Little Pokie

The Baby

2006-02-24T17:17:00.000-08:00

I have tried to write this labor and birth narrative for over three months, and I keep going back over the paragraphs I’ve vomited up so far and I hate them. The writing--the detail, the dialogue--is boring and contrived; I don’t know why I can’t write this final blog entry with any flare or distinction. Perhaps it’s because three months have passed, and my child (a BOY, for fuck’s sake) is a marvelous creature and embodies every detestable cliché in existence about how much you love your newborn (I am not after all immune to sentiment). Perhaps it’s because now that the child is here and real, I’ve realized that a lot of the issues I blogged about while he was in my womb don’t matter as I watch him pull his mouth off my nipple and then stick his lower lip way out, stretch his neck to the heavens like a baby bird, his belly full and his cheeks round and pink and healthy; when I lay him on the changing table and his face becomes a giant, toothless, trusting smile; when he moves his mouth like a happy fish; when he grunts in his sleep like an 80 year-old man with a bad back; when he poops colossally and then the red of his face turns back into flesh and he coos with contentment; when he coos at all; when I lower him gently into his bath, his tiny testicles hanging low, and then he presses his arms into his sides and looks up at me, as if praying that I won’t do anything to alarm him; when I play Who’s That Baby on My Changing Table? and proceed to make sure that it’s really him by way of kissing and raspberrying his feet, knees, belly, fingers, and finally his nose as he smiles and gurgles and would definitely give me a huge hug if he could; when his head clearly takes up more room on my nursing pillow than it did the day before; when he cries for no concrete reason I can detect and leaves me in deep despair.

So I am occupied with other worries now, and many joys—something entirely new to me. But both are more profound than the ones I had while I was pregnant. But his (yep, his) labor and birth run through my mind in one form or another every day. So here is what I remember most.

Pain
From 3:30 a.m. to 10:45 p.m., every contraction was excruciating. The quintessential hypnobirthing text states that labor does not have to be painful, that it is actually not painful, and that the reason it is regarded as painful is because childbirth has been co-opted by the medical industry, and because of mainstream media misrepresentation. I must have internalized both to an extreme degree, because my labor hurt like fucking hell. Contractions were menstrual cramps times 100, and they came on so fast and hard I couldn’t tell how long each one was—they didn’t seem to distinctly separate—until I was at the hospital and a nurse hooked me up to a machine that measured the contractions and told me: 2 to 3 minutes apart, about 60 seconds in duration. This was six hours into it.

After the first two or three hours, when I was at home with the husband, who let me lean on him and moan with each surge, I was able to use the relaxation skills I’d been practicing. But at first it hurt so terribly I couldn’t focus; I was scared to death that this was labor. How could it be? How could it hurt so badly? I thought that was all bullshit! Now, of course, I believe that different women have different levels of pain while in labor, and that detailed stories of labor and this concept should replace generalizations.

By the time I got to the hospital, however, I successfully relaxed through each contraction. But relaxing didn’t make the pain any better. I remember telling the midwife that I thought the pain would subside between contractions—that I didn’t realize the pain would be constant, that I wouldn’t get breaks or breathers.

“Different women have different labors,” she said. “You’re having a hard one.”

“You’re doing great,” she said, a little later, as I sat in the rocking chair and finished a low moan through a 90-second contraction. “You’re the poster child of hypnobirthing right now. You’re doing fantastically.”

This was hours after I’d asked one of the many dozens of wonderful labor and delivery nurses at the hospital for an enema to see if that might help the pain. She gave me one, gently and professionally, and it did not help. It was then when I realized that this was labor. This was my labor. And it hurt like hell, and it was going to continue to hurt like hell.

Amniotic Fluid
My water didn’t break; it ran out of me fairly steadily over about a 2 or 3-hour period, whenever I stood. It splashed on the floor of the labor room, pinkish-clear, from hour 6 to hour 8. It shocked me but I did not express the shock because the shock was not important and the shock did not register as shock. There was fluid making a mess everywhere, but it didn’t really matter.

So far, labor had little to do with a baby. At this point and throughout my pregnancy I saw no end, no indication that a baby would be the result of all this. I’m guessing that pregnancy and labor with a second child cultivates more accurate concepts of the future.

Shaking
My legs and at times my entire body was shaking and
trembling uncontrollably, the shaking so involuntary that I was afraid something was wrong until the midwife said that shaking was a part of labor, a good sign that the contractions are strong. Contractions are strong enough to make you rumble. Contractions are extremely powerful. They could probably move trains.

Disappearance of Shame
During hour 12, I shat. But before I shat, I had not been worrying about the possibility of shitting and when I did, my embarrassment evaporated. I was consumed with my body and what was happening to it, not about what impression my shit might leave on the husband or the midwife or the nurse. I was aware of them, all there, paying such close and strange attention to my nether regions, but it was not important. What was important was finishing this experience. What was important at this point was the end of labor, whatever that meant. I still didn’t think that would happen.

Drugs
“We’re going to have to start talking about Pitocin,” said the midwife around 3pm—hour 11 or 12. “Your contractions aren’t strong enough yet, and you’ve been in labor for a long time. You’re tired. We definitely need to hook you up to an I.V.”

“For what?” I asked.

“Fluids.”

“I don’t want Pitocin,” I said—but not because I was still determined to be drug-free. I had asked for Nubain around hour 11 and had been appreciating its effect: it didn’t make the pain that much less intense, but it provided an hour-long buzz that made it easier to endure.

“I know,” said the midwife. “But we need to start talking about it. We need to get these contractions going, and you’re exhausted.”

Going? Are you fucking kidding me?

“If I need Pitocin,” I said, “then I want an epidural.” You say: Pitocin; I say: Epidural. I think I was lying on the bed at that point; the lights in the labor room were off, and the gray afternoon light made everything calm and steady and even more surreal, like something Dali would never dream of painting.

A baby at the end of all this still did not occur to me. There was no outcome; there was my body and what was happening to it. I suppose you could say I was focused, but since I wasn’t focused on anything specific, I think determined is a better word for my disposition—I was determined to end this experience. With a baby? Not necessarily. I was not thinking about a baby, about any babies at all, especially my own. I didn’t know anything about them anyway.

I did look at the husband as I gripped a counter with both hands to declare the following: “I am never, ever doing this ever again.” He said that was fine; the nurse and the midwife laughed.

“We’ve heard that before,” said the nurse.

“You can’t make those kinds of promises right now,” said the midwife.

Oh, I can, I thought. I most certainly can.

The epidural was administered around 4 or 5, and since I had known it was coming, I stopped practicing hypnobirthing and became a Body Waiting for Pain Relief. The doctor took only about half an hour or so to arrive, but I kept panting and asking where he was.

“Did you call him?”

“Where’s the doctor?”

“What’s taking the doctor so long?”

“Will you call him again?”

“Is the doctor coming?”

“Have you called the doctor?”

“Is the doctor on his way?”

I’m sure I was annoying, although not as annoying as a baby trying to get itself out of your body.

When he did administer the epidural, I laid back on the bed. I still felt the contractions but they had become mild and low—I could get through them just by breathing steadily and closing my eyes. No need to moan anymore, or bend over, or move, or anything. My entire being exhaled with relief.

“You’re finally getting a break,” said the midwife. Then came all the rest—which I had forgotten about. When you get an epidural, you have to get all kinds of other things. A catheter, a fetal monitor, a this, a that, blah blah blah. In a matter of about an hour, the natural childbirth I had wanted became quite unnatural.

But isn’t it natural to want relief for pain under any circumstance? Why is so much of the “natural childbirth” movement so insistent on no drugs at all—and what kind of pressure does this put on women who, considering what they’re about to go through—have enough to consider already? And childbirth is such a culturalized ritual—if mother and child are all right and generally unharmed (an impossible feat anyway—the baby gets harmed and the mother gets harmed—heads are squashed, arms are wrenched, vaginas are too traumatized to urinate), I wonder if anyone can really make declarations on what’s right or wrong, what’s good childbirth practice or bad childbirth practice. Maybe it’s all just a handy forum for righteousness, as so much of parenting seems to be.

At the time, however, I was quite disappointed in myself for taking the drugs. Then the disappointment subsided under all that relief.

Gender?
After writing about it so extensively during pregnancy, I thought about the gender of my baby one time during labor. Right around hour 9, when a contraction had just ended, I said this to the husband:

“I have thought it might be a boy. About a month ago I started wondering.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” He stood facing me, having just finished a hamburger his father had brought for him. I was sitting on the edge of the bed, enormous and round in my gown. The midwife sat in the rocking chair.

“I didn’t want to agree with you.”

Pushing
“Okay, Anna,” said a wonderful, wonderful nurse who I hope will not mind my lips on her feet should I bump into her downtown sometime. “I want you to push like you’re taking the biggest poop of your life!”

“Ready?”

I nodded.

“Go!”

I pushed. With a small, supportive audience in full view of my nethers, I pushed with all the force I could muster. I was aware of their presence but their presence was not important. It was time to get the thing out. I had been drugged, coached, well-steeped in childbirth literature, weathering painful labor for 15 hours, and I’d had Pitocin and the midwife said my contractions were finally strong enough and god damn was I going to push this baby out. At this point, the concept of a baby truly presented itself, but only in the context of its exit from my body. I would finish this. And I knew for certain—just like I knew that my baby was female—that I would push it out in under two hours. It was nearly 6, and this experience—this godawful experience—was going to end by 9. That would be the end of it.

