Being Pregnant
On the past nine months.
Programming note: Enthusiasms is going on leave! I am taking off the rest of June and July and aiming to be back in August (maybe this is dumb and overly optimistic, TBD) as I am imminently having a baby and then will be learning how to take care of him. I’ll probably send around some sort of very short “it actually baby” announcement sometime in between then, but otherwise, see you all on the other side, and, as always, thank you for reading.<3
I was not always sure I wanted to be a parent. In fact, there were times in my life when I was sure I did not want to be a parent. (I once dreamt I had a baby and was overwhelmed when I realized I couldn’t leave the baby home alone like I did my cat.)
That changed, and not all at once. But this is also not an argument for the committed child-free to reconsider. C. would say, half-jokingly, that you should be as sure about having a kid as you would be about killing someone. Hyperbolic, certainly, but there is something there—that you would fundamentally alter the path of someone’s life in a way they did not ask for.
I guess you cannot ever really be sure, but when I was—and this is so cheesy, I know—I was standing in front of one of the Sol LeWitt wall drawings at Mass MoCA, quietly weeping. The world is full of so many horrible things, I thought, but also, there is art and music, perfect summer evenings, and surprisingly decent vegan pizza, and I wanted to share all of those. I also realized that, finally, I wanted to take care of someone in all the ways they needed it—and I thought, finally, that I might not completely suck at it. Then we still waited another year before we were totally, completely, as much as we could be, ready.
At some point during my pregnancy, my therapist said that I must be writing about it a lot, and I told her then that I was still wrapping my head around it. I think that remains true, even here in my last week-and-change of being pregnant. I have a very easy time, but it is still a kind of profound and weird experience, even when everything is going as well as it possibly could be.
The first three months feel like you are keeping the world’s most precarious secret, and also are sort of boring and like nothing at all is happening. I thought that I would be comfortable announcing it widely as soon as I knew, but instead, I felt superstitious about saying anything because it felt so small and fragile. The first time we saw him on the little bedside ultrasound, my midwife pointed to a blurry blob on the screen, and we both said, wow, look at that. Afterward, we fessed up that neither of us knew what the fuck she was pointing at.
You just have to put so much faith in the fact that things are generally fine in there, even though you cannot see. As time went on, this lessened, though I would still be suddenly stricken with the thought that something might go wrong. I’ve also been angry, to the point of tears, that all mothers aren’t afforded the simple worries (bumped into corner pregnant? amniotic fluid or sweat, how to tell difference?) that I have been blessed with.
Once he started moving around, he became less abstract. There is very much a person there, keeping me company at all times. His comedically timed kicks, his hiccups, his sudden reticence when someone else wants to feel. I talk to him throughout the day, sing to him, occasionally read books aloud. I hope that he knows me, somehow, in the way that I feel like I already know him.
He’s also, here in the last few weeks, flipped himself around, determined to come into the world ass-first. (My midwife nodded sympathetically, It is good to have a bit.) Since we discovered he’s breech, we had to schedule a C-section. I will not get the days-leading-up anticipation, go into labor, or know what birthing a human is actually like—all things I have mourned now and perhaps am still getting over, but I’m sure, in the end, won’t matter.
There was one day, early on in my pregnancy—it was winter, and it had been flurrying a bit, and the flakes were getting fatter. I was on my bike, stopped at JFK Street on my way to work, waiting for the light to change. A college kid passed by. He was ill-dressed for the weather, riding a skateboard in the snow, sipping an iced coffee as he weaved between cars, headphones on. I laughed a bit to myself—and then, just as soon, I realized that I would have a son, and I would worry about him being warm enough and if he was wearing a helmet and know that he wasn’t but that he was happy anyway and thought, I cannot fucking wait.