In the early hours after Henry was born, a midwife attending us asked what we’d be doing about birth control–as if I were a baby-crazy addict who couldn’t wait to go through that painful labor again, as if it were her job to stop me. She had no idea who we were. He’s an IVF baby, I said. She said Oh in this way that seemed emotional and shut her up quickly. I need to find a better way to word it without labeling my baby. He’s a product of IVF doesn’t sound right, either.

At a five-week follow-up visit, I saw the first midwife I saw after finally getting pregnant. At that point so many months ago, I was emotional — a train wreck, perhaps. She marked on my file that I was depressed and I was talked to a little more cautiously than was probably necessary after that. We had just been through a war to get to zero, to get to this point where most people are just beginning their baby journey. When I talked about IVF then it was with gruffness in my voice and tears in my eyes. So at this recent visit it was her again, and she asked me what I was doing about birth control. I looked at her quizzically. We had to do IVF, I told her quietly.

Then at an eight-week follow-up visit, she asked me again. Henry had just been crying in the car and crying in the waiting room. When they called my name in the waiting room, I was nursing him and had to unlatch him and hold him, now crying, while also holding the car seat, his hat, my hat, my winter coat, his blanket, and the diaper bag — and the nurse just stared at me while I gathered all this stuff with my baby crying in my left ear. So when the midwife asked me what I was doing about birth control this time, after all the other times, after all this, I started crying. Not so much because it’s an emotional topic, though obviously it is, but because, despite my trumpeting the midwives vs. the doctors in this whole fight about how best to deliver my baby, the service has been, from the very beginning right to the end, anything but personal.

Rosie was born with a midwife at home fifteen years ago in the tiny apartment that Steve and Rosie’s mom shared so long ago. Her midwife goes to our church so we see her from time to time. When Henry was born, Rosie’s midwife came to our door with soup — one jar to eat that night, and a jar to freeze for later. She came to fawn over Rosie’s brother, to welcome a new family member, to give her blessings after all these years. Now that’s service.

March 9th, 2010 | Category: the baby thing | Comments (1)

We were at the hospital this morning at 7 a.m. and there’s been a lot of progress and they said they think it could be today. Today! We’re back home now, trying to figure out what’s a real contraction and what’s a Braxton-Hicks and what that all means.

January 6th, 2010 | Category: the baby thing | Comments (5)

One of the pregnancy books in our house has little gray boxes on some pages with the heading “Dad Tips,” and then it goes on to give an insulting token piece of advice, something like If your wife looks tired, perhaps do the dishes for her, or, Once in a while your wife will appreciate when you ask her if she needs some help with the laundry.

In pictures of births we’ve seen in our birthing class, the husband is right there. He’s wearing a grimy white t-shirt and unfashionable shorts and he’s balding, and he looks helpless beside his wife but he’s there nonetheless, holding her hand and rubbing her back and giving her water to drink. He has the perfect look of concern on his face, a face without irony and without any sense of a separate self in that moment — he’s feeling his wife’s pain intimately.

In birthing class one night, the husbands and boyfriends were taught things to say and not say during labor.

Do not say: You look tired / This is taking a long time / I’m tired / My back hurts / Don’t scream so loud / I could really use a drink.

Do say: Your body is beautiful and strong / I love you / You can do this / I’m right here / Can I rub your back / Can I get you some water / I love you / I love you.

But I think it’s difficult to learn this level of empathy, to be the supportive figure nonstop for the entire labor and for any pain during the pregnancy. A nearly complete selflessness. The birthing class teacher, a doula, told the story of walking into a house where the husband was in the kitchen taking work phone calls while his wife was in active labor. Maybe, stereotypically, women are better at putting aside their needs for the moment to serve the greater good of the family.

All through the pregnancy, Steve, who is already compassionate, probably because he was raised a mama’s boy and because he’s done this parenting this for a while, has been growing more so. He makes me popcorn if I ask for it. He brings the laundry downstairs and back up again. He does laundry if there’s nothing in the basket that it looks like he might ruin. He drives the car when we’re both in it. When we’re sitting down and have to stand up and he’s nearby, he reaches over to help me up. He takes the dogs for walks and throws a ball repeatedly until their tongues are drooping out the sides of their mouths.

But also this pain, the pre-labor back pain and the hormones and fatigue, it’s pain that one person endures in the interest of both herself and her partner. And that takes an incredible amount of empathy for the partner to understand. Other times when I’ve been sick, I’m not one to cough louder to make sure that people hear me, and I’m grateful for any small gesture of sympathy but I don’t seek it out and don’t really feel that I need it — at least I hope that’s true. Our relationship is not built on coddling. But in this last trimester of the pregnancy, if Steve’s not right there being understanding and asking if there’s anything he can do when I’m in pain, I feel incredibly, incredibly alone.