I pushed. And pushed. Despite the paralysis that the epidural enduced, I was on my feet, squatting, holding onto a bar, rolling on my side. I was really out there—100 times more vulnerable than I am right now, as you are reading, but my vulnerability did not matter. I had to end this. And I would. I would push the baby out.

The Caesarian Section
About 4 hours later, after the epidural wore off (its duration was amazingly short and its strength in my opinion amazingly overrated), it was decided that I would have a Caesarian Section. It was decided by the consulting doctor, the midwife, the husband, and myself. I remember looking up at the clock, one of those standard white-faced battery powered clocks that you see in classrooms, and noting both the time (after 9 pm), and then the concern and resignation on the face of the midwife and the doctor (pretty apparent). He had come in and watched me push a few hours before. “I think she can do it,” he said proudly. We all knew by then that the baby was pretty large. I felt everyone’s relief when he said I could do it, and it gave me even more wherewithal.

But I could not do it. I found out two weeks later that the baby was not descending and therefore not rotating in such a way for the head to crown—descension and rotation apparently need to work together to get the baby through the birth canal. At the time, no one explained this. No one said, “The baby is not descending.” Everyone said, “The baby is not coming out,” or “It’s not progressing,” so I assumed I was not strong enough to do it, that I was too tired.

I however did not care: natural childbirth, gender, drugs—none of it mattered. It was not important. The incredible, shocking pain was important; the fact that none of it was moving the baby was important; the fact that this experience had to end was important. A baby? A baby, at the end of all this? Nope. No recognition. I was in tremendous pain again; it shot through me and snapped through my nethers but not out of me, and by the time they wheeled me down the hallway to the operating room (or whatever they call it), I was crazed. I was naked and writhing and hollering and kicking, saying, “Please, please,” to the midwife, who patiently did something I don’t recall, like touch my shoulder or rub my arm.

And as we neared the operating room, I was embarrassed. A janitor standing beneath a vase painting smiled at me as we passed, and I know she was laughing at me, not sympathizing with me—she looked at me with a chiding grin, as if to say, Look at her, she can’t take it. As if she had birthed many children and weathered the pain with a lot more dignity. I did feel humiliated, but I couldn’t stop writhing. Maybe I could have. I feel now like I could have controlled myself, but I if I could have, I would have. Right? And even if I hadn’t been given that knowing look from the janitor, who for all I know is tough as nails—that bitch—I think I would still feel embarrassed. It couldn’t have hurt that bad. Could it?

According to the nurse who led our childbirth class—which I was very disappointed with—Hmong women express no pain during childbirth except for a dot of sweat on their upper lips, and Latinas express pain by screaming “Oy! Oy! Oy!” I was shocked at her racism. I still am. But what I take from those generalizations, and from the childbirth anecdotes of my friends, is that the pain for some women is severe, and the pain for other women is not—for some women, the pain isn’t even pain—it’s great pressure. I think now that levels of pain during childbirth have to do with 1) the body of the woman and 2) the size and position of the baby and all kinds of things I do not understand—but the variables in these two factors alone are probably infinite. The third factor, the one that we unfortunately hear the most about, is the woman’s “pain threshold” (a term I now despise), which is determined by the body of the woman and the size and position of the baby and the way the woman’s culture exercises control over her expression of pain (because culture plays a role in everything we do) and of course her temperament and personality and genetics. But the term “pain threshold” implies that her threshold is hers and hers alone, and that it is not dependent on all these other factors. So I feel like my pain threshold is all about me and my potential and my failure to live up to it. But it is not. I am wrong. I am utterly wrong about this.

And I certainly wasn’t figuring all this out as the anesthesiologist, a nice woman with large glasses, administered the anesthetic, as I lay on the table naked with my arms Velcroed in place, straight out at my sides, exactly as if I were on a cross (I apologize—but the analogy is accurate and it was the first thing I thought of at the time). Finally! Finally! The pain subsided and I for the first time in hours and hours and hours smiled. I smiled up at the lights, through the oxygen mask over my face, and I sighed. I smiled and sighed and felt myself breathe and the muscles around my eyes relaxed completely. They could have removed my spleen. They could have amputated my legs. I was smiling and the pain was for the most part gone and I didn’t care what happened next. It occurred to me that the baby would come now, but I still didn’t know how important this was. It didn’t feel like any sort of end was on its way, and I didn’t care anyway because the pain was gone.

Then there was the husband, standing at my left shoulder. They had sent him away while they prepped me. His eyes were wide open and he looked extremely glad to see me. Then the doctors started doing whatever it was they were doing, which was fine with me. I could have given a shit. I heard them talking to each other—one on the right side of my body and one on the left—and they were laughing about something—a TV show, or the location of a flea market—and one of them told me not to worry about the scar because it would be “below the bikini line,” and their banter and that silly comment (I have never given a flying fuck about scars anywhere, and I don’t wear bikinis) did not matter at all. Nothing really did. Not that there was a baby coming, not that the husband was at my side, looking eagerly over the sheet they suspended above me that hung to my shoulders and blocked my view of my own belly, not that I was about to not be pregnant anymore. I was just there, en abyme, waiting for something that was starting to take shape.

“There’s the head,” said the husband. “They’re pulling it out now.” I smiled. A head. Coming out of my stomach.

“Look! There it is!” said the wonderful nurse who had stayed late to assist in the birth and whose feet would by now be damp with my saliva were I to run into her in a sandwich shop or somewhere.

“Tell your wife what she has,” the nurse said.

The Child
“It’s a boy,” said the husband slowly. He sounded light, airy, marvelously happy, and the joy in his voice made me happy, too. No more pain and a happy husband and the end of the experience. I was ecstatic. Elated.

“It’s a boy,” he said again, and then he walked out of my view, toward the doctors and nurses, to have a look.

I doubt very much that I said what I said next. The husband says I said it, but I think he’s wrong. For one thing, I had an oxygen mask over my face, so I couldn’t have said anything clearly. But maybe it did happen. Who’s to say? Certainly not me.

“What am I supposed to do with a boy?” I asked. And then I heard them all bustling around, happily checking out my new son while I lay there, crucified with wonder.

“Here it is,” said the husband. He brought him over and I saw a glimpse of his face and body, damp and mushy and shiny, slumped into the husband’s arms. In the pictures they took, he’s gazing right up at the husband, calm and quiet, his knees and elbows bent into his little slimy body.

“They’re putting him on the scale,” said the nurse.

“9 pounds,” called a man’s voice, “and 14.8 ounces. 9 pounds, 15 ounces! Wow!”

“Wow!”

“Wow!”

I smiled. I still didn’t feel a thing and I was glad because it seemed as though I had been feeling everything imaginable for not only the last 19 hours but also the last 10 months. I should have been shocked that it was a boy. It was not the Little Pokie, the girl I had been envisioning and worrying about and hoping to spare from that numbness and distance from her own body that characterized me so unfortunately throughout my life. I had given birth to someone else. I had had a boy. My instincts were wrong. Really, really, really wrong.

But none of this occurred to me at that moment: I was in a tired but pleasantly drugged haze, and they wheeled me to recovery and I held Ian (Eye-an; we have doomed the poor child to a life of correcting everyone, as my father keenly pointed out) for the first time, and I don’t remember feeling overjoyed or exhausted. I just remember being fucked-up and foggy and the room being very bright as the husband bathed our son and the midwife spilled the bathwater all over the floor—poor woman; what rotten luck—and Ian lay patiently in my arms. I don’t remember his looking up at me, nor do I remember what his face looked like, except that it was small. His gender didn’t matter; the state of my body didn’t matter. There he was. It was a baby, and it was here, and it wasn’t Barbara Ann, the aunt I never knew, who died when she was only a few days old in 1941 as a result of oxygen depravation because her mother, my grandmother, Dessa B., had a placenta praevia and nobody knew it ahead of time and nobody could do a thing about it. I wonder if this means that Barbara Ann was destined to die—if so, then millions of babies have been destined to die because of all kinds of complications, and millions of mothers have been bereft and despairing and tremendously sad. I think now that there is probably a force in the universe that grows larger with the unpreventable death of every baby, because if anything had kept Ian from being in my life I would be living with a sense of emptiness that would in many ways be insurmountable.

But of course we survive what we think we cannot. That is what females do. We are the most unbreakable, the most resilient creatures in the entire world. This is incontestable.

So this is what I was wrong about: everything. I’ve been wrong about everything for a long, long time. My potential for love, which is greater than I ever knew. The strength of my ability to withstand pain, which is not strong at all. The sex of my child, which I was sure enough about to elaborate on for pages and pages. The pain of labor, which I vastly underestimated. But none of that matters anymore. It doesn’t matter that I was right or wrong, or that the day Ian was born was in many ways horrible. It was the worst day of my life, in fact. It’s nothing I would ever want to go through again.

But I look now at Ian: his big round blue eyes, the splotch of red between his eyebrows, the extremes of his grin, so happy to see me or the husband or his giant plastic key chain. Three months ago I looked at Ian—pooping tar and sleeping in a clear plastic bassinet, his head a strange lopsided lump of soft bone—as I chugged water in my hospital bed and felt the pressure in my feet, bloated and swollen, like hocks of ham. I called them Godzilla feet.

