Now I am a barn animal in a dark corner, big and resting. Going by IVF calendars, the due date is technically tomorrow, New Year’s Day. The baby will be born in the lovely year 2010.

December 31st, 2009 | Category: photograph, the baby thing | Leave a comment

Steve got me two new lenses, actually. This is the second. Better for indoor lighting and close-ups (i.e. baby shots).

December 30th, 2009 | Category: photograph | Leave a comment

The onion with the gold skin beside me.
The gold-skinned onion with the maroon rope.
The onion beside me: gold-skinned, tied at its sprouting point
with a blur of maroon yarn.
Gold-skinned. Not like me. Sprouting green.
At the sprouting point a knot of maroon yarn.
Dark maroon like dried blood.
The green keeps growing beside me, I can’t tell but look at them now.
Pointing at me. One two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen green.
The yarn is merging with the onion, woven into the thirteen sprouting points.
The yarn curls into itself like an onion.
I think that after the baby is born I am supposed to bury the onion
with the yarn still on – a storm of yarn, a haze of blood, thick and soft.
I want to make a small blanket out of the yarn underground
after the cats have licked the baby clean.
I think I am supposed to go into the snow with a shovel and dig through the dirt,
make an ugly patch of labor, and bury the gold onion. Save the placenta for spring.
We are red and the baby is blue and our hands are raw.
The yarn I must look at but should not touch, it squeaks polyester in my hand.
The onion I can look at but not smell. Green sprouting in winter. A blue baby cries.
Growing beside me and inside me in spite of the cold. Growing on chocolate and snow.
A nipple at the bottom of the onion. Scraggly hay.
Lines like road maps, like arteries on the skin.
Paper skin. Baby skin while I labor.
Fur yarn unknown to my adult self. Childhood yarn.
Maroon, dried blood in the shadows, fuchsia at the furriest light.
A maroon spot on the golden onion that no one but itself made.
Paper skin pink where it peels. I would like to labor beside this onion
and give birth to the parts that are green, peeling a baby out of a placenta part by part,
dark yarn attaching us. We are buried nearly all year so that we survive.

December 29th, 2009 | Category: drawing, the baby thing | Leave a comment

Steve got us a wide angle lens for Christmas. I can see as much in the lens as I can see with my own eyes, it’s almost panoramic.

December 28th, 2009 | Category: house | Leave a comment

39 weeks and 3 days today.

About a week ago, I started to swell up, the part of pregnancy I wasn’t looking forward to — when all the tissues gather extra blood to prepare the body for the blood loss of labor. You don’t look much like yourself, Steve said, and it’s true. My face looks like I’ve been crying or I haven’t gotten much sleep. I had to take my rings off yesterday, even the rings that were pretty loose before the pregnancy. There are red indents where the rings used to be.

Five days ago I started getting pre-labor back pain. The kind that probably means the baby has dropped and is finding a good position. I’ll feel him move and I’ll feel a knife in my lower back. Lots of times I’ll pop up from a sitting position as if I just remembered that there’s something in the oven, except with a pained look on my face.

The baby made it through Christmas. As much as I want to meet him, I wasn’t ready while I was wrapping presents. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be done wrapping and the baby would come and Christmas would arrive and that’s how Jack would learn that Santa Claus is a metaphor.

When I feel this kind of pain in my back, I feel alone. Except when Steve is right there rubbing my back or asking if there’s anything he can do. But that’s a lot to ask, especially for five days straight.

The milk cartons last week had expiration dates of January 3 and that’s how I’d know that it was close. But the milk Steve bought on Saturday night has an expiration date of January 13. I hope the baby’s out by then. Now I’m hearing stories of babies who arrived six weeks late. That’s not possible, is it? Rosie was two weeks late.

