politics, revisited

today i am neither a republican or a democrat.

is it just me, or is no one making any sense lately … ?

nostalgia

luckily most bad days are just bad days. easily remedied by watching henry sweep up underneath the table and then put the cheerios from his dusty little pile one by one into the garbage.

i was poking around in my old stuff this morning and found this little ditty i wrote a few months after joe and i got married. you know, the first time your period is late and you don’t think there’s any possible way that you could be pregnant but you buy tests anyway and get nervous and scared and who knows what all…

I am afraid of babies.  It’s not that I don’t want children, I do—but I think I want children in the abstract.  I want to watch other women’s bellies flutter with the flying of fetus hands.  I want to knit blankets for a neighbor, not my own distended belly.  I want to look at someone else’s ultra-sound and pick out the tiny floating phalanges.

            I have a recurring dream that my husband and I have triplets.  Premature.  We can’t afford a stroller so I push my babies through the supermarket in a wheelbarrow, pulling their oxygen tanks behind me in a Red Flyer wagon.  Each baby starts to cry, and I pick up the oxygen tanks in my arms, convinced they are my children.  I hush them, and when I wake up, I can still hear them hissing.

            I don’t think I’m afraid of the pain, or the mechanics of smashing my major organs into the upper third of my chest cavity, or even a head the size of a small melon pushing its way out of me.  I’m afraid of trenchcoats, concealed weapons, terrorists, soccer moms, plane crashes, junior high.  I’m afraid I can’t be a mom like my mom was—afraid I can’t name every bird flying outside the window, afraid I won’t know how to drive to school twice in one day with clean underwear, afraid I won’t know what to say if she doesn’t get asked to prom, afraid she won’t like eating chips and salsa for three hours in the afternoon.

            I was listening to the radio last night while knitting my nephew-in-progress a blanket.  Terry Gross was interviewing a pastor on Fresh Air; Father Boyle had been diagnosed with leukemia, but was still working seven days a week to help gang kids get jobs and mainstream back into life.  Gross asked him if he ever got tired of the pain, if he was ever afraid of death.  Father Boyle paused—he had such a gentle voice—and said, “All I want is a heart the shape of God’s.”

            I turned off the radio and closed my eyes.  Even though a baby is still a question, still a hypothesis, still someone else’s news, I knew I would give my baby the world, give her as much as the pastor had squeezed between his leukemia breaths.  I would pick up the estuaries, rivers, plateaus, temperate forests, oil lines, egrets, glaciers, lilac bushes, latitudes, longitudes, and the thick red equator, between my thumb and forefinger, and put them in a giant Tupperware just for her.

And maybe someday my baby, while sliding out the birth canal, will flutter her tiny amniotic soaked feet up to my heart, and pat it into a shape—maybe a shape like God’s.  And when I am holding her in my arms, pressing her chest against my own, letting our ion channels run in tandem, our valves will flap tissuey red kisses with every pulse.

 

one of those days

everything is making me cry today. the lady at the grocery store snipped at me when i asked if she had more chicken better-than-bouillon in the back. she wasn’t any nicer when i couldn’t find the frozen pastry crust. and the bagger left my groceries sitting on the counter and walked away, leaving me to fight with a screaming toddler and a pregnant belly to stick the groceries in the cart. i came home so distraught that i let henry watch barney. (yes, it was that bad.)

but it’s not just that household chores seem so frustratingly overwhelming. (yes, all the non-perishables from the grocery store are still sitting on the kitchen floor as i type.) it’s days like this that make me wonder if i can really manage another little one.

i’m a week away from the third trimester and it hit me that i haven’t given this pregnancy much thought. i’m only aware of this little girl as an ache or a hunger or a pang or a pinch in my bladder. i don’t lie on the couch after lunch, like i did with fetus hal, with my hand on my belly, feeling movement and imagining  fingers and toes, first words. i’m just surviving. i’m just crossing off days on a calendar, just counting weeks until this is over.

i pulled out a book on labor and delivery last night. i flipped through the pages and saw a picture of an episiotomy: i spent the rest of the night trying to talk myself out of fear. i am terrified. i’m terrified of tearing, the recovery. i’m terrified of breast-feeding. of newborn cries. of sleepless nights. of henry’s reaction to a new baby. of myself.

i marvel at these women who move from one child to two to three to four joyfully, peacefully. maybe i’m just not cut out for pregnancy, but i know i wouldn’t get out of bed if henry wasn’t begging for a drink, for oatmeal. i’m tired. an all-out bodily exhaustion. my brain feels equally stretched and battered.

and then there are those moments. those briefs steps outside time where the universe seems split in two and i see for a second, just a second, the impossible beauty of motherhood, of my children, my husband. why are those moments so few? and why am i so tired and weepy in the interim?

giggle

i didn’t write this, but i wish i had…

“When I heard that John McCain’s running mate had children named Track, Willow, Bristol, Piper, and Trig, I was floored.

“A lot of Americans, myself included, want to believe this is still the country we grew up in, a country where no one dreamed of giving their children names like Brooklyn or Rhiannon or Darcy.

“We want to believe we are still living in a country where naming children is a cultural self-preservation tactic, a means of maintaining an institutional memory of the ethnic and religious groups from which the newborn has sprung, a way of maintaining a link with a heroic past rather than a cute or ironic future.

“But that country no longer exists. American children are no longer named after prophets, warriors, healers, or cultural titans; they are named after Welsh fairies, characters in science-fiction movies, the outer boroughs of New York, and trees.”

– Joe Queenan in the Los Angeles Times

i didn’t go home

last night, after an indulgent haircut at the local salon (what bliss to pay $30 for a head/arm massage, facial, and cut. ooooo.), i didn’t go home.

my phone must have still been sitting on the kitchen table, so i dug out two quarters from the mess of graham crackers and diapers in my purse and used a payphone. “hi, honey.” i said. “i’m not coming home.” [i didn’t feel like pulling an entire nora helmer; there is, after all, another baby on the way.]

and then i was alone in the perfect night looking beautifully styled, hoping the well-ironed locks masked the flour/applesauce mixture henry had smeared on my shirt just before i walked out the door.

i window shopped. i oohed and awed over anything i wanted to in janie and jack. i touched all the pretty china in crate and barrel. i took myself to joseph beth and sat in the bistro eating a baked brie covered in caramel and almonds while i read.

i didn’t think about kids. or dental school. or residencies. or dirty dishes. i thought about my own piles of aspirations.

it was nice to be with myself again.