Yes. That was a horrible day. But I now hold my child in my arms, sexless and innocent and shocking. I touch the baby’s skin. Yes. That was a horrible day. Much worse than I thought. I kiss tiny toes and see fingernails webbed to fingertips. A breasty mouth pumping itself into a tiny “O” without a sound. Eyes looking at a ceiling for the first time, neck craning around.

Reality
Horrible. Who cares? Fuck horrible. Lots of things are horrible. Look at a child.

Give a Pregnant Girl a Hand

2005-11-09T08:31:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, the husband and I were in Lowe's , nesting, looking at valances (we don't know how to pronounce this word; I suppose you have to start somewhere) to hang atop the rows of beads I had strung to cover our medicine cabinet. Silly projects have become very important.

"When you due, honey, tomorrow?" asked a clerk.

"Today," I said.

"No wonder you're out walking around." She smiled. A warm, heavy woman with round cheeks and her long hair up in a ponytail. "You just keep it up. Think 6:00." She pointed to my belly. "6:00, now," she said to Pokie, who didn't move one inch in response. "6:00."

The nesting festival continued at the fabric store. The husband was looking in Home Decor and I was looking at baskets for our bathroom shelves (god, this sounds so gross).

"When's the baby due?" a clerk asked, wide-shouldered and curious.

"Today," I said.

"No wonder you're walking around," she said. "You look great! Good luck!"

Strangers who know how to talk to a pregnant woman are wonderful: no unwanted advice, no competition. Just jovial, positive support.

This would have been appropriate when I took our cat for his vaccines a few days ago. It was a vaccination clinic and the line was long--about 25 or 30 pet owners with their dogs and cats standing in front of me.

Surely, I thought, someone in the front of the line will offer to let me cut. I'm huge and everyone knows that it will be miserable for me to stand here with a 15 lb cat for the next hour.

No one said a word. No one did a thing. No one made a move. I couldn't believe it.

And--when I was teaching, no student ever offered to carry my shoulder bag thick with books up the stairs for me. Not once.

If you see a hugely pregnant woman, please offer to help her out--not necessarily if she looks as if she needs it, but if it's obvious that it might be appropriate. For god's sake. I can't help but wonder if the twisting of the Women's Movement and the twisting of feminism by the media and by some feminists who think motherhood is by its nature oppressive have something to do with the fact that so few people offered to help me out while I was so pregnant and so clearly tired. Maybe folks in that line at the vet didn't want to give up a space because they'd been waiting so long, or maybe some of them felt like pregnancy was no excuse for getting special treatment.

I freely admit that I used to feel like pregnancy was no excuse for special treatment. Two enormous problems with this world-view are 1) It assumes that women--all of them--use pregnancy as an excuse for laziness when it's perfectly reasonable to use pregnancy not as an excuse for laziness but as a reason for wanting and needing to do less; and 2) It assumes that pregnancy is not a valid cause for special treatment, when pregnancy is most definitely a valid cause for the most special treatment anyone can provide, anywhere. It is a reason for favors and gifts and lavish love and breaks and extra attention and extra money and extra everything.

This declaration doesn't seem like a stretch; it seems, after experiencing pregnancy myself, totally obvious and apparent. Despite media bias toward pregnant women, the fact that the feminist movement to the best of my knowledge has not directly stated such truth is sad indeed. So help us out if you can. Feel free. Feel obligated. Feel damn good about it.

So Many Hoaxes

2005-11-09T07:44:00.000-08:00

I am one day past my due date, and the cervix check I received yesterday informed me that I am merely 1 cm dilated. So these cramps I've had over the last month or so have been my body's attempt to convince me that it was preparing for labor.

Ha!

"I'm sorry you're so miserable," said the midwife when I called over the weekend to see if nausea, massive constipation, cramps, fatigue, and a feeling that I might explode in a burst of baby and guts rather than go the usual route of giving birth were conducive to the onset of labor. "All that could be an indication that labor might start. Think of all it as preparing you--once labor does start, you won't care. You'll welcome it."

Labor. I now realize that it's a big hoax--that all women are just cruel, sadistic weirdos for pretending that labor and birth actually happen. How they've pulled this off and how they have their babies (because they clearly do have babies--we see them everywhere), I'm not sure--but at this point mothers everywhere are steadily losing their credibility.

The biggest hoax, though, might be the one I've tried to pull on myself. All my ranting about how whatever weight women gain is fine, and all my anger about the pressure women have to look a certain way when they're pregnant, was obviously lip service, because yesterday, when I saw that I have gained 40 pounds, I went immediately into a strange, teenager sort of trance where I felt fat and ashamed and quite simply grizzly. In my second and early third trimester, I felt cute preg--even superior, I now admit--with all my walking and my giant bulb of a belly. I enjoyed people telling me how small I was. Sure I did. And now I am one of those magazine pictures that you never see anywhere, and I feel somewhat repulsed by myself and my body.

I am supposed to be stronger than all this nonsense. I am 35 years old. I have emerged from years of bulimia, from the gloppy trenches of External Pressures That Co-Opt Your Spirit. But apparently I can bitch about our culture all I want, sometimes even intelligently, but I have clearly not yet cultivated the ability to internalize my own belief systems.

Some feminist I am. What a bummer. And my inability to walk the walk sure does detract from the greater picture, doesn't it? You know, something about a baby being born through me, something about the wonder of the female body. (Weight gain--who the fuck cares? What is wrong with me? Should I meditate?) Something about... you know, having a baby. Becoming a mother.

Oh, that. Right.

My Shelf Needs More Room

2005-11-03T06:14:00.000-08:00

When you breastfeed (apparently, anyway--I don't want to seem as if I have some kind of experience with it), you first have to use your nipple to tease the baby's mouth open--and I mean open wide. The lactation specialist called it the Pac-Man. When you see the Pac-Man, you move the baby's mouth right over your whole nipple so that it goes way back into her mouth. From there, you let the baby suckle for as long as it pleases while checking for various signs that the baby is getting or has had a full meal--sounds from the mouth and throat, level of post-feed pleasure-stupor, weight gain.

Breast feeding, in otherwords, is a process by which mothers serve their babies. You essentially wait on and monitor the thing obsessively; what you bring it is your own body. How I feel physically about this offering is largely irrelevant to the baby's needs: Had a 36-hour labor? Feeling more exhausted and sore than you ever imagined possible? Had a C-section and so the pressure of a baby on your stomach is excruciating? No milk coming in? There are solutions to all these problems: drawing on strength and love to overcome exhaustion; lying down to feed; and pumping 24/7.

But how do I feel psychologically about all this? What if I'm damned uncomfortable relating to Pokie in what seems a kind of... um... sexual way? What if I want to have a life and not be exhausted for the next year (the length of time I plan to breast feed)? What if I'm a "liberated woman" who feels conflicted and perhaps already resentful about how much I have to be there for my child? As if I haven't done that already, since February?

First of all, my discomfort with breast feeding because it's... sexual or weird or crosses boundaries women shouldn't have to cross if they don't want to is a bunch of Puritan bullshit that fortunately is getting easier and easier for me to dismiss. My discomfort here comes largely from that paradox that permeates US pop culture: pleasure and disgust with the female body. This paradox is everywhere on TV, in literature, in behavior, in how we think about ourselves. It's not as if I didn't know it was there until I became pregnant, for god's sake--I just didn't connect it to breast-feeding, to physical elements of motherhood, until recently. And breast-feeding--how good and necessary it is for babies, the mature versions of which politicians claim are our most valuable resource--is no competition whatsoever for this paradox. Doing so in public is frowned upon:

Want to wear sheer, tight clothing that reveal nipples and beautiful breast flesh? Fine. Sexy. If you've got it, flaunt it.
Want to go to a titty bars? No problem. Bring your cash.
Need to breast-feed in an airport? Well cover that shit up, would you? That's disgusting. That makes me uncomfortable. Do that in private.

Secondly, my desire to not be a mother-machine has to do with the way the women's movement trickled down to me (and I'm no feminist scholar, so there are certainly a zillion parts of the movement that never reached me at all). I grew up thinking that nurturing a baby detracts from women's independence, individuality, and self-will; that sacrificing to such an extent is not a trait of a true feminist; and that nurturing and caring for children is a form of bondage and imprisonment. I feel now that these are all misconceptions... more accurately, that they are just as grounded in cultural bias as my breast-feeding hang-ups. If I think that caring and sacrificing for a baby detracts from my individuality, then I am overlooking something rather important: my own body and, whether I like this term or not, its obvious childbearing purpose. I can choose to use my body for this purpose or not, of course--but to think that using my body and all of my mental and spiritual resources for what my body is clearly designed to do is a form of self-effacement, a reducing of my social and spiritual power, is absurd. Really, truly absurd.

So the reason I don't value mothering is because men and women in power do not; because the mainstream media does not; and because feminists, until recently, have not (or at least this has been my impression). It's really this simple: I have been duped and morphed by both mainstream and feminist ideology to believe things that are not reflective of reality.

Well god dammit.

