December 15th, 2009 | Category: the baby thing | Comments (2)

My brain goes in and out of working order. Swimming through warm and cool spots in an ocean, hormone spike here that makes me forget what I meant to say–

then exhaustion — the kind of exhaustion like in the beginning, that turns my brain to jello and makes every stair a chore. And crankiness, which makes me less lovable. This collage has circles in it. I’m getting close to the end, I can tell, because it feels like the beginning.

And fear. The what-if-I’m-not-good-enough / what-if-sleeping-on-my-back-has-damaged-the-baby / fear-fear. That’s returned. Waking last night at 3:30 in the morning, so wide awake it seems best to just get up and do some writing or clean the kitchen. Instead: ruminating (cyclical theme). About money, about all uncertain futures, about what on earth to name this baby and if I’ll know when I see him like I tell people I will, about IVF and how much I hated it and why (you mean she’s not over that already?), about the dogs and if they’re okay–

the dogs have been moved to Jack’s room for the night now. I realized in one other ruminating middle-of-the-night session that dogs in the bed with a newborn baby is a deal breaker (I’m beginning to love 30 Rock). It would be stupid, and my training sessions to try to keep the dogs on the floor would fail in the middle of the night because they’d crawl back up as I slept and I wouldn’t notice, and by morning all our training would be lost. I put the baby monitor in their room so I can hear if they’re choking or vomiting or all the dozens of fears I conjure in this transition. The first night one of them chewed up a pencil. No other incident since.

Are you going to snap right back to your old shape? That’s what happens to my Sims. (– Rosie)

You’re walking like the pregnant people do in my Sims game. (– Rosie)

Hormone spike: everything smells bad again. Even me. On our walk this morning we passed a man who smelled like airports and vodka. Coffee-breath smells like death-rot.

An hour walk still each morning. Even when it’s 11 degrees. My wool coat buttons except for around the waist. I can walk a dog on the way downtown but on the way back Steve kindly takes both leashes — tackling the meek Ann Arbor hills plus a dog plus a hot chocolate puts too much pressure on my back and shins.

I just woke from a midafternoon nap. In the studio. I turned off the lights and the room glowed dark winter gray. On the chaise lounge, barely the width of my body, especially now, both dogs crawled up there with me, the heater oscillating between all three of us.

I have no control over so many things. My parents and brother and sister have planned a trip the week before the due date, but they have to double-pack their bags in case they end up on the plane to Ann Arbor with one phone call about contractions. I am worried about ruining their plans and about the expense of sudden airline tickets during the holidays.

Just squeeze it in. ( — my sister)

Just squeeze it in. ( — Steve)

Just go over a bunch of pot holes if you want to have it early. ( — neighbor)

But I can’t even get the baby to turn or not turn. The baby’s kicking, Steve puts his hand on my stomach, and he abruptly stops kicking. I get apologetic, as if I could help it. The boy is not a performer.

I want to know what exactly the dogs know about the baby. Do babies only give off their baby smell once they’re born, or is he giving it off right now? Do the dogs smell, as the handicapped man at church in his wheelchair said to me on Sunday, that I’m walking for two? They don’t treat me any more gently. Can’t the dogs see that I swallowed a basketball or a watermelon seed or any other metaphor that I’ve heard recently?

What part of this baby is human and what part is still in a sort-of purgatory between human and upside-down blue bat? I asked Steve once on a walk if the soul/spirit/personality/essence/character of a person comes at the early embryo stage or when the baby breathes his first breath, and Steve thought that maybe it came in between, or maybe even later.

We are visual people. Or I am. Like doubting Thomas, I need to see the baby for myself before I believe that this is real. The turning in my stomach, I can only abstractly identify it with a baby. I don’t even know which part is his head. Once I thought I might have felt a foot. After nine months, the better part of a year, it gets hard to believe that this will end with a prize. Though I read this yesterday and I know it’s true: I love you more than sleep.

December 14th, 2009 | Category: inward, the baby thing | Leave a comment

December 7th, 2009 | Category: inward, the baby thing | Leave a comment

I feel like part of pregnancy is you grow and grow until you’re unrecognizable, until you’re swollen and useless and too enormous to be categorized as a human form. More of a horse or a cow, with a girth so big in the front it looks painful to walk, so heavy it looks like you should resort to all fours. Something out of proportion to our sense of what a human is or can be, that moment of sublime or an extreme that looks almost obscene, that a body could do that. Then, and only then, is it time to let go. That’s when the baby’s born.

I’m not there yet, though. At thirty-five and a half weeks pregnant, I have one month or so to go. I google-image other women who are at my stage of pregnancy, and some look that big and some don’t. At this point the baby is done developing and has the job of putting on a layer of fat to deal with a Michigan winter. A half a pound a week. Last night I might have eaten that in ice cream.

December 2nd, 2009 | Category: the baby thing | Leave a comment

It started after Thanksgiving dessert, so I don’t know if it was all the food combinations that lowered my immune system, or maybe too much sugar, or maybe I ate something that my body was slightly allergic to, or maybe it was just so much (fun) work to cook everything and I was left exhausted, but after the (homemade, even the crust, and with pie pumpkins from our garden) pumpkin pie I started to get a sore throat.

Steve grew up with a Christian Scientist stepfather, so when I say my throat’s starting to hurt he says to me, No it’s not. Which is sometimes helpful, because really the more I pity myself at a certain pivotal point is going to determine to some degree whether or not my body and mind coordinate and I get sick. But usually it makes me feel frustrated to hear that. And this time my throat really was hurting, and by morning it was difficult to swallow.

And maybe I’m a weakling, or maybe my immune system is dealing with enough right now so anything else on top of being in the last month of pregnancy is going to push me over the edge, but this cold I cannot take. It has inhabited my whole face and chest, for Friday and Saturday and Sunday and now Monday. Coughing hurts my pelvis. I feel vulnerable and helpless, unable to take anything to help the symptoms and unable to both sleep and breathe at the same time. Pregnant, I can’t even take Afrin, and my neti pot isn’t working.

So last night I felt my strength cave. I just felt so bloated in every way — too big to bend over to get anything on the ground, too swollen in my face to leave any room for my brain. I crawled into bed before 11pm after a night of whimpering. I’ve been so good for a whole year, I whimpered. No wine since December 2008, I whimpered. No chance for a hot toddy now. No peanut butter or chocolate in the house at all. No cheetos in the house, even. No Robitussin. I poured honey and lemon down my throat. I sipped my chamomile tea and Steve kindly rigged his computer to point silly television at me. The television was so imbecile, all this yelling, maybe that’s why the baby turned and kicked and kicked. I found some vanilla ice cream and swirled it with sunbutter. I found some stale pita chips from a few months ago and munched on those. How come there’s never any junk food in our house? Steve tucked me into bed where I read a book about all the terrible things that could happen to infants before I turned off the lights and twirled the sheets as I slept fitfully.

The piece of brightness: Steve was on the phone with Jack before he came over to our house on Saturday, and Steve mentioned that I was sick and Jack’s alarms went off. He knows that pregnant people aren’t supposed to get sick. This kid who appears to be on a different planet most of the time was suddenly having compassion for me and the baby. He asked a million questions, he wanted to make sure I didn’t have a fever. When he walked into our house it was the first thing he asked about, and later while we were swinging at the park he asked again, wanting to know how I thought I got sick and what I thought about the baby’s health. I had no idea he cared that much, or really that he even noticed that I’m going to have a baby at all.

November 30th, 2009 | Category: happening, the baby thing | Leave a comment

When the plane descended, the first thing on my list was a changing table. Is this what a nesting instinct is? It’s not about buying stuff, it’s about trying to imagine what it will be like to have a baby, and looking to other people with babies, and seeing their changing tables and feeling inadequate and terrified and totally unprepared. How do babies survive? Reading this book about babies and all the rules — what kind of laundry detergent so the baby’s skin doesn’t develop a terrible-terrible rash, where to put the crib so that a baby isn’t strangled by curtains and window blinds, whether or not to have a crib bumper lest the baby suffocate and die or conversely get caught in the rails and die, when to nurse and how long on each side so that the baby gets enough protein and carbohydrate and fat and how that changes depending on how long the baby’s nursed and how to tell if the baby is getting any milk at all lest the baby starve and die — it’s amazing so many babies live!

Babies live!

We were at the soul-crushing Babies-R-Us buying our changing table (there weren’t any good ones on craigslist for a price any cheaper than the one I found that I liked at the store), and Steve was kindly and dutifully pushing the cart behind me while I darted around trying to decide if we needed an additional changing pad (we didn’t, I have to return it), and what waterproof mat to put underneath the fitted sheet in the crib (I bought one and washed it and hate it and can’t return it), and suddenly I turned to Steve and asked him if he’d ever had a changing table.

Nope, he’d never had one. He wasn’t sure why we needed one, but he was happy to buy one if I felt I needed it so badly. Come to think of it, I’m not sure Rosie even had a crib. He looked handsome and obliging and there I was dizzy in one of those moments where I felt my world shift a little bit. It’s not that I’ve been spending a lot of money on baby stuff, I truly haven’t, though yikes it adds up. But something about preparing for a baby makes me look to models who aren’t me. And suddenly I pictured Steve, 21 years old with a new baby in a tiny apartment in a low-income apartment complex with his girlfriend and his brand new Rosie, and no changing table. And they didn’t love her any less, certainly. No one ever died by just changing a baby on the bed or the floor, slipping in a waterproof changing pad if it was messy. And Rosie didn’t have the Einstein playmat, nor the Jungle Jumparoo, nor the BOB Revolution stroller, and they were all fine.

It made me so grateful for this time, that Steve and I get to buy baby items that make our lives easier — certainly with dogs it will be safer to have a designated place for diaper changes that isn’t the floor. And it also made me realize that truly, truly, as I’ve heard a million times and could only know by living through this, the baby needs nothing but us.

November 23rd, 2009 | Category: the baby thing | Comments (1)

I was part of a small group reading last night and I was the first to read. It’s really so informal, and these people at VSC are the best audience — attentive, respectful, warm, open. But of course I was a little bit nervous just because the lights are low, there’s a bright light on me, there’s a speaker, and I have ten minutes — and when I’m a little nervous, my heart beats a little faster and my blood is coursing through my body at a more rapid pace. And I already have that, I already have all this extra blood and my lungs are so compressed.

I sent eight poems to Steve over email and I asked him to pick four — I asked him to just do a cold read and see which ones stuck out to him and I’d read those. But I should have known that he would pick the ones that were the hardest, or the bravest: poems about dogs puking, fears of pregnancy, and strange fur rituals. I was happy to read those, though, because, like in Iron Chef (which we watched once in a hotel room in Seattle), you are rewarded for taking risks.

But I also chose one poem that had the risk of being too difficult to read. In the poem I’m running around the room with string, encircling objects I love, running around some more, encircling some more objects that I love, until the house is a cat’s cradle. But that means that the poem is running, too, and the places to breathe are few. Hm, I should have thought about that a little more. I just envisioned Catherine Zeta-Jones singing at the Oscars 40 weeks pregnant. If she can do it..

The reading was going fine, and then I got to that poem and about halfway through I heard my voice shake and then my throat made this sound that was perhaps a death rattle and I could hear the blood pushing at my eardrums. That’s how much I couldn’t breathe. I took a breath, I kept going on, but then it happened again near the end of the poem, the sound of blood in my eardrums and then I sort of choked on my own lack of oxygen. I had to stop and quickly explain and take a big breath, and then I finished the poem, relieved to be done. I went from totally calm to running a marathon inside the length of one half-page. That’s what it’s like to read in public while a baby’s feet are kicking at your lungs. I’ll have to work on that. But I don’t think I would be kicked off Iron Chef, so I went back to my room and collapsed into my bed in peace.

November 18th, 2009 | Category: happening, the baby thing | Leave a comment

I feel such a part of this community here. Most of the time I don’t even notice that I’m pregnant and then someone will bring it up. I let a visiting artist into the writing studios today and really I should recognize her, she was introduced to all of us and she’s special, she’s an established artist and seems wonderful, but I didn’t recognize her at all. I’ve see you around. You look like you’re about to give birth any minute, is what she said to me. I’m not used to being the one that people notice. It’s not good for my art even how much I’ve tried to stay invisible — small work, short poems, titles that don’t call too much attention to themselves. I can’t hide now, though. But still I feel like I’m part of this group. And then I was realizing today that there are so many ways that this experience is different because I’m pregnant. Ways that I was sort of denying. It’s not that while pregnant I think about my differences from my past self constantly, but when I tally them up I realize that there just happens to be a lot. But I just live with them and mostly I don’t notice. I like the contrast of my really feeling like my old self in comparison to the list of how I’m not.

i walk so slowly it’s as if i’m underwater. i love to walk, so i do, but i don’t make it very far. i notice that when people are behind me walking to the cafeteria, they catch up with me very quickly. if i try to match their pace, i have to walk at a speed that feels abnormally fast.

food going down in small fragments, so i burp and gurgle every so often. food that burns as if hot bread were stuck in my throat.

