August 25th, 2009 | Category: photograph | Leave a comment

I remember when my sister was pregnant and I went to visit her in the city, and when she crossed streets I’d corral her like I do to Jack, ushering her across the street with my arms, ready to jump in front of any car that didn’t look like it was slowing down. She was an adult, but she was a baby, too, and I instinctually needed to protect her.

I remember this because that’s what my brother did to me a few days ago. But as the pregnant one now, I don’t feel like fragile cargo. I actually feel more invincible: if that car didn’t slow down, the driver would look so stupid. I’m a big, vulnerable target. I’m the target that, if hit, would make headlines. People are extra careful already when they see me; I don’t need to be extra careful myself.

And what I love is I’m not threatening to anyone. If I already projected a non-threatening energy not pregnant, now it has at least doubled. When Steve and I walk into a store, no one thinks we’re going to steal anything. Steve might have a shaved head and a 6′2″ frame, but with a pregnant woman beside him he’s harmless. When we were at the farmer’s market and he told a farmer a joke that was possibly off-color, the farmer paused, then I smiled widely, and the farmer laughed. It’s my new superpower.

August 25th, 2009 | Category: the baby thing | Leave a comment

When I first came on the scene in this family, I was 23 with two braids and hot pink socks. I would go to Rosie’s school concerts and parent-teacher meetings and be clearly new and uninfluential. The teachers didn’t look at me when they spoke, and I probably didn’t look at them. I had no title then. Or rather I was Rosie’s dad’s girlfriend, and that didn’t sound very sturdy. Forms would come in from Rosie’s school and I’d triple-guess myself before I entered even her birthdate.

When we were married, after four years of feeling apologetic for even taking up a chair at parent-teacher meetings, it was much better. I was the stepmother, which sounds like mother if you mumble the first syllable. It was more clear that I was there to stay.

But no one likes a stepmother. I felt it when we moved into our neighborhood. Having a stepmother means that the family went through some pain in the past and I’m the tacky band-aid. It means there was instability and I’m the false impression that now everything is on solid ground. And I’m a threat, or at least I sometimes perceive that, to the real mothers: I’m the younger version of the other mothers — those fights those mothers have at night with their husbands, I’m the possible outcome. I’m the woman who could climb on board their ship that sank and wave a new flag, holding their kid’s hand. And who knows how I came on board this particular ship: maybe I stole my husband from his then-wife (I didn’t). And if I’m not a threat to some real mothers, then I’m probably invisible to them. They know I haven’t been through what they’ve been through, and who knows where my loyalties are — stepmothers don’t have a reputation for being all-loving.

I thought about all of this so little in the past couple of years. But now that I’m pregnant it’s coming back again. For two years I was almost one of them: I’d raised Rosie for six years, we’d been in our neighborhood long enough that the neighbors knew we were good people, I’d been to enough of the school concerts and parent-teacher conferences that the teachers and parents remembered me. I don’t usually wear two braids anymore, and I don’t have any hot pink socks. I was feeling older, out of graduate school finally, and seemingly commuting Rosie all the time. But yesterday at the parent swim meeting, I felt it again: I stick out like a sore thumb. I’m the only pregnant one in the room. I’m going through something that the other parents went through fifteen years ago. Pregnancy means a beginning — which means, to these other parents, that I might be a brand new wife. I look so young again, not even able to sit up straight because my back hurts, or I’m too full or too hungry, my cheeks flushed, my hair thicker and messy. I feel like a rookie all over again.

August 25th, 2009 | Category: the baby thing | Leave a comment

We’ve begun moving Rosie to her new room, and two days ago I painted it a color she chose — a lavender-blue-gray. Seeing the color on my legs and hands, it looked like a bruise. Then going through each room of our house in my head, I realized that every color on every wall is the color of a bruise. Except for blood red accents. Closets that, when opened, are red like an open mouth; window trim like red-rimmed eyes. The skin of our walls is really skin.

August 20th, 2009 | Category: house | Leave a comment

I was back to spinning in thoughts of fetus love and what that means. My friend knows someone who rarely smiled. She became a doctor and then got pregnant unexpectedly and said more than once, What am I going to do with a baby. She gave birth to a boy and she began to smile. My friend put photographs of her on the precious real estate of her fridge, holding her boy, opened by love, and now she’s pregnant again.

Some say people feel a connection to their baby the minute they conceive, some say when it is born, some say in between — when they feel it kick, when they see it on the ultrasound screen. I have felt it kick and it feels like gas, though slowly now I’m differentiating, and to get to picture what’s happening inside is, if not love, then at least cool. Rosie says her mom loved her when she was still in her belly. She has talked to her mom about me and my silly monologues on love.

How can you truly love someone you’ve never met? I ask her. Maybe people say that about God. I ask her, Don’t you think it’s strange that there’s someone in our family we haven’t met yet? We have no idea who he is, but he’s inside of me? He’s this close, incredibly close to us, he’s right here in this car right now with us, and we don’t know anything about him, we have no idea who he is. She asks me if I’m having second thoughts about pregnancy, which isn’t true at all. I’m articulating the mystery.

I know the mystery will end with love. Why I know this: I can love her, and Jack, and the dogs, and the cats. I even loved her hamsters, while others have given up their dogs. I love fiercely and with all my brain and heart. But that doesn’t mean I stop articulating. I want to ask her, though I don’t, but do you love your new brother?

And I think it’s different because I’ve never known this, the unchosen kind of love. In all love before this coming baby, I’ve picked them. I picked Steve; I interviewed Rosie and Jack and chose to stay. I picked the cats and dogs. I saw them all first and I said yes, I do, I choose to love you my whole life. But maybe, Steve says, you had no choice in loving me. It was predetermined. I believe him. I didn’t feel choice — it felt like I was drawn to him for a purpose, outside of my control.

It is different with IVF. There was so much medical intervention involved in making this baby, it’s hard to say it was predetermined. Doctors drugged me up, swelled up my ovaries, extracted them, inserted random sperm directly into them, then chose the embryos that they then inserted back into me, freezing the rest for a yet-to-be-determined date. This baby, the son I will have for the rest of my life, was picked for me by a doctor. This baby is a miracle in every sense of the word, but it was chosen for me and also for God, if God was working through a doctor to bring it here. It wasn’t created like Rosie was: she was a miracle that forced herself into existence through determination, in spite of the efforts of her parents. This coming baby is the exact opposite. And I feel funny about that.

Rosie and I went baby registry shopping, and this was the moment — not the kicking, not the ultrasound — where I realized we were having a baby. A real human being. It’s not the stuff I love — but it was visual evidence. I was picking items that my baby would sit in, put his mouth on, love. I could picture it then. Before then, I couldn’t picture it almost at all. I’ve been afraid to — afraid to buy things that mean this is real. Every little twinge of pain still puts anxiety on the upswing: maybe this will disappear. That’s normal because of how I got here. I know logically why I’ve been afraid to put evidence of a baby in my home, why I’ve over-analyzed fetus-love. All that fear because of how I got to this place. Though I know, despite my fears, how the mystery ends. The way it always ends.

August 20th, 2009 | Category: the baby thing | Leave a comment

August 18th, 2009 | Category: drawing | Leave a comment

We moved into our house three years ago, which is a ranch in a pretty normal neighborhood a fifteen-minutes’ walk from town. Two years ago Steve rototilled our front yard and turned it into a garden and a patio. Last year was the first year we really got to see the plants working with one another, and this year it really looks like a garden, with plants talking to one another, pushing up against one another. He’s mixed flowers with vegetables and fruits and trees, so it’s one big mess of color. He keeps asking permission to buy hundreds (and thousands) more dollars in bulbs and trees. It is where he always finds beauty.