I will indeed feel like a non-self, mother-machine for many, many days to come. But I need to place this concept of motherhood where it belongs: on my Manifestations of Cultural Bias shelf, right next to the Notions of Beauty figurine. Seems like the older I get, the more crowded the shelf becomes.

Siblings

2005-10-31T23:14:00.000-08:00

The first time I learned about death, I was 5 years old, sitting on the wooden, chain-link swing of the swingset in our backyard, flattening the grass by pushing off lightly with my feet. My brother was the one who told me, and I can't remember how the subject came up. There was something dead that I mentioned or he mentioned--a dog we had cared for that ran away, a spider, a mouse. It was late in the day, and the sun shone just over the tin roof of our old Iowa barn that remained standing throughout my childhood, and my brother, 3 years my senior, flipping a brand new orange yo-yo, turned to me and said that the thing in question--the thing I don't remember now--was dead.

"So what?" I said. "Who cares?"

"You're going to die someday."

"I am not!" The back of our house stood behind him, white and farmy, paint chipping all along the porch railings. I could see my father making supper through glass windows in the kitchen door.

He laughed. "Yes you are, Dumb ass. Everything dies."

"Not us," I said.

"Dad will die someday."

I stood up and felt the swing knock against my back. "I don't believe you." I put my hands on my hips. "When?"

He shrugged. "I don't know."

At that moment, I felt that flat nothingness with which we are all familiar for the first time--a sort of vacant, empty chill that in my head looked like a small square of indefinable space. The chill was the concept of my own mortality and the mortality of my parent--but it was also the knowledge of a big, big question that I knew had no answer. I had figured something out by understanding that there was no figuring to be done. This and the powerlessness it implicated--my own--scared the hell out of me.

I started panicking and my brother started laughing (we never had much of an alliance), and I ran inside to discuss the matter with my father.

"Are you going to die?" I asked him. He was standing at the stove, pan frying pork chops. He pan fried everything. I never saw him grill a thing my entire life.

"No, Love," he said, looking up from the skillet and smiling.

"You never, ever will?"

His face changed and he put his spatula down to face me. He knew now that this was one of those moments where your kid learns something really important without your being there, and you have to figure out what to say.

"I will someday," he said.

"You will?"

He nodded. "Yes."

"Will I?"

He nodded again. "Yes, Love."

"But I don't want to," I said. Total despair. Fear. The knowledge that I couldn't control something--something this mammoth, something this crucial--was terrifying.

"That's not going to be for a long, long time," he said. The pork sizzled. "You don't need to worry about it right now. You won't need to worry about it for years and years and years."

"How many?"

"Seventy," he said. "Eighty."

"That long?"

He nodded. "It's not going to be for a long time. And I'll be here, too."

"Till when?"

"Until you're grown and old."

"Oh." That was a long time. That changed everything. "Okay." I went back outside. My brother was standing there in the middle of the lawn, trying to do an Around-the-World with the yo-yo. I skipped past him toward my swing, calm and happy, my feet light and my head up high, so he could see very well that he hadn't upset me after all.

The Run That Never Was

2005-10-28T06:35:00.000-07:00

Last night, I asked the husband to run out and get me some chocolate cake from a local bakery.

"Oh, Anna, no."

"What?"

"I really, really, really don't feel like it."

"Your pregnant wife is asking you to go get her some food." I crossed my arms and muted the TV. "You have no agency here."

The husband looked at his watch. "If you eat it now, you'll be up all night anyway."

"I really want some cake."

"No," he said. "I'm not going. No, no, no."

I unmute the television. "I don't know where you think you get all these rights."

Love

2005-10-24T12:46:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, the husband and I were driving down the freeway, headed to Home Depot so I could purchase the appropriate lightbulbs for Pokie's cute little multi-colored floor lamp. I was in the passenger seat, fiddling with the IPOD so the husband wouldn't fiddle with it. (He often does while he drives, and it makes me angry because a) it isn't safe; b) he doesn't stop fiddling when I ask him to and seems to regard my concern as unworthy of action.)

I was flipping through the huband's absurdly lengthy "artists" lists, trying to decide between two albums by John Prine, when he leaned hard on the horn and I jerked my head up to look out the windsheild. We were going about 60.

"Jesus Christ!" An old Honda hatchback in the right lane was about to veer into us. We were in his blind spot. "Mother fucker!" The husband leaned on the horn again. I was holding the IPOD in my left hand and gripping my seat with my right, watching the Honda come within inches of us as we sped further onto the shoulder, toward a huge mass of white oleander that grows high on the freeway median.

Then the Honda responded and pulled back into the right lane. "God dammit!" the husband honked again, furious, and sped up.

"Just let him go," I said. "It's okay." I was still gripping the seat.

"What an asshole."

"Um..." I cleared my throat. "I think I'm going to start crying." I put my hand over my mouth and started to wail. Unborn babies die in car accidents all the time.

"Oh, honey." He reached over and touched my knee. "It's okay. Nothing happened."

"I know," I sobbed.

"Why are you crying?"

I shrugged. "I just need a minute," I said. "Just a minute."

The husband kept rubbing my leg, being soothing (except for, as we drove across the freeway bridge, "You know, you were fiddling with the IPOD, not me." Unfortunately, I was too upset to jerk my leg away and stop speaking to him until he apologized. His timing was impressive.)

By the time we pulled into the parking lot, I had stopped crying but was sniffling in steady spurts. He turned off the ignition and pulled me over to him for a hug. "You know," he said again, "I would never let anything happen to you and the Pokie."

"Oh for god's sake," I said into his shoulder. Macho bullshit. "If something had happened, it wouldn't have been your fault."

"I would never let anything happen to you and the Pokie."

"You can't control everything," I said.

We relaxed the hug and he looked at me, serious as hell. "I would never let anything happen to you and the Pokie."

"All right," I said.

"Nothing happened, did it?"

"No," I said. Sniffle. Tear wipe.

"Well then?"

"Okay, okay," I said. "I got it."

"I love you," he said, kissing my hand.

I sighed. "I love you, too."

Questions

2005-10-23T15:42:00.000-07:00

My first of four hospital stays was at age 16, when depression settled into my head without warning and remained there over the course of about a month. I contemplated suicide--just sort of thought loosely about it all the time, not with any particular images or plans attached to the concept. Then, one evening, after arriving home from sledding with my boyfriend, I felt desperate and just about as empty as the bottle of Bartles and James I had just helped polish off, so I slitted my left wrist with a dull paring knife that could barely even break the surface of a hard-boiled egg.

The whole incident (the label of which is "suicidal gesture") was inspired of course by genuine depression but also by after school specials and soap operas: I looked at myself in the mirror that hung over my dresser for quite awhile, sobbed at my reflection, kneeled on my carpet, pleaded with god, and the like. I was very dramatic. I wanted the drama a lot more than I wanted to die; in fact, I did not want the latter at all. I believe now and was sentient then of my desire for freedom from adolescent insecurity that I was incapable of managing--partially because for whatever reason, I could not manage adolescent insecurity; partially because I was indeed depressed; and partially because a key element of all that adolescent insecurity was a compulsive draw to drama of all kinds.

There was no gush or spurt of blood, since the blade was dull, since I didn't try very hard, and since I had slitted the knife in the wrong direction (this I learned later on). A few spots dripped onto my bedspread and as if in a trance (both real and contrived), I watched the drops soak in. Then my mother appeared in my bedroom doorway, up from bed in her flannel nightgown. (I feel no need to describe her expression, as any picture you form is probably accurate.) Any mother would have done what she did: drive her daughter immediately to the emergency room.

The ER doctor admitted me to the hospital for one week--for depression. Not to a psych ward (fortunately, I was never admitted to one of those)--just to a standard ward. I had a room to myself on the fourth floor and watched a lot of TV and walked to the nurses' station for packets of graham crackers and pint-sized milks. The psychiatrist started me on Elavil, and I started feeling better than I had in months and months. When my boyfriend broke up with me (for some reason he became distant), I handled it with wine coolers, cigarettes, and any other substances that I came across--not with suicidal thoughts or impulses. So I suppose progress had been made.

The hospital itself, that first time, was a pretty ok place to me. I was safe up there, cushioned by clean white walls and clean sheets and a thick window that overlooked the roof next door, hospital pjs, soggy grilled cheese sandwiches, and a wonderful TV that was mounted high on the wall for Ease of Viewing While You're Sick, with both cable and a remote control. I actually felt sort of pampered, and I certainly did need to be there. And I knew this. And I was glad--very, very glad--to get some help.

But until about three weeks ago, when I toured the maternity ward where I will be giving birth to the Pokie, I had not comprehended the fact that I would be having my child in a hospital--in a place that generates some rather unpleasant memories. That first stay, as I said, was ok--but my reasons for being there were not. They were not ok at all, and I don't care if they were over 15 damn years ago. Although I imagine you already know this, I am indeed unsettled and conflicted about my adolescence and my past in general--about decisions I made, thoughts I had, and feelings I watched myself act on--and as far as I am concerned, a hospital is no place for my baby to be welcomed.

I am of course working on getting over this, because who cares where I have the Pokie as long as everything goes ok, which it will? And this birth, I should probably keep in mind, is as much about me as it is not about me--this birth is about the Pokie. It's about being there for her and doing the best I can for her; it isn't about answering existential questions that I'll probably be probing in different ways for the rest of my life.

