Gestational logorrhea: week 9

I was such a baby, the first time around. The slightest aversions turned into insurmountable obstacles. Having to wash lettuce for a salad filled me with almost uncontrollable rage, even though I most definitely wanted to eat salad. The slightest feelings of nausea became near-misses. Brushing teeth was a twice-daily exercise in dry-heaving. (I know I'm lucky that's all it ever was.) I indulged my insatiable craving for pizza as though it were a religious duty, and gained much more weight than was really necessary.

This time? I think I'm just turning mean. See, I've got a two-and-a-half year old on my hands most of the day, which is to say: a ticking time bomb. I'm lucky that his fuse is quite long, longer than other kids his age, and he has prodigious vocabulary with which to express himself. This has spared me many meltdowns. But despite looking and speaking like a child beyond his years, he doesn't have a lot of horse sense. Yesterday he bolted away from me as we walked home from the playground. I couldn't believe he wasn't going to stop, so I let him get quite far away, most of a block, and then had to huff and puff my way to him. I'm lucky he didn't make it to the street. I was blind with rage when I finally scooped him up (using improper lifting position, which yielded a backache I probably deserved), got him in the stroller, and yelled in his face, which never works because he knows when he's going to be yelled at, and preemptively yells, himself. There was no "teachable moment" there, just a hormonal mom yelling at a yelling kid who wasn't going to get the point. I wish that was the only low point of yesterday, but there was more - we went to a restaurant for lunch, he was extremely sleepy and refused even a bite of food, and I only felt irrational anger about his lunch strike. He was out cold by the time we got home, and finally ate his lunch at 3 pm. But that doesn't excuse how mean I was to him.

Kids being the resilient little buggers that they are, there are no hard feelings on his part, today. I do wonder if deep inside he's starting to be afraid of me and my anger, which might be hormonally triggered but which I come by honestly via genes, thanks to a quick to anger dad (who, I learned recently, counts breaking our Pong video game by kicking it to pieces, because we wouldn't stop playing when he asked us to, as one of his finer parenting moments). A cautionary tale for you, ahhhhh.

Gestational logorrhea: week 7-8

In the heart of the uncertainty part. I know for sure I am carrying something around with me, a creature that makes it hard for me to go about my usual activities (taxing even outside of pregnancy, since they involve a 40 pound toddler) without hyperventilation or excessive hydration. But in this neutral zone after the first ultrasound (where there was no heart rhythm yet to hear) and the next appointment, two weeks from now, when I get the results of genetic tests and hear a heartbeat for the first time, it's much too easy to imagine the worst.

Even worse than imagining the worst, is how calmly and collectedly I am imagining it. It's not necessarily keeping me up at night. I imagine a series of phone calls I'd need to place and procedures to line up, if the worst is really the worst. What makes me cry is not that, but much simpler things - the notion of spending the week alone with my boy after enjoying a complete family unit for a three-day weekend. When I realized on Sunday night that our family unit, fat and happy after a holiday weekend of fun, sun, and food, was about to be torn asunder by the arrival of another work week, it was more than I could bear. Of course, I bore it. I guess I'm rehearsing bearing things. I woke up Monday morning with nothing but a feeling that I could bear it.

For now, in this strange limbo before my next appointment with the old doctor and then the first one with the new midwives, my proof positive that I'm working on a new person is an old craving. I made spaghetti with bechamel sauce for dinner tonight - something I haven't made since I was pregnant the first time around. Disgusting to look at, maybe it's even disgusting to eat, but it was incredibly satisfying.

Gestational logorrhea: week 6

We saw it today - transparent sac
deep inside, with a yolky snack.
No beating heart. Early still for that.

The lack of preciousness this time around is astonishing. No time to navel-gaze, literally or otherwise. Barely time to shove food into my endlessly hungry maw, sometimes food pilfered from the firstborn's ration, when we're out and about. Lifting the boy out of his crib is a test of my endurance, which usually leaves me collapsed in the armchair in his room until I'm summoned to the rug for the umpteenth pretend picnic of the day. How tired will I be when I actually have something to show? Just now I look paunchy, only slightly paunchier than Before.

First appointment today left me with a slightly sick feeling about the new doctor I chose - turns out it's yet another Baby Factory. A thorough practitioner who talks at about 3.5 times the normal speed (even by NYC standards). In and Out (well, except with an hour-long wait to go In). I am hoping the midwife returns my call.

Gestational logorrhea: week 4

Here be found random thoughts on my current condition, which I'm still too much in shock to really believe... I doubt anyone is following along, but if you do, hi! and please keep this all to yourself. Thanks.

You are pregnant for two weeks before you conceive. I guess I was pregnant in my mind, with all the eating I was doing, and continue to do. Why did I think it would take more than one try this time around? After all, we weren't moving house or anything. However, this baby was conceived in a bed - how pedestrian! It is difficult for me to get after hours access to a library these days. Yes, you read that right.

I look at Jonah now and am suffused with equal parts pride (understandable) and guilt (for removing his privileged status of primogenito). He knows the book, I'm a Big Brother by heart (it was in a batch of hand-me-down books from my brother), but he has no idea it will apply to him. When quizzed about having a little brother or sister, he recites back what I've told him: "Gonna share my toys with them. Gonna teach them things." I wonder if he suspects anything.