I’m starting to know that the baby’s real. I can picture him now. When I was in Vermont, a friend said that it must be nice to know that I’m not alone. She said that when she was pregnant with her son away from home, she liked to picture him and talk to him. I told her that I couldn’t do that, I had no way of knowing what he looked like or what he’d be like. Forgive me for my lack of imagination. She admitted that she pictured a fair-haired boy and he came out very dark and he tans better than any of us. But now I can picture him, or picture an essence of a boy. It’s no longer just a blue thing inhaling amniotic fluid in my uterus. I can picture further than that. Maybe it’s late for us to be doing this, but Steve talked to him directly and specifically for the first time last night. He told him he could come out now. We agreed that it was a beautiful world to enter, though it could use more snow. Today there’s more snow.

Other people in our birthing class seemed to interact with the bellies more than we have. I’m sure it’s out of a hesitancy, a disbelief that this is real after all we went through to get here. The other husbands would touch their partner’s stomachs in class, or the women would rest their hand on their own stomachs. It’s been so hard to picture that Big Belly equals Cute Baby. If I can’t picture it, I don’t expect my husband to. For all his talk of our pregnancy, I’m the one who’s not drinking wine or eating raw fish. I don’t know how it can be real until the baby is here. But lately we’ve been wishing him out, luring him with our lullabies, and that makes the baby real.

Steve thinks the baby won’t come out until the new year. But over breakfast yesterday we were talking about this and that, a random breakfast conversation, when suddenly Steve bellowed, Baby, come out! out of nowhere. I think the neighbors heard him. We are in waiting mode. We didn’t like 30 Rock the first time we watched it, but we’ve been watching every single episode again. We’re halfway through the third season. All this heart work, all this waiting, we need forty minutes a day to disappear. Steve likes to watch movies that make his adrenaline race, but lately we watch mild comedies, just waiting, saving our energy. I read a book that says I should get eight hours of sleep a night in this waiting time, just in case. I don’t want to be running around for hours and then go into labor. So we rest. We’re ready. We’re playing the part of the calm before the imminent storm.

Not that we’re ready. No one can be ready. I have no idea what it will be like. There’s so much we haven’t done. I don’t know how to put an anchor into the wall to hang pictures while also measuring the art height and holding it up to see how it looks, so I haven’t put up any art in the baby’s room. We don’t have a name picked out. I have yet to polish my birth plan. There are still projects from Christmas floating around the house. We’re not ready, we’re just done waiting.

December 28th, 2009 | Category: the baby thing | Leave a comment

My friend Jennifer brought over some cookies she made.

December 24th, 2009 | Category: house | Leave a comment

Sometimes I get these back pains during the pregnancy, as if the baby’s shifted and is resting on a nerve. Downward-facing dog any time of day and usually the pain subsides. This isn’t so good if I’m driving because the pain makes me want to leave the road, but often I’ll wake up in the middle of the night with that pain and do my best to shift the baby around. Sometimes if I pee he has more room and he moves for me.

Two days ago, Rosie fell on the ice and hurt her knee. It swelled up to a size impressive enough that her mother made an appointment for the doctor’s and I drove her there, each of us walking very slowly from the car to the doctor’s office. It was important to make enough sounds of awe when Rosie showed off her knee, I learned that.

This morning Steve drove Rosie to her driver’s ed (!) class, dropping her off right at the door and with a borrowed cane. When he came home he hopped on the treadmill for his run. I was in the dining room eating breakfast and working on a poem, and then suddenly my back wouldn’t let me sit down. He came up from his run, didn’t say a word, filled a plastic bag with ice and went to the bedroom. Five minutes later I was joining him, downward-facing dog, groaning in pain that wouldn’t subside. He had pulled something in his neck while on the treadmill. The baby was poking at my spine. And Rosie was hobbling on a sprained knee.

Someone had to get Rosie at class, and it was supposed to be me. Steve got up to get ready for work, bitter at his neck and stuck in his own body, and as he said goodbye, he was off to work, that’s when I started to cry. I couldn’t get Rosie at class, I couldn’t get out of bed, I cried. He drove to get her. The three of us lay low for the next half-hour, Steve with ice for my back resting beside me with ice for his neck, and Rosie on her bed with her knee propped.

Then Joon started to shiver, and her shivering kept getting longer. She lay on top of me uncomfortably and shivered, shivered. Steve let her outside and she lay in the snow. When she came back inside, she seemed okay, though still she stared at me with those eyes — something was off inside of her.

