the way my belly always does that little curve. No hesitancy this time since this is probably the flattest my belly is ever going to be again. I’m ready to abandon all hopes of having a flat belly. I’ve been chasing that damn dream since I was 16 and tore the page on sit ups out of YM magazine. And I wore heels and went into the city early and took one of my favorite walks from Canal, north through Soho, and then bearing west and up into NYU territory to meet my fam at the Comedy Cellar. I slipped into my favorite dream walking state; noticing the buildings beneath the store signs, watching for the bones of the city that don’t change with time, the structures themselves. The light began to do that Edward Hopper thing; the setting sun catching the roof edges, New York as it wants to see itself, as I love to see it. On West Broadway, I spied the Picasso sculpture. My mother and I used to sit beneath it and eat salad bar sometimes. I used to love salad bar. A flower garden, and the scent of the plants was dazzling. I laughed my ass off at the comedy show, and still did not tell them, my mother or step-father or cousin. It is still my secret knowledge of myself.

I am a pine cone. I am a pristine, sealed envelope.

B. and I reunited on the couch after, and I asked him, “How was your day?”

And then he started to tell me all these things he did and thought and none of them related to my being pregnant.

“But how are you with this?”

“You mean you being pregnant?”

“Um, yeah.” What else is there?

“I guess it just wasn’t in the front of my mind today.”

And that’s when the gulf opened. My dream mood, harmony with the city and the light, my sexy snazzy flowing pants, the flowers, the buds, just fell away and suddenly I was all alone.

I knew for sure two days ago, and suspected for longer. My boobs were unbelievably sore; I just wanted to walk around holding them all day, and I was cramping. It felt like I was about to get my period, but also different in some way. Some awareness; some weird message from my body to my brain and I knew. I just knew. I didn’t tell my husband though. For the purposes of this accounting, we’ll call him… B.

Although, I think I knew for weeks. There was this one night in the mountains, where I’m fairly sure this all began. (B. and I having silent standing afternoon sex with me bent over the fake brass railing at the foot of the bed, mouth open, not making a sound so that no one in our collective families could hear through the thin wood of the very old house.) It was intentional, I should say that. We spent the year before knowing it, and the summer talking to it, ready, as ready we could ever be. We called it, “ready to jump off a cliff.” So none of this unplanned exactly, except that I didn’t think I was going to get pregnant quite so instantaneously. I thought we’d have a few months of playing around, finally free from trying to avoid the meeting of sperm and egg, and then get down to business in October so as not to miss the combo of maternity leave and school summer vacation. But this one night in the mountains, after we’d had real, actual unprotected sex twice, I got up to pee and was sitting on the toilet in candle light and suddenly it occurred to me that I could have actually been made pregnant in those last two times and I panicked, starting praying to have at least one more period. Just one more.

So maybe I knew even then-that the spark had been struck, the ancient flash, that I had invited another human being into my body and they’d accepted and were taking up residence and preparing to spend the next nine months in me and then stay with me for the rest of my life.

Just one more period.

I apologize right now to the future person growing inside of me for writing this,  but know that amidst it all there was a deep amazement and joy when I knew you were there. But if you come to exist; if you survive these next three months and are indeed meant to be the person I am meant to harbor and grow and raise, then you’ll have to know that with the joy I am also terrified. You may not know until this moment comes to you, if it ever does, how shaking it is on a cellular level. I am shooken up. This is the craziest most crazy insane thing that has ever happened to me. And this is just who you get to be your mother. (A mother! Somebody’s fucking mother?! Oh my god.)

Whenever I go into a new space, I look for and plot my escape route. Although I can usually handle the claustrophobia, to be in a space that I do not, or cannot, get out of can be a challenge for me. It is not a scenario I willingly put myself into. Except now of course. I’m the one doing it to myself, because I actually want this, but as I was walking home from the drugstore, pee test in a discrete paper bag in purse, it hit me hard: no escape. Ever. And yes, I thought the word abortion. I just thought it. Because it was the only exit. And I just wanted one more period. Not such a big thing. Just a moment more.

I haven’t told anyone but B. yet.

It was mid afternoon, and the sun was hot on the avenue, and I was looking at the clock, and now can’t remember what time it was, but I wasn’t ready to get home and know for certain, so I stepped into the bookstore. It was cool in there and dim, the wooden floor polished, the shelves a dark wood. I walked down one aisle and then there in front of me was a table covered with books, those gorgeous fabric covered hardbacks that publishers have started doing of classics. Lovely to touch, embossed details, the design excellent. I stood in front of them, handling them like rosary beads, and then I lifted a collection of Grimm’s fairy tales. And exhaled. Oh yes, we will read this. And then, I held The Secret Garden, and imagined me being able to give that to a future person, the world to slip into, the brick walled hide away, the private child world away from the adults, and it was enough, and I left and was home in minutes. And five minutes after that I stood behind B. as he sat at his computer.

The time that came after is private, even for a secret blog, but I will say this: I went to put away the groceries, because I didn’t know what else to do, and he came up with the portable speaker in his hand and Nas playing, Illmatic, “It’s time to start this kid’s education.”

We listened to our favorite music from our teenaged selves all afternoon. And discovered that “Action” is in fact a really good song to have sex too.

The disorientation only began to set in this evening. It’s becoming harder to understand with every passing minute. I’m going to bed.