Physical manifestations so far are limited to headaches (when I don't eat frequently enough, which is ALL THE TIME) and incredibly sharp twinges in my lower abs when I get up too quickly from bed or a chair. Eeeeeeeeasy there, big girl.

May her memory be blessed

A year ago today, a friend - a poet, scholar, teacher, and all-around excellent human being - threw herself from the top of a building. Just a few short months before her incredible second book of poems came out.

I've never been so close to a suicide before and at a year's distance I continue to be surprised at the lack of closure, at the inability to progress from sadness and shock.

Sarah, I miss you.

Foreshortening

This video could have been so much better if it were about 10 seconds longer... emblematic of many of my artistic endeavors, I guess. This poem could have been better if it were about a stanza longer. If you'd only held on to the last note of that Chopin Nocturne for another moment. If only you'd stayed in relevé longer.

March 29, 2006. A farewell to the old woman across the alley, about whom I wrote this in an email to a friend:

The old woman across the alley from me reappeared. I haven’t seen her in what seems like months, and I always worry that one day I’ll come to the window to find her windowsill stripped of its empty bottles and plants, her strangely hung curtains torn down, and I will only be able to infer that she has died or moved on to a nursing home.

Her hair seems a bit more unkempt now. And she just spent a good 20 minutes looking at her hands in the light, sticking them out the window and pondering them as though they were brand-new to her. Then she fussed with the curtains for a few minutes, checked the leaves on the plants, and now she has disappeared into the small, black triangular gap in the curtains.

I’m trying not to make too much of this. Trying to view it as a performance piece, rather than what I know it is all too well – senility in progress. I watched my grandmother decline in the same way, and I can’t bear to watch it happen again. She lived with us for a while and at night I had to lock my door, because she’d become lost in her wanderings and open the wrong door trying to get back to her room. I remember that once when I came out in the middle of the night to help her back to her bed, she was so happy to see me, smiled her dentureless smile which was the most adorable thing, and gave me a big hug.

In my old building there was a very aged man who took a liking to me, we were pals and he even once came to my apartment to try out my piano (he had been a pianist and composer). Then I moved from the building. I kept seeing him, and then I stopped, and then his wife told me he’d moved to a nursing home. I didn’t see her for a while. Then about a month ago, I saw her on the street and she told me he’d died. She said, “Mr. S... died.” Mr. S... – as though he had not been her husband for fifty years. Perhaps, being old herself, this is a convention, but to me it sounded so anachronistic. His obit in the New York Times indicated that he had been a major in the Persian Army of the Shah, before leaving Iran to come to the U.S.

She’s back now, running her fingers along the metal bars of the child guard that fits over her window (these are everywhere in NYC, and apparently required in order to prevent kids from falling out, though God knows there are other hazards more dire around here). Now she is back in the black space behind the curtains and... oh, no, she is back to tugging the curtains in such a way that I see only her hand. She is checking for rain now. She appears to be chewing something, so I hope she is feeding herself. I know that if I see her in distress, I will probably call 311, the city’s non-emergency number, to see whether they will send someone around to check on her. But I don’t even know what apartment she’s in!

I received my wedding dress today. So I came home from work, tried it on (needs taking in on top, of course), rehearsing my role as a bride. And now I look out the window and see this woman playing her own role so intensely (elderly shut-in). It is heartbreaking to imagine what her non-window-gazing time in there is like. I always see the TV flashing abstractly against the frosted window in her living room.

Down to the spinach

The day goes by not in coffee spoons, but in meals, the baby's. Breakfast (which I sleep through), second breakfast (he gets banana, we get cappuccino & cereal & yogurt), mid-morning snack (I try to curb my snacking on his toast-with-honey crusts, because it's fattening & because he sometimes gives me the stink-eye when I eat his food), lunch, afternoon snack, dinner. And innumerable nibbles in between. The other day on the playground I suggested we visit the fish, meaning the big yellow whale sculptures sunk into the ground. Baby J found a goldfish cracker on the ground and was going for that, instead...

As a result, I find myself utterly focused on food as well. What will my snack be at naptime? I typically take time away from the baby to eat things I can't share with him, like apples. He still can't chew them properly, but insists on taking huge bites that can choke him. Like chocolate, which he had for three successive birthday parties and never again since. (Is that fair? I dunno.) Of course, my metabolism cannot sustain the eating I'm doing, and despite "busting it out" (as my trainer says) at the gym, my weight is standing still, and despite momentary feelings of power as I heave weight around, I ultimately collapse back in to myself. Last night while we ate dinner Big J suddenly looked at me and said, "Are you slouching?" Am I slouching? How could you only have just noticed? I was practically bent in half. Amazing the food could go straight down.

I am capable of extremes in terms of eating. I can impose structure on myself and deny myself pretty much anything. Like, I could even choose to ignore delicious sandwich cookies sitting right on top of the cereal containers on the counter which I could see if I turn my head barely 45 degrees to the left just now. But despite my current state of disgust with my body/cage, the underlying motivation to improve it is lacking. Or fleeting. I make sweeping, half-true statements about self-disgust which Big J then has to immediately (and very kindly) rebut.

This is just one manifestation of the extreme shift that motherhood has wrought. Almost 15 months into this, I still feel alienated from my former self. I sit down to write something, banalities stream out. Language sounds hollow. Intimacy is affected. And diet. And political engagement. And taking part and taking sides in the world's affairs.

I'm looking for Popeye's magic stuff. Can actual spinach bring change? If not, what virtual spinach could help?