Yesterday the midwife started with the heartbeat. She put the doppler to my stomach and instantly she said that she could hear it, though what I heard was static. Then she helped us read the static.

Here you are, she said, and you could hear my heart in my stomach, a slow swish, swish, swish. A few seconds later: And there’s the baby’s heart. It was much faster, swish-swish-swish-swish-swish-swish-swish.

She did it again: Here you are, (swish, swish, swish) and here’s the baby’s heart (swish-swish-swish-swish-swish-swish-swish). I want to try to put them together, she said, and after inching the doppler this way and that, she did. She put our hearts together, our heartbeats overlapping each other. Not for science: for poetry.

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The baby has five fingers on each hand, we got to count them today at the ultrasound. Five toes on each foot. A strong heartbeat, a complicated-looking brain, a solid spine.

The due date is January 3.

(When I was in the reproductive endocrinology unit, meeting with two doctors after the first failed IVF, and they were bullying me into taking all the drugs wth their over-informed and under-compassionate perspectives and telling me it was my fault that the first egg extraction was so painful and that I should have screamed louder, when I was crying and they softened, one of the doctors said, We look forward to giving you a baby in 2009. So I’m allowed to laugh at the due date — You’re three days later than you promised, doc.)

The sonographer put a note with the sex of our baby in an envelope. We turned away today when he looked, which felt false and silly and not what I wanted: we didn’t turn away when he counted all ten fingers; we could have asked him to put that information in an envelope, too. I just didn’t want to be staring at anatomy when I learned if it’s a boy or girl. The poetry is forced but still fun: we’ll find out next week in a cottage up north, on a dock, under the stars. We’ll put the note on the kitchen table for Rosie and Jack to find in the morning.

July 29th, 2009 | Category: the baby thing | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL