Pre-Birth Words, Part II: How I Waited For You

It began this way. I had just had my first faintly positive pregnancy test. I was liquid with excitement and edgy with nerves. I didn't yet believe that it could be true. I couldn't dare to hope. We'd been actively trying to get pregnant for a year and somewhat passively trying to get pregnant for two years before that. There were examinations and blood work and medical expenses and ovulation test kits. There was the cycle that every woman who has ever had trouble conceiving knows - the unbearable week or two of waiting until it's not too early to take a pregnancy test.

I took one too early because something just felt different about this month, but it was just barely positive. These are entries from the week following that day. 

9 August 2015
11 dpo. BFP. hcg. ttc. I know now what all these things are, have absorbed the acronyms into my body of knowledge. I have felt the ache, impatience, and longing. I've gone to the web forums. I have known the obsessive feeling and the sense of banging my head against the wall. Why? Why is it so hard for two young healthy people to get pregnant?

10 August 2015
I am torn so many ways inside. I feel very isolated. It seems unfair to burden others with this knowledge. Then, if it does end, nobody will have to bear the sorrow with me. There's my sister, but she's far away and can't hug me. Something keeps stopping me when I think of telling even a close friend. That feeling of being on the brink of a decision and then backing down . . . 
. . . We'll find out soon. I just have to ride out these days like the gentle waves they are and remember to thrill in the small things, in all things, in the storm that blew wildly in all around me outside with the deep-shade gray clouds darkening day to twilight and rolling out and under, like steam, at the edge of the pale-bellied sheet of rain. Rejoice! The trees shimmy and creak, their leaves whoosh and shush and the wind gusts up under my dress, my hair, my armpits, and lifts me, spirit-first, skyward to join the tempest.

Sometimes I wrote in clumsy poems because prose wouldn't always get at the heart of my heart.

11 August 2015
Medicine, M.D., may occupy
printouts of code in
marching rows of
numerical precision,
windowing in for us 
neatly
the answers in a box,
prescribed or proscribed,
a post script
to a letter
with no call to respond.

We are salvaged, gratefully, by math
calculated by others, ago.

How, then, in mysteries do we grow?
Supplicants, are we, appealing
to the highest power
known. How little we know.

Revealed only in the precise increments
which time affords;
Rich though it
no doubt surely is,
dispensing aeons
one
minute
at a 
time,
Like nickels to beggars
who can't do for themselves.

.........

My body, my illnesses, my mother, my preschool boy, all once were beeps from a heart rate monitor and numbers and checked boxes on a piece of paper. The entirety of the universe lives behind my child's wide eyes, and he was a measuring tape held to my navel and a photocopied handout on prenatal nutrition.

12 August 2015
This pregnancy is one week behind Ambrose's in terms of the calendar year. Really 5 or 6 days. Our second child will be born soon after Ambrose's birthday. I wonder how they'll feel about having birthdays close together. They will be almost exactly 5 years apart in age. Ambrose will go to kindergarten, I'll go back to work, our new baby will go to preschool 2 days a week - - or private care, or I will work 3 days a week for awhile, or 4 days. I'll use the extra time to study. I'll take the ARE's, get licensed.
It will be perfect.
I believe, now. I'm on board. Trotter-Dunn (Nielsen Ramsay Thompson . . . ) v.2 is the size of a poppyseed and growing even as I write.
Let all creation sing.

...................

Oh, yes, I remember this feeling about being pregnant. A sleepy, fatigued feeling like a weight inside pulling gently down, like I am more dense than usual. Swimmy. And the beginnings of that, "I'm starving. I feel like I'm going to throw up," roller coaster.
So tired. Sleep forever. Sleep for the new growing jellybean.

After that first week, my obsession died down for awhile, and I settled into the pregnancy. Then it became about waiting the long, long months to meet our new family member.

29 September 2015
Cotton ball cloth bandage,
Crimson blot no bigger
than a period.
And once were we all,
once were you, 
once joined,
that small.
One period's absence 
betraying presence.

And then one rainy day in September I
heard your heart.
And it beat so close and dar to mine.
And I will love you forever, 
and already - - I will love you forever.

Give me vaccine serum,
weight gain nausea bloating fear,
paste and bandage my body,
dissolve me in daylight
so that you may live.
So that you may have joy.
So that you may be a princess
or a pirate with a bucket full
of candy,
So that you may fly a plane,
So that you may buy a piece of fruit on the street in Thailand,
So that you may kiss the perfect lips of your lover and feel
their skin under your fingertips.
So that you may crack pistachios
and laugh.
Dear soul.
I see you, dear soul. I am beginning
to see.

And sometimes I just grumbled a bit.

1 December 2015

I throw a sandwich
At my hunger and all my
hunger does is laugh.

A pregnancy haiku.