Or maybe I'm wrong about this, too. Maybe labor and birth and meeting the bodies inside our own are about all of that. Maybe they're about everything; maybe they're meant to provide answers to questions about human weakness and emotional lows and great power and the nature of euphoria and the meaning of sorrow. In an ideal situation, the husband through his tears (because he will cry--of this I am certain) will plop the Pokie on my chest, and I at that moment might have all the answers I have ever wanted. Or maybe I'll see them as unimportant. Or maybe the questions will disappear. For awhile.

Woah

2005-10-19T10:29:00.000-07:00

In Target the other day, the husband and I were buying a baby shower gift for a friend, waiting at the checkout. Ahead of us was a mother and her child--a girl of I would guess about 6 or 7.

The mother, a woman about my age with straight hair, a prominent chin, and an extremely kind expression in her eyes, noticed me and tapped her daughter on the shoulder.

"Hey," she said, pointing at me. "Look at her belly."

The girl looked up. "Woah."

"That's what I say!" I smiled. The girl had hair like her mom's, pulled back with silver bendy clips and a ponytail, and her eyes were huge and brown. She looked from my belly to my face, back and forth.

"When are you due?" the mother asked.

"November but probably Halloween."

"Do you know how you're having it?"

I did not like this question. I would never ask a stranger such a question, whether bonded with her through universal maternal forces or not. Universal maternal forces do not automatically give us license--but this is clearly something that many people would disagree with.

However, I wondered if she and her daughter were discussing for the first time, over the course of several days or a week, pregnancy and sex and various procedures and anatomical structures that every child should know all about; I wondered if such a discussion had prompted the mother to point me out. And I didn't want to be a bitch just to make a point in case I were right.

And what would we do if pregnant women were bitches about such things? It's often ok if we're bitches to our partners--that's standard, since it's to be expected sometimes, when days are hard and heavy and you can't sleep--and especially since our moodiness is joked about and discussed in pregnancy guides everywhere, usually in these tidy little advice sections to men on how to be patient with a mad pregnant woman and her hormones.

But what if we pregnant women, in public, were bitches to strangers who asked inappropriate questions, instead of paragons of patience and kindness? What would happen then? Target would surely fall, I reasoned, so I said to the mother, "Naturally, if possible," and felt like a phony. Felt like I had an opportunity to set things straight and lost my courage.

"Oh, great!" said the mother. (And if I had said, "I'm looking forward to the epidural," or "I wish twilight sleep were still an option," what would she have done? Said, "Oh, how terrible," or something even worse, like, "I hope that will be ok for your baby"? Wished me ill? Otherwise expressed disapproval at my ability to make decisions for myself and my childbirth?)

"Good luck," said the mother. The daughter was still staring intently at my stomach, at its great, great reach. Did she want to touch it? I almost asked.

Wow. This is Impressive.

2005-10-15T07:14:00.000-07:00

I am pretty overwhelmed. Not with all I have to do--organize stuff, buy a breast pump, etc.--but with what's happening to my body.

I'm now in my ninth month, and Pokie has significantly dropped twice in the last two weeks. Her head butts on my bladder are constant and intense, and I now have bladder spasms--really sharp pains just above my pubic bone that make me suck in my breath--throughout the day; I can't ride my bike anymore because her head presses too uncomfortably against my rectal and vaginal muscles; I wake up every hour or so while sleeping because I have to pee, and sometimes the pressure in my bladder makes me double over on my way into the bathroom; I get pains and rather constant aches in my chest because of the inflammation around my ribs; my hips are stiff and sore; I am quite breathless (what's with this once-the-baby-drops-you'll-breathe-normally-again bullshit?); I am nauseated on and off and feel like I'm having a bad period for at least a few hours every day--sometimes all day long.

I realize this reads like a litany of complaints. In fact, this is a litany of complaints. But sharing my suffering--and from what I understand, the weeks after pregnancy are much worse--and bitching aren't really my purpose here. My purpose here is to express awe.

I find it remarkable that our bodies are so powerful, so equipped, so INCREDIBLY competent at enduring and recovering from all of this, that we just go on with our days and the obligations of our lives while we're pregnant and while we're so capable of amazing physical and mental feats. On a social and political level, I find it remarkable that women get pregnant and give birth without much fanfare, many of us without free and accessible financial, emotional and material support that should be found on every street corner of every city and town in the world.

I also find it remarkable that we are the ones who do not possess a higher concentration of power in the world. I do nod at Naomi Woolf on this point--when she says that oppressive social structures and inequity might be just as rampant if women were the ones in power--but I'm quite surprised that the wonder of cultivating life and then pushing it out hasn't simply put women in power by default, by a sense of respect and deference for women that I would imagine are somewhat innate--that are accessible to just about anyone. Since men can't give birth, and since they cannot understand it, even if they are informed and sympathetic and open to learning about it, how on earth have women allowed them to be the ones in charge of... well, just about everything?

So I have a new found respect for women, to say the least. I feel sort of like a little kid, "getting it" for the first time. With this knowledge comes many other emotions: peace and a sense of relief, now that I understand so much more than I did before; impatience with women who compete and perhaps patronize other women, especially about pregnancy (I was on the stairstepper right up until the day I went into labor... I loved every second of being pregnant... I am a purist during the first trimester...); and of course anger. For me, anger accompanies deep knowledge like bruises accompany deep blows to my shins.

But the anger at the moment is overshadowed by what I'm afraid might be joy. I don't experience joy about anything. Not because I'm this self-pitying wretch who victimizes herself (although many folks might argue with this assessment), but because I lean toward the cynical and the dark and the negative about everything. And allow me to be utterly and completely clear about this: there is indeed a deeply, deeply dark side to having a baby--if people don't realize that this is a part of the whole deal, they're ignorant and need to be deprogrammed.

But I'm overall pretty joyous at the prospect of going into labor and pushing out my child, of feeling Pokie swim roughly or smoothly through my pelvis, of having the husband cry (because he will cry--he'll sob like a newborn himself) and plop her right on my belly, of watching her blink at the world for the very first time. I think it's going to be just terrific. If I don't experience joy at anything else in the world from here on out--well, that's ok with me.

"Cleopatra for a Day"

2005-10-11T19:55:00.000-07:00

This is what the labor and delivery nurse from whom the husband and I took a childbirth class said when she explained how laboring mothers would be treated during labor. She also used the phrase "queen for a day," or some other wretched cliche from the dungeon of gender stereotypes, and told the husbands that everything was "about mom now," and that they shouldn't watch TV or order pizza or sit idly by while their wives were in labor.

I have enormous respect for nurses, and I'm sure the teacher of our childbirth class is probably a pretty good nurse--I suspect she takes good care of her patients. But comparing labor and birth to a makeover, or explaining that we need to be waited on while we're birthing, is rather insulting. I don't need to be pampered or indulged--I need to be supported and respected. I don't need a manicure--I need perhaps a touch on the shoulder or a reminder to inhale or someone to guide me down the hallway if I want to walk. I don't need to get whatever I want; I need a to be read and interpreted intelligently. I think the stereotypes that our teacher's analogies are grounded in reduce what I am about to work toward, and what every other mother in the world works for when she has a child, to superficial beauty rituals. Her ideology demeans women and places our needs and our remarkable ability to give birth into a category of the frivolous.

Why people aren't more reflective about gender stereotypes I do not know. But as soon as our teacher made all these generalizations, I wanted to throw a shoe at her head. I felt ill. I felt like I was in the wrong place. And I thought our teacher was stupid.

But to her credit, she probably said what she said because she's been a labor and delivery nurse
for 20 years and has regularly witnessed men neglecting their wives during labor; she's probably also witnessed women giving birth who were unaware of their own agency and power to demand support from those around them. And this of course makes me just as infuriated, and it makes me wonder which came first--the gendered behavoir or the stereotypes that reinforce it. They clearly nourish one another. And our teacher I suppose tries to find the humor in them and make light of them by using cliches rather than simply beating the piss out of some idiot who watches football while his wife is giving birth or ordering an uninformed woman to articulate her needs and expect to be respected wherever she goes.

However, I find humor like hers to be a form of acceptance, of resignation to mindless concepts of "how men are" and "how women are." Humor like hers is socialized heterosexuality at its pinnacle, and it should be questioned. It should be objected to. It should be challenged.

If I have a boy--and I won't, but just in case I do--I will request pink booties for him--maybe even a pink swaddle blanket and hat. I wonder how our teacher would react to such a choice.

I doubt very much, though, that debunking gender stereotypes will be as important to me while I gaze at my new child--the child that will have so violently pushed itself into the world through my body--my vagina, of all places. I imagine that gender stereotypes and their ramifications will be the very last thing on my mind. And I imagine that this is ok, for at least a little while.

Pokie On The Way

2005-10-10T03:31:00.000-07:00

I am now into my 9th month of pregnancy, and the Pokie has dropped about a foot. Her little softball of love just behind and beneath my right breast has moved to more of a center spot in my rib cage, and she head butts my bladder when I'm walking and sitting and sleeping. The midwife said she thinks Pokie will come around Halloween, not in November--and I'm now thinking she's going to be here ANYTIME. She has also concentrated her little boulders of bone and other mass toward the center of my belly, in the vicinity of my belly button, as if she's pulling onto the highway and preparing to exit the freeway. This move seems to be accompanied by new pressures on my rectal muscles and a whole shitload of worry on my part.