leaning way back to digest.

hair thicker, and somehow wavier.

eyes sunken.

pale. green, almost.

sitting up so straight, so positively straight, i must be leaning back, because of my back.

a back that aches while sitting so most of the time i’m stuffing a sweatshirt behind me so i’m sitting with a thick arch in my back, my stomach sticking way out. i always have to remember to bring an extra shirt with me wherever i go.

unable to sit perched sideways for long — my computer has to be directly in front of me as i type or everything starts to hurt.

sitting way back makes me look uninvolved, like i’m listening passively to people as they speak. as i type, i have to lean back, which makes me feel less invested in what i’m typing.

an always sort-of stuffy nose, so i am conscious of my nose for a lot of the day and sniff a lot.

sporadic sleep.

nightmares, nightmares. my brain does not fully belong to me and thoughts feel like toxins that stay with me through too much of the morning and then return to me when i enter my bed again.

i’m just thicker. thicker thighs and face and of course stomach.

i am more sensitive. and more cranky.

i am more forgetful. the world makes less sense to me. i don’t fully trust i’ve really looked both ways before i cross the street.

my energy goes up and down very quickly. and with it my moods.

i’m on the lookout for pain. any pulling or weird feeling in my stomach sends me into high alert. it’s not that pain hurts more than before the pregnancy, it’s that the pain might mean something awful so it suddenly is so much louder.

i get incredibly thirsty. if i’m thirsty and i can’t drink a whole lot of water then i feel truthfully like i might pass out.

i inspect all the food in the cafeteria too thoroughly. what cheese might not be pasteurized and if i don’t know then is it worth the risk. how much caffeine is in that earl gray tea and is it worth the risk. does the salad bar look fresh enough, do those olives look like they’re from a can. i eye longingly the soda machine but so far i’ve refrained.

there’s wine at most events. people get louder or quieter or an altered, less self-conscious, less-edited version of themselves. i become the watcher of their changes and not the participant.

how many times i’ve run to the bathroom in a day.

i feel stylish, i have layers and colors i love, i’m surrounded by people who are stylish and i see myself reflected in them. then i’ll catch a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror and realize that i look very undone, uncomposed, and swollen. pants fit funny, with my pelvis tilted back to make room for the baby. my body’s posture is more of an S than ever before. shirts don’t fit all the way over my belly. oh, i am not actually stylish. i just look tired. but the most stylish woman in the residency, wow, she’s pretty, she came over to tell me that i looked good and that she hopes she looks this good when she’s pregnant. here i was intimidated by her, for no reason. well, for how far along you are, i mean, she added. oh.

November 16th, 2009 | Category: happening, the baby thing | Leave a comment

It’s interesting and strange that I am conspicuously different. Maybe everyone feels that. But people stare at me here. Introductory questions focus on my stomach.

No one can be mean to a pregnant lady. I am instantly read, I think, to be a good person, and a stare quickly becomes a hello. One man takes my plates for me when I’m done eating.

Part of me feels like this is a small gift I can give to this place, to show that a pregnant peer can do this thing, too–can make work, exist away from home, eat the food that’s doled out to us, sleep in a rickety twin bed, and oversocialize.

Steve said that I could rob a bank now and then go in hiding for a couple of months and re-emerge out when the baby’s born. He says I look that different and that I should capitalize on it somehow.

My sister said the same thing about people she met when they were pregnant: when she finally saw them not-pregnant, she could get a better sense of who they were, and their features returned to themselves. Oh, that’s what you really look like.

I see that my face is different since becoming pregnant. My eyes deeper-set, darker underneath, my face more swollen, my nose sort-of swollen, breathing out of my mouth, my skin much paler, my hair thicker. I’m not sure if these people would recognize me in a couple of months.

In the cafeteria when I’m walking by, people make way. They step way back or they scoot their chairs up as close to the dining table as possible, as if I were five feet wide.

I’ve felt less pregnant here, though, than previously in the pregnancy. I try to move like everyone else, as flexibly and as quickly. With a prop in front of my stomach like in the movies, I could seem not-pregnant.

The baby is getting bigger and this is how I know: when it moves, not only do I feel it but I can see it. I watch my stomach move around, become asymmetrical, cone-shaped sometimes and then something pokes up in the upper left quadrant. All this visual shifting. It’s subtle, but sometimes I wonder if anyone else is watching.

November 13th, 2009 | Category: happening, the baby thing | Leave a comment