It was a wonderful and uncomfortable time. I treasured my discomfort and waited, the most difficult and beautiful time of waiting life has offered me. It was my privilege to wait, and now it was a completely different kind of waiting. Not a wait, open-ended, with a question mark, but a sure ticking of minutes and months. Your baby is the size of a pear . . . your baby is developing kidneys . . . your baby is the size of a butternut squash . . . your baby's skin is covered with a waxy substance called vernyx . . . your baby is the size of a watermelon . . . 

Pre-birth Words, Part I: End, beginning

It was spring. My pregnancy was drawing to its inevitable end. I prepared, within and for myself, and we prepared together as a family.

1 april 2016
"This is birth month. I am not afraid to give birth. I sense that my baby is not afraid to be born. I am ready and I have confidence. I smile at my Braxton Hicks contractions and urge them on. I smile when I wake to a contraction, smile into the dark for only my baby and me. I imagine future times, picking up our baby in the dark and holding it close while it fills its belly with milk my body made. Its small thirsting sounds. The tiny half-movements as its filling tummy lulls it back to sleep.I am ready.I am patient but I am ready. Come, baby. We want you here in the world with us. We can't wait to show you. We're ready."

I knew, then, all  of it. I knew how much I wanted the nights punctuated with groggy feedings, the spit-up cloth over my shoulder, the light of a screen in my face to keep my eyes open until the baby finished eating. I knew the way it would be, the whole density of it, the heft, the texture and aperture inward. The thriving long crescendo of a human being, from thin pink line to college dorm room and beyond, I knew it as if spacetime were experiential, as if I could feel my whole life at once.

Looking into the eyes of your child is like feeling your whole life at once.

3 april 2016
"There are many things swarming my mind, but I don't know what to let out in the way that I do. The weather continues to dip into low temperatures at night, and I walk to the car in the chill each morning. I fancy that spring is waiting, as I have waited my own impatient years, for this child. The season will reveal its full glory, the wind will calm and the Dogwoods will come to full flower and I will give birth to our second baby and whisper to it its name in the quiet and carry it outside into the warm season and all of creation will rise in celebration."

I know that Spring did not wait for the birth of my child. But I also know that it was very cool the morning he was born, when we entered the hospital, but when we came back out the next day it had warmed, and soft rain fell. And I know that it was a blessing for the baby, that it rained for him. I know that. And I know that it rained because of our planet's slow waltz about the sun. And I learned something else that day:

"These are stories, but they are what matter. I am a non-being without stories. I fail in my purpose without devouring and sharing them. I believe things about my life and tell them joyfully the same way over and over, like my father does. I etch events in stone for my memory so that the story can't change. I give my stories freely so that many may hear and remember."

We all joyfully waited. Ambrose, of whose birth we had celebrated the 5th anniversary only two weeks before, waited.

"Ambrose seems more and more ready for this change. He races, dawdles, and soars through his days with rain boots in puddles and deft finger manipulating in discovery, in the way of five year olds, but he pauses and wraps his arms around me and looks up over the hump of my belly, pats it with gentle hands, purses his lips to my shirt and says, "Hullooooh, baby," all muffled and sweet, and I remind him that the baby will already know his voice when it is born, and he says, "Yeah," with pride in his voice.
...I feel blessed that I will share this child with him. That quality time will be spent, not just with me or Brian or grandparents - - but with his or her big brother, Ambrose."

There, now, that is one thing I didn't know all the way, could not have known - the utter sweetness of Ambrose's love for his baby brother. I knew of it, but I hadn't felt it yet, the wonder of my son discovering how it is to be a sibling and have a sibling, the thrill of seeing his love outlined in his hands cupped around his baby brother's face, in the glow of his smile as they coo at each other in the backseat of the car, watching as he finds a burp cloth and wipes the spit-up from Ephraim's chin. Something has come out in him that I've never seen: he is a natural care-taker, concerned and diligent.

14 march 2016

"Today I'm thinking about yesterday. Brian and Ambrose and I all worked through the house together, moving and sorting and finding and mopping and wiping and vacuuming. Ambrose whined in the kitchen where a trail of dribbles led to his kneeling form as he struggled to reposition the soaking mop head on the handle. He'd realized he needed to rinse and re-wet it, but there were parts of that process he just couldn't predict or handle. I can relate.

Sun filled the house, and birdsong, and that specific feeling of 'spring cleaning' that we all know. Winter has loosed its bonds on us, and we experience and respond to the freedom. 

...Our bedroom gradually emptied, and a new room grew where Ambrose's room was. We laid down a rug, set up the crib. Here is where our actual baby will sleep, I thought. Brian picked up Ambrose and laid him down in the crib and he grinned in confusion and amusement and Brian held out his hands to show Ambrose how little he was when he slept in that crib, and oh - - how my heart beat inside me, feeling the rushing of my own blood and the baby's and Ambrose's and Brian's, and the four of us were there together and it was good."

We were already a family, but now we feel like a new family - - or a more complete family. Like we were playing a beautiful song but now a new instrument finds its entrance and dances atop the melody and dives down through the chord progressions and trills and harmonizes sweetly, adds its dissonance and resonance and consonance and hesitance and the music washes over me and I am alive in it.