It's the menstrual cramps that are really surprising, however. They started about 8 hours ago, low to middling pain as if my period has just begun. I've certainly read that contractions can begin this way--so of course I called the midwife.

"Those are pretty normal for the ninth month," she said calmly. I also told her I was feeling nauseated and that harder but not at all unmanageable pains were coming off and on. "Doesn't sound like labor is happening yet."

Thank god, I thought. I am so not ready for this.

"But they could become labor. And if they did, that would be fine."

"I'm far enough along?"

"Anytime after 36 weeks is okay," she said.

Except for the fact that we have no crib, no bassinet, no car seat. And I'm supposed to teach for another 3 weeks, and I've already taken two sick days for a chest cold. I'm worried about my students not getting their shit done. I'm also worried that I'll look like a weak-ass pregnant woman to everyone in the world. I'm also worried that I'll cause my wonderful administrators more stress than they deserve, having to enroll subsititutes to cover my classes so early.

"If the pains stay low, just ignore them. A shower or a bath might help. When the baby drops, this can happen--sometimes the pains might last two hours or 24, and then they'll stop completely for a few weeks, and then labor will start."

"That would be much more ideal," I said.

"You could go into labor, though," she said.

Why don't the midwives ever seem to laugh at my jokes?

"You just never know. So try to get some sleep. If the pain intesifies, go the hospital--they'll check your cervix and if anything is going on, they'll call me."

I hang up and feel better. There are systems in place for women who go into labor. But they are easy to forget about when you feel like you're having your period but realize right away that that isn't what's happening at all.

These menstrual cramps are the most confounding. For the last 20 years, these low, dull aches in my lower back and belly have meant that I'm having my period--that I'm clearly and inarguably not having a baby. They have brought me relief at this fact many times--but even more often they have brought me discomfort, the need for an Advil, the need for a heating pad. What are they doing here now? Who designated menstrual cramps as an indication of pre-labor or labor? Poor planning, I say. Poor, poor planning.

But I suppose more often than discomfort, menstrual cramps have also brought me a deep sense of knowledge: so many of my involuntary physical rituals and so many of my feelings about and responses to them are reproductive in nature--and invisible, and vague, and mysterious. My body is such a distant thing. The Pokie fosters awareness of this in a way that I had never envisioned.

It's now 3:58 a.m., and I am going to attempt to go back to bed. The cramps have pretty much subsided except for a dull, dull ache; I'm still feeling a little sick and I'm still worried about everything. However, before I got out of bed to eat some yogurt and type this I did have a very important realization that my strange impermeable body has brought me--nothing is more important than me and my baby. Not my students, not the existence of a bassinet. There she goes, again, moving through a path I feel every single minute but will never see. Getting ready to head out.

Big and Breathless

2005-10-03T14:59:00.000-07:00

I'm recovering from a chest cold--a viral thing, so mercifully I don't need antibiotics--so I am hulking around my dusty house (I've gained 31 lbs now), breasts secured by a sports bra (the only kind I can now wear comfortably), attempting to breathe for myself and the Pokie. I just came from the allergist, where I dropped in sans appointment to ask them for a breathing test to make sure I'm getting enough oxygen. And I am. In fact, the doctor said, my lung capacity for being only a month away from delivery was above average.

"Thanks for seeing me since I just dropped in," I said. "I know this is unorthodox, but I was concerned about the oxygen issue."

"No problem," he said. My allergist is a booming sort of man, red-faced and heavy, who speaks loudly and seems to enjoy exuding cynicism. "We're concerned about you and that baby you're carrying there." Then he called in a perscription for a more powerful inhaler, he and his nurse wished me well, and I left.

Can I just say that perhaps not every male doctor is a pig idiot after all? I was so touched by their willingness to see me that I thought I might bawl. I suppose this kind of reaction is hormonal--but it's not every day that the medical community gives a fuck about the needs or concerns of a big pregnant woman.

The husband certainly gives a fuck--much, much more than a fuck, in fact--but it has become more apparent to me that because he is not a woman his capacity to understand and sometimes sympathize with these MASSIVE and SHOCKING changes to my body is limited. The constant pain in my ribs (sharp aches on the right behind my breast), monstrous hemorroids, breathlessness, inability to sleep well, and the inconsistent yet significant pressure of Pokie's slightly large head on my bladder (which now gives me bladder spasms several times a week and makes me urinate more often than I ever could have envisioned)--all these things that unfortunately seem to overshadow their cause: a baby soon to be here--do not seem to make the husband halt everything and suck on my toes, or offer me massages every hour, or simply grab me every second to inform me of how brave and strong and resilient I am. I suppose we are all limited by what we can experience and what we can potentially experience.

He certainly has his moments--just yesterday, as he was watching the Pokie move beneath my skin, create her ususal softballs around my belly button and under my right breast, he looked up at me and said, "How do you... live?" I said I didn't know.

But this morning, I mentioned that I was a little concerned about the baby getting enough oxygen.

"The baby's fine," he said, heading to the shower. "You're breathing, aren't you?"

"Yes," I said. "But my chest keeps getting tight."

"Don't worry about it," he said. "Pokie's fine."

He's been using the word "fine" a lot lately. On a daily basis, in fact. My money concerns--such as how the HELL are we going to afford a kid? Don't we need to up our life insurance in case something happens to one of us? "It'll all be fine," he says.

All four of our pets, who I would if warranted probably throw myself in front of a moving car to save, will be so neglected for awhile. My heart breaks just thinking about it. "They'll be fine," he says.

I worry about nursing since most women who try to nurse give it up after a few months, and I had to miss a nursing class because of my cold. "You'll do fine," he says. And what about my hemorrhoids--what if they're WORSE after labor (as they probably will be). "You'll be fine," he says. We don't know shit about babies, I might say. What do we DO with the thing? "It'll be fine," he says. "It'll all be just fine."

Fine is a nice word. It's an easy word. It's an innocuous word. It's trying my patience in the same way that I would imagine my concerns--constant, overwhelming, sometimes serious and sometimes superfluous--are trying the husband's patience. The difference is that I am allowed to be as serious or superfluous as I am at any given moment because I am pregnant. I suppose he knows this. Who doesn't except nearly everybody?

Last night, as I was attempting to fall asleep, I said, "You know another reason why I'm having trouble sleeping?"

He sighed. I like talking after we turn out the lights. The husband does not, but he does lately because I'm pregnant, god dammit. "Why?"

"Because I'm really excited that the baby's coming," I said. He reached over and rubbed my shoulder. I hacked up a snot ball or two and finally fell asleep.

Vanity

2005-09-23T14:10:00.000-07:00

I have gained six pounds in two weeks and have now put on 31 pounds since I got pregnant. I am unable, pretty much, to bend over or to lift basically anything that's heavy. My face is growing wider by the day, I have a giant zit on my nose, and of the bras I just bought a few weeks ago, only one fits without pain or discomfort.

I am worried and preoccupied with all these things, and not in an I-am-making-life! kind of way. I feel very large and wide and hungry and not at all like moving around or exercising--my activity level has dropped as well--so I'm wondering after delivery how and when the weight will come off, if the amount of eating I seem to engage in now will resume to levels near moderation again or if I'll stay hungry and fat. I'm worried about it and even the Pokie's adorable little elbow rubs doesn't put the worry in its place.

My growing face is especially bothersome to me because it's always been my am-I-fat-or-not compass; it's always been where evidence of weight gain, extensive vomiting, and laxative abuse (yep, did that briefly in high school, too--ick) has shown itself most profoundly.

So it's very strange for me to see my cheeks widen like this and not feel somewhat disgusted. I don't want to feel disgusted, but I do anyway, and the size of my face is a reminder of something unpleasant rather than something to celebrate. If you haven't noticed, I do for whatever reason have this tendency to adhere myself to my past. This face thing is clearly part of this tendency.

But what's also going on here is vanity. Pregnancy has made me keenly and newly aware of my vanity--it's so strong that there isn't much out there that can really compete with it. A few things make me forget about myself temporarily: a good movie; a great book; the suffering of others; the suffering of my family, friends, pets, and animals in distress I see on TV; the spirit and intelligence of my students; the contentedness of my orange cat when I scratch his head and he rolls over and nudges my knuckle. It seems truly unforutunate, then, that pregnancy does not make me forget about myself and my appearance to such a degree.

But how could it? Should I expect it to? The Pokie is as much a part of me as she is separate from me, so is it perhaps unrealistic for me to think that carrying another life in my body is something that could make me cast vanity aside, but for fuck's sake--you'd think that the well-socialized woman could be put into her place--or at least well-countered--by the awsome and mysterious concept of making life. Ha! Not here. Not in this culture. Not in this woman. And I suppose a lot of things about this losing battle: that it's ok to some extent to worry about how I look; that if moral and ethical standards do exist, then Prozac makes this more ok than it should be; that awareness isn't always enough to counter social forces that shape us--dare I say mostly women here?--as we grow up; that dammit, there should be more very large pregnant women visible in the medai, their zits, flooded ankles, and puffy eyelids squarely facing the camera; and that pregnancy, for me, has resulted already in a whole lot more than a child.