We have pie pumpkins, giant pumpkins, lemon cucumbers, rhubarb, strawberries, raspberries, broccoli, tomatoes, basil, asparagus, carrots, blue potatoes, sweet potatoes, beets, and corn. In the pots on the patio we have bananas, lemons, and limes, as well as an avocado tree that probably won’t bear fruit. He’s also planted echinacea, gooseneck loosestrife, roses, crazy poppies, alium, tulips and more tulips, irises, and lilies. There’s so much other stuff I can’t name. In one of the pictures below, there’s basil lining the walkway to our front door. It smells so good to come home.

August 18th, 2009 | Category: house | Comments (1)

I love This American Life on NPR. When I was at Cranbrook I would draw quietly at my desk with my headphones on, plugged into the computer, streaming episode after episode. I have listened to almost all of them.

I submitted an essay of mine to them recently, with a note gushing and bragging about how much I know This American Life and how inspiring it is. They rejected it with a form letter that suggested I listen to the show to see what work might best fit their style. I could only laugh. And resubmit it to them again. I really think that their aesthetic is closely aligned with mine, close enough that if I moved to Chicago I would work for them in a heartbeat.

I listened to their recent episode this past Sunday while I was making a really delicious dessert for some dinner guests. I cried through most of Act One, and felt inspired enough that even now when I think of that episode I feel full in my stomach, this feeling like I need to and should jump out into the world and save it right now. It’s about a man who had a child too young, didn’t know how to parent yet and didn’t know how to be a success in his own life. Then he grew up, and twenty years later he had a child again, this time with enough money and knowledge to raise it well. (Maybe that is relevant. Maybe that is the person I love.) He learns that it doesn’t take much to raise a child well, but those first few years are everything. He teaches what he knows — pretty much he just tells new, poor parents to read to their children — and the results break my heart and restore it.

August 18th, 2009 | Category: overheard | Leave a comment

Steve was nice enough to accompany me to Julie and Julia last night, which was great because we got to bash it the whole way home.

The movie made me angry at our generation, or rather at the depiction of our generation. It made Julia Child look authentic: strange, towering, loud, energetic, original with big dreams. Julie, the blogger who cooks her way through Julia Child’s cookbook in one year, is whiny, skinny, and smaller than life. Julia’s kitchen is gorgeous; Julie’s kitchen is rusty and claustrophobic. Julia is in love with her husband; Julie’s love for her husband feels spastic, sporadic, and false. Julie spends too much time in front of the computer, chatting on her blog. Julia is writing a cookbook on a typewriter with carbon copy sheets and real paper. Julie is ‘publishing’ without editing, degrading the language with drivel. She isn’t funny or original, and at the end, when she wants everyone to be proud of her for cooking so much, it feels like a huge setback: she wants me to be proud of her, not for creating a cookbook, not for creating anything, but for copying? for cooking recipes that someone else made and then telling people about it? It made our generation seem incredibly trite and intensely, disappointingly derivative.

The premise has a lovely form: two women with similar names find themselves through food, at the beginning of one girl’s adult life and at the end of another’s. The girl looks to her role model to learn how to be a woman. But she never does anything further than copy in a lesser form what the older woman made. And in the end we learn that Julia Child was uninterested in Julie’s blog project. Just as anyone would be uninterested if I typed out the books I love instead of writing my own. There is so much to be said for the lessons in imitation, but we hope that we learn to stand on the shoulders of giants to reach further than the giants could reach. I have to believe that that’s true.

I love the intimacy of the blog form. It is private and personal and has so much room to be whatever the writer needs it to be. I love the string the reader follows, as if it were an old-fashioned mystery we read in installments. I think many blogs can be beautiful, and I think that our generation is capable of more than any other generation before. It hurt me to see a young woman celebrated for copying someone else’s recipes in a less authentic form, in a less authentic space, with less authentic language to describe them. I am writing this on a blog: I have to believe that our era holds more than Julie in her ugly kitchen can see.

August 15th, 2009 | Category: overheard | Leave a comment