My friend came by to drop off a present and she assured us that it was my fault. I have an aura of hormones that we can’t see, she said. Joon plopped down right on my friend’s feet as she stood at the door. I stood like a caricature of a pregnant person, my hands on my lower back.

Rosie begged to have friends over tonight — she’s been left stir-crazy right at the beginning of her winter break with a swollen knee. Steve agreed, though I was hesitant and pretty much locked the basement door once the girls descended. Once in a while the pain will return and I’ll be back in bed groaning, crying, alternating hot pads and ice cubes. Steve is still in his own pain, and sometimes we bond because of it and sometimes we clash. There seem to be so many things to take care of right now — bodies and present-wrapping and a pivoting fetus and a swollen knee, a strained neck, sympathy lower back pain, a shivering dog — I suddenly want a doula, or a mother, or someone to take care of everything. Or a television, at least, to compete with the hormone aura.

December 23rd, 2009 | Category: the baby thing | Leave a comment

Photographs are beautiful, and there is so much chaos that goes on that isn’t as beautiful. Sometimes the beauty of photographs reminds me what to cherish, and sometimes it feels like a lie.

Rosie had to go a friend’s house after an hour and a half of baking so we were rushing, and Jack was in a mood and I was exhausted, but we did it, we made four kinds of holiday cookies this year.

Sometimes when Jack’s in a mood he gets critical and voices his complaints and criticisms. Sometimes it’s smart criticism, and sometimes it’s just mean. So much the opposite of Rosie, who has always thought, perhaps too much, of how her words will hit another’s heart.

He was chattering away, clearly anxious, unsettled, who knows why, while we were decorating our cookies. Courtney you definitely cut the hole on your icing bag too big. You really put too many sprinkles on that cookie, Courtney.

It’s not nice to criticize someone else’s work like that without being asked, I told him, but while I said it I was walking up to him from behind and went to push him kickbox-style with the ball of my foot for emphasis. Because I was annoyed, and because I knew he would laugh at the jolt. He doesn’t get under my skin like some people can — I can sense with him that most of what he does that bothers me comes from a place that isn’t too deeply scarred; he’s just being a kid.

But as my foot went toward his back, Joon’s head got in the way — she was trying her best to get a cookie — and then she was in the dining room rubbing her mouth with her paw. I was crushed. My Joonie, and I had just hurt her. All my heart ventricles opened up and I was on the floor with her.

Look she’s scared of you now. You made her scared of you. That was Jack, and he was wrong, she was next to me and accepting the love. Dogs are forgiving. Humans not so much.

Cool it, Jack. Because this part of him has been growing, the critic inside of him that comes from some insecurity, some need for power, or some fear maybe. He is growing ever-thoughtful and sensitive and his energy is enviable and he’s clearly very smart, but there are moments where these pieces of him come to the surface that bother me — because I have so little control over him, because he’s not mine, because he’s in my house and I love him and can only half-parent him. Standing over the most colorful frosting, we talk about words and bratty behavior and being sensitive to other people. He quiets for a brief moment, then he begins to rattle on again, this time without harm.

Of course Joon’s fine, and my heart is receptive to her in this way that I hadn’t felt for a few weeks — I’m so ready to see her beauty and goodness and spirit now.

And the cookies are delicious, though she didn’t get any.

And obviously, does it even need to be said, there is no such thing as too many sprinkles. Though we all felt pretty sick to our stomachs and colorful in the mouth with the stained sugar by the end of the night.

December 21st, 2009 | Category: house | Leave a comment

(Baby don’t come yet my hands are really dry. Don’t come yet our kitchen is a mess. I haven’t made your window curtains. I haven’t put any art in your room. I haven’t wrapped any presents for Rosie and Jack. I still have a little bit of a cough. If the contractions start now, or now, I would like to first take a tiny nap. When the contractions start I fear I will run around scrubbing the kitchen, changing the sheets in the guest room for my parents, wrapping presents, cleaning the bathroom.)

December 19th, 2009 | Category: the baby thing | Comments (1)