Are You Kidding?

2005-09-15T09:32:00.000-07:00

According to Pregnancy Weekly, an e-newsletter I endure since I threw away What to Expect and would like some regular information source on Pokie's growth and other informtaion, here are the "absolute must haves" for a baby's first aid kit:

Infant/child thermometer (digital, ear or rectal)
Children and infants non-aspirin liquid pain reliever (Children's Tylenol or Advil), as recommended by your pediatrician
Calamine lotion or hydrocortisone cream for insect bites and rashes
Rubbing alcohol to clean thermometers, tweezers, and scissors
Petroleum jelly to lubricate rectal thermometers
Hydrogen peroxide to clean cuts and scrapes
Antibacterial cream (Neosporin) for cuts and for scrapes
Tweezers for splinters and ticks; you can buy long very-pointy tweezers made specifically for removing splinters
A pair of sharp scissors
Child safe insect repellent
Children's strength liquid decongestant
Nasal aspirator bulb (not the long, pointy ear syringe)
An assortment of band-aids in various sizes and shapes (cartoon characters can really help take the sting out of a boo-boo)
Gauze rolls (1/2 to 2 inches wide)
Gauze pads (2x2 and 4x4 inches)
Adhesive tape
Sterilized cotton balls
Cotton tipped swabs
Mild liquid soap
An oral syringe or calibrated cup or spoon for administering medicines
A package of tongue depressors to check sore throats
A heating pad
A hot water bottle and ice pack
A small flashlight to check ears, nose, throat, and eyes
First-Aid manual: Pick one that's easy to read with step by step instructions and gives advice for handling a wide range of emergencies
Syrup of Ipecac and Activated Charcoal: Keep each of these on hand in case of accidental poisoning, but do not use either one without first calling the local poison control center or your baby's pediatrician.

I am supposed to carry one of these kits in my purse, diaper bag, and car.

My only question is Are You Fucking Kidding Me? What, are we about to be bombed or something? I can certainly see carrying some of this (like 3-4 items or so) in my car and in my purse--sure--but come on! I'm supposed to carry Ipecac and Charcoal and peroxide and alcohol with me everywhere, along with a heating pad and a flashlight? Who are these people? Are they crazy? Are they paranoid? Do they want me to become more paranoid than I already will be?

I can't help but wonder if the answer to that last question is yes. So much of everything having to do with the motherhood industry is fear-based that I don't know why I'm surprised--but I tell you, if the Pokie gets bitten by a flea, I think waiting to apply Calamine until we arrive home from the grocery store is likely something she'll be able to endure. For Christ's sake.

Being Parental

2005-09-11T19:03:00.000-07:00

About a week ago, my father called me. He was drunk.

This carries a significant amount of weight. Growing up, he was drunk all the time. I mean daily, all the time, and I mean very drunk--stumbling and slurring his way around our house. His alcoholism in many ways has placed itself or been placed at the forefront of my life; it was the major issue in the second custody hearing, and throughout that miserable ordeal my brother and I confronted him about it and I frequently echoed my mother's words and phrases --words and phrases that I really did not understand much at all, like, "Please get help, Daddy"; or, when he denied he was drunk or had been drunk daily for my entire life, "Daddy, you've got to tell the truth"; or, when I wanted to get attention from peers whom I wanted to be my friends, "My daddy is an alcoholic," "My daddy wasn't there for me," "I had to testify in court against my daddy today." And on, and on, and on.

The whole point of all these words and phrases, I think, was an attempt on my part to be close with my mother and my brother. I think this is what kids do--they parrot in order to get attention, to fit in. For my mother to think I really understood what I was saying was a mistake on her part.

Of course, my father's drinking was quite an enormous mistake on his part (or a disease--where do you draw the line between disease and mistake when you talk about addiction, anyway?). And whenever he calls me and he's drunk--once or twice a year, I think; all the other times we talk, he's fine--I get a little upset. I get to feeling a little or perhaps a lot sorry for him, and I don't know what to do.

I can't be a little girl again and tell him to go get help, because we're past that point now. He's in his 60s. He will do as he chooses. And if I do confront him, he will deny it and it will be extremely uncomfortable for both of us--especially me, who is on the other end of the telephone experiencing something like a non-LSD flashback of his stumbling, incoherent, absent self, of all these weird times where he was drunk and I was child and I just didn't get it, didn't understand. So what do I do? Nothing, really. I talk to him for a short while and make up an excuse to get off the phone, and I feel slightly guilty for even the latter, seeing as how I've been drunk a zillion times in my life and wanting to get off the phone with him feels rather hypocritical.

But what's really shocking, I suppose, is how thoughtless it is for him to call me drunk. Even if he doesn't think he's an alcoholic (I think he's past this now; I think he drinks anyway, consciously gives in or something), the fact that he would call me drunk considering all our family has been through as a result of his drunkenness is hugely self-centered. It is not an act of a selfless parent who thinks about how his actions affect his children. I think this is probably more troubling to me than the disease I wonder if he will ever recover from--my father, as a good friend of mine once put it--simply isn't parental. He never has been, really, not overall. He's been there for me in many ways--I don't mean to rip on him unconditionally. But in some very key emotional and psychological ways having to do with booze or personality, he has never been there for me. In my life, there is indeed this ephemeral and intangible void where a father should be.

So is this his fault? For being who he is? Can he help it? At this point, I don't think he can. I don't think parents can help being who they are. They have to participate in parenting, of course--and if shortcomings inherent in their psyches override their ability to participate, we all have a problem. My father I suppose has never been able to see this, ironically because of who he is. He is not capable of seeing the ramifications of his actions, just like my mother is not capable of seeing certain things about herself, and just like I am incapable of seeing certain things about myself. My father is human to the extreme. Maybe people who make such mistakes, who behave even more self-centeredly, are human to the extreme. Maybe this is one way to look at it that can generate some compassion, or something, or foster a sense of forgiveness.

But damn. It hurts. When parents fuck up on an emotional level, it hurts their children in a sometimes irreperable way. If they aren't who we wish they were, we take it personally. Even a child at age 35, the one who's writing this, cannot completely separate who her parents are from how they parent. I suppose this is the nature of being somebody's child. I'm sure there is something beautiful and okay about this. At the moment, though, I can't really articulate what that might be.

Hurricane

2005-09-09T21:26:00.000-07:00

(Barbara Ann Part III is coming soon.)

I am now watching the Gulf Coast Concert--just heard a plea for money from Jennifer Anniston, a gospel song from Alicia Keys, and an old favorite of mine--"Born on the Bayou," written I believe by John Fogerty, but sung on TV at the moment by Foo Fighters. Now I'm watching Mariah Carey, who I think has a good voice but is easily the trashiest and most repulsive superstar I know.

Overall, it's a pretty good concert show. I think celebrities are full of shit, of course--but they are doing something, and I assume they're all giving a shitload of money to the Red Cross or what have you. What seems blatantly self-serving, though, is the way they're answering phones, as if they're graciously giving their time or something, giving a little nod to their public, and we're supposed to think they're not only stars but also great people.

Pul-eeze. They might be giving their money and time, but those glamour gods on the damn telephones remind me of Oprah goddamn Winfrey, who spends so much of her time flattering celebrities by doing these shows on their good deeds (her hurricane coverage was no exception). I find it sickening.

But this hurricane is a fucking gut-wrenching catastrophe--and I frankly hold all those stupid Bush-voting motherfuckers responsible for the help and aid that all those Gulf Coast residents were denied. What--you guys thought HE was a leader? What on EARTH ever gave you that idea? Do you read? Do you pay attention to his speaking? Are you intellectually and psychologically stunted? What's your deal?

The husband and I talked about his going down to the Gulf Coast for 9 days, the minimum I believe the Red Cross requires after you go through some training. If I weren't two months from giving birth, I think we both would go over Thanksgiving or winter break or something. But the pregnancy complicates things, of course. And in some ways this troubles me. In some ways I think the fact that we're not going--especially not him; at this size and with this energy level, I wouldn't really be that much help--is sort of selfish.

So if he went, he'd be gone probably 2 weeks or more. Yeah, I'm preg--but chances are the baby will go to term; I really doubt that I'd give birth while he was away. Yeah, something could happen to him--but I the chances of that even less than chances of my going into labor without him. Yeah, I need support because I'm going to have a baby. But what--I can't be without him for two fucking weeks while he goes to the site of a natural disaster and helps out who knows how many people for a reason that--sorry, everyone--is larger in scope than me and my pregnancy? Is this disaster larger than my pregnancy, which feels so often like not exactly the most important thing in the world, but the only thing in the world?

In truth--the truth I can detect, anyway--there are all kinds of things in this world larger in scope and greater in importance than me and my baby. Phrasing it like that: me and my baby instead of me and my pregnancy gives me some chills, makes me wonder if I'm missing some crucial cliche here, such as, nothing is more important than my child, than taking care of my child, or something. But yikes. That's not really true, is it? There are things that are a helluva lot more important than me and my life--enormous moral and physical loss, abuse of power, exploitation of the vulnerable, love for fellow humans. And my pregnancy and my life are inseperable, although pregnancy and birth and all that goes with it are very much out of my control. Pregnancy is internal because it's in my body and external because it has nothing to do with me. I am--women are--in many ways vessels. This observation isn't meant to be demeaning or dismal or negative. It's quite simply a fact.

