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 . . .
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