So last night when we are waiting for Rosie to get out of her tutoring session, and Steve drove her there and I’m in the passenger seat, and then my stomach starts to cramp and then my back starts to cramp and it’s been an hour sitting still in the car and then he accidentally drives over a huge bump in the road and I bite my tongue and swear, that’s when everything feels wrong. There’s a joke about the swear word where I want there to be sympathy. There’s talk of something small when I want a hand on my back or in my hair. And I’ve said that I’m hurting, but I didn’t say it right or loud enough, and I often don’t know how to say what I need — or, rather, we’ve had this conversation before many times and there’s that fine line that’s sometimes crossed where spelling out what you need makes the action of the giver less genuine, so I can only imply. And men, stereotypically, aren’t known for being attuned to subtlety and so I don’t expect him to hear in my breathing that I’m in pain or to see in how I’m stiff in my seat that I’m hurting, and I don’t want to add drama to this life so I try not to cry. We pull into the driveway and I do cry trying to gather the things from our grocery trip from the car that are too low down to reach and too heavy to lift plus my bag and my laptop, and I feel pathetic while Steve’s far away, he’s dealing with the dogs in the house. It’s a lot to ask of someone who is his own person to constantly be wondering how he can help this person who has up to this point been her own person and is now surprisingly slow, sluggish, and weak — all those adjectives in the name of carrying a blue upside-down person that he helped create.

I get inside and I cry slumped over the counter even though the pain has subsided, and he rubs my back and that’s all I needed, I can barely stand the attention of even this small gesture, but it’s all I needed, to not feel like I’m hurting alone.

January 5th, 2010 | Category: the baby thing | Leave a comment

Baby come OUT. We say this a lot. And as randomly as possible, to try to skeer him out. We tell him the world is beautiful out here. / And also, I’m proud that he’s still in. It must be cozy in there. I’ve kept him safe this whole time.

It’s not nesting, more like hosting that I feel. This guest is coming, and he’ll be staying for a long-long time, and my family’s coming as soon as we call them with any news. Once all these people come, I won’t want to be cleaning my closet out, and I can’t see any point when I will want to once this baby-permanent-guest arrives, so yesterday I cleaned out my closet. My mom cares about windows and how clean they are, so yesterday I cleaned (only the smudgiest) windows. I want the baby’s room to be able to get as dark as possible in the day for naps, so this past week I made white curtains with window-blind material on the back. I don’t know when I’ll be able to do that once the baby comes, so I did it on a deadline. Not because I can’t survive if every crack in the tile isn’t scrubbed with a toothbrush, but because I want to be a good host. I made my brother vegan cookies and put them in the freezer. I bought my mom the kind of tea she likes to drink every day at 4 pm.

I wear black all the time, to trick the eye. I don’t feel enormous to myself, but I know that I’m enormous to other people. A friend called me after two years of silence because he had to tell me that he saw my photo site and that I’m pregnant. Another friend, less tactfully, yesterday: well you look relatively good, considering.

I tie my own shoes, even the boots with lots of laces. I bend down to pick up dirty clothes. I empty and fill the dishwasher. All these tasks I thought would be impossible are strenuous but not impossible.

For all that we’ve wanted this, there is no way to know exactly what you’re wanting, or to know even if you’ll like it. All nine months there has been hestitation. Will I be okay when my life changes in this way that I forced into existence and nurtured as best as I could, blindly and with only faith that this growing belly is going to offer up a prize? I have been hungry, starving, for people to say how wonderful it will be and that I’ll be okay. But at this point, we have been preparing for so long, it’s just time now. There is so little hesitation anymore. Now it’s like sitting in a theatre waiting for a play that was supposed to start, it’s a couple minutes late, we’re all fidgeting in our seats. (Baby come OUT.)

January 4th, 2010 | Category: the baby thing | Comments (1)

Rosie got the pink slip that allows her to drive on the roads with us. It didn’t seem like it was going to be stressful to me before, but when she asked if I would drive with her, suddenly I couldn’t let myself in that car. After all we’d been through to get here, nine months pregnant, almost in the clear, it suddenly felt incredibly stupid for me to get in the car with someone who had only driven four times. She was insulted and sullen. She insisted she was a really good driver — she’s been on the roads with a driving coach who has his own brake and accelerator on the passenger side, and apparently he didn’t have to use the brake last time she drove (only last time?). She has this way of seeming so mature and overconfident. So Steve drove with her without me, and he stopped her from narrowly turning left before the cars going straight had passed, and he didn’t get to stop her from not stopping at a stop sign, though thankfully no one was close enough to hit them. Last time she was with her driving coach, she texted at a stop light — and the driving coach said nothing. Steve drove with her this morning and she was concentrating on her make-up in the rearview mirror and so missed the fact that a light had turned green until a car honked and swerved around her. The world feels incredibly precarious right now, and the rules suddenly feel so important. I feel like wearing a whistle and blowing it at anyone who bends any rules at all. I just want to be good. I just want this baby to come out on time, and alive, and to never get in a car ever, ever.

January 2nd, 2010 | Category: happening, the baby thing | Comments (1)

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

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

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

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