So maybe this is why I feel a little funny about not physically doing anything for these victims of both circumstance and a government at every level who tells them to eat shit. Right now, I am honestly this vessel that I don't really understand. I think I feel this keenly, this eerie distance from myself--my body and mind--since I'm carrying a life around, and this distance is so apparent to me that I wonder why the husband can't just take off for awhile if it's for a good reason.

But of course he's not going anywhere right now. It's not as if he asked me and I said no--I think we both know it's something we just can't do at the moment. Got a baby on the way, you know. This appears to be quite a trump card. It doesn't matter what I think is more important, and it doesn't matter what he thinks is more important. Pokie is coming, and it's clear that she needs us already. But is this fair, when so much is going on in the world that needs us, too? Is this what parenting means? Is this what you're supposed to do?

Barbara Ann Part II

2005-09-04T10:33:00.000-07:00

I'm getting another ultrasound; the doctor is moving the little gelled microphone around and around on my lower belly. The Pokie is on the television screen, looking like her forehead is extremely large. I see the curve of her little nose and barely a pucker where her mouth allegedly is. She's really cute.

I'm in my seventh month, growing appropriately, feeling all right except for all those things you never hear about in pregnancy--pressure on the upper ribs that feels like someone needs to pop some bones into place, hemerrhoids, a little diarhea, sharp leg cramps, sore hips, eyes droopy from waking up 4 or five times a night, and breathlessness arriving at all times of day as a result of climbing a flight of stairs or getting out of a car. P0lishing my toenails and even trimming them has proven impossible--my feet are starting to look like a homeless punker's--and the urination urgency is simply absurd. It's ridiculous. About 40,000 times a day, I feel this tremendous pressure just above my pubic bone, like a dam about to give way, and when I get to the toilet, I pee a mere trickle. I am not only a urinating machine, I am a cervical fluid machine (this sounds so much more palatable than Discharge Machine), and I walk around feeling soupy a lot of the time.

The most interesting thing about all these pains in my ass, however, is that through it all, the Pokie is moving around. I'm uncomfortable as hell=baby is coming. So while I mind the discomfort, I do know physcially that there is a payoff, a reason for it, unlike the first trimester, where I was tired and sick and wondering what the fuck was the point of all this, unlike the second trimester, where anxiety stunted much of the joy I had. Now I feel sort of ok with everything. I can't wait to see the Pokie, to feel her emerge, to play with the little feet she presses around my navel.

She's taking up quite a bit of room on the TV screen; every time the doctor moves the microphone to her femur for a measurement or to her crotch region, the husband and I look away. We want to be surprised even though we know it's a girl.

"Everything looks fine," the doctor says. She puts the microphone back in its holder next to the keyboard. "The baby is exactly the size it's supposed to be at this stage."

"Great," says the husband.

"The fluid in the renal pelvis is on the higher level of normal, although I don't think that should pose any kind of problem," she goes on, pushing her glasses up her nose. "But the placenta is still relatively low."

I had a low placenta in the last ultrasound; sounds like I still do. Pokie kicks. Damn she's cute.

"So we're going to need to check it again," says the doctor, "in a few weeks."

"Okay," I say. Kick, kick. Cute, cute. Little elbow, maybe, a little butt. Or maybe it's her gigantic forehead pushing into my right side.

"And if you do have to go to the hospital for bleeding," she says, "you'll need to tell them what's going on."

"Okey doke," I say, ready to get up and urinate, for god's sake. The doctor leaves the room and the husband stands up and I wipe gel off my midriff. I make another appointment on our way out--five weeks away; I'll be at the end of my 8th month--and the husband and I blissfully go home.

About two hours later, I'm wondering what the hell is going on. Bleeding? Why didn't I ask about bleeding? Why would I bleed? Do women just sort of, you know, bleed in their third trimester? And where was my placenta, anyway? How far away from my cervix? What exactly was all this about? And why didn't I ask the damn doctor when I was in there? I thought I didn't ask questions and assert myself with male doctors. With female doctors, I should have been more savvy.

I do some online reading about low-lying placentas and learn that low-lying placentas are extremely common.

Cool.

However, by the third trimester--by where I am now--almost all placentas have moved up toward the top of the womb. Only about 5% of women in my month/week still have a placenta that's questionably close to the cervix.

Not cool at all. What the doctor meant by bleeding is that bleeding to various degrees--a lot, a little--is the most common symptom of placenta praevia. So she obviously thought the placenta was close enough to the cervix to warrant such a warning. She might have wanted to explain herself. I might have wanted to ask about it.

What this means is the following: I am at a greater risk now of placenta praevia, where the placenta margnially, partially, or completely covers the opening to the cervix. If the placenta doesn't get itself out of the goddamn way in the next few weeks, I will have to have a C section. I do not want to have a C section. I do not want to have a C section AT ALL. I want the Pokie to come through my vagina like she's supposed to, with ample warning from contractions, and tear the tissues she's supposed to tear. I am extremely disappointed that a C section is a distinct possiblility.

I am, however, more fearful than disappointed. If I have to have a C section, I do, and that's that. But there's always been this little surge of fear in my gut, one of those stultifying what-ifs, that I might die during childbirth. Only 40 women per year in the United States die in childbirth, so I know this fear is irrational and ridiculous, but as I stare at diagrams of placenta praevia and recall passages from birthing experiences I've been reading over the last six months, the guardrails give and I am zooming into possiblities of death, of never seeing my child grow up, never seeing the husband again, leaving this earth after making my life into far less than I wanted. I start to cry. I should have known it would turn out this way. Me with a baby? Ha. Far too good to be true. Why I'm not as concerned about the baby I don't know, but I start worrying about that, too, and feeling like the truly self-centered woman I've always been.

"The report," says the midwife, when we talk on the phone the next day, "says that the placenta is still low and could possibly indicate a marginal placenta praevia."

"How come it hasn't moved?" I ask.

The midwife sighs. "We don't know. But there is not one thing you can do about it. You have no control over this."

I sigh.

"We're all aware of this," she says, "and we're all watching it, keeping track of it. We'll just have to wait and see."

"Should I limit my activity?" I ask. "I take walks and I always take the stairs at work."

"You've had no bleeding at all so far. Correct?"

"Correct."

"Then no. What the docs tell us is that if you haven't had any bleeding, you should go about your business as always."

"This might mean a C-section, huh?"

"Yes. The baby comes first."

"Oh of course," I say. God forbid these women should think I'm worried about something as trivial as a Caesarean when my baby's health is in question. "To be honest, though, I'm more worried about something terrible happening. Hemoraging or whatever."

"The first bleed is usually a warning bleed," says the midwife. "If it happens, it will be small, and you'll just head to the hospital. Say you're climbing your stairs and you start to bleed. You'll just turn around, get in your car, and go to the hospital."

"Okay," I say.

"We're all aware of this," she says again. "We're all paying attention. We're all watching it."

Barbara Ann Part I

2005-08-28T09:59:00.000-07:00

My grandmother's name was Idessa and she was a South Carolina debutante who migrated to a Florida retirement community for the last 30 years of her life, an upper-middle-class social not-quite-ite with dozens and dozens of pairs of shoes, purses that always hung elegantly over her elbow, and organdy hats that she sometimes wore to lunch with her friends at the country club she and my grandfather belonged to. (Dessa was a wicked golf player. She used to let my brother and I take the golf cart out and drive it around the neighborhood while she sat in the backseat and smoked her Marlboro 100s and warned us about alligators in the golf course ponds.) She had 3 children: my mother and Aunt Tricia and Uncle Jim. My mother was the oldest, my aunt was the middle, and my uncle was the baby.

She was superficially religious--went to church primarily I believe to show her social circle that she and her family were respectful and worshipful and well-groomed. I heard her swear one time and one time only, when she had the Buick filled up at a Chevron and was attempting to pull out onto a busy four-lane thoroughfare. The traffic was thick and we were waiting, waiting, waiting for a free spot, and she was getting impatient because we were supposed to be following Tricia and my brother, and my aunt tended to drive like a bat out of hell in order to spite Dessa and leave her behind at any opportunity that presented itself.

"Dammit!" Dessa said, watching my aunt disappear through a distant stoplight. My mouth fell open and I gasped; I was about 7 years old and didn't know that any word of that kind could come from Dessa's mouth. Then she floored the gas and sped out onto the highway, swerving and causing several cars to honk at her. I grabbed the armrest on the inside of the passenger door and held on.

"Did you see that?" Dessa said. "Making me lose my religion!" She shook her head. Her voice was shaking. "Oh! I swear." She glanced at me, took a quick, loud, breath, lit a cigarette, exhaled, and then she popped an enormous little-girl grin and started to laugh--silently, like she always did, her shoulders moving with each chuckle but not a sound coming from her mouth. I laughed too. I supposed it was ok for even Dessa B. to swear sometimes.

A few years later, when I was about 10, my brother and I were visiting them again for a week or so during the summer. He and my aunt were off somewhere, to the mall or a movie or out with the golf cart, and Dessa and I were sitting in the Florida room--her regional and cultural term for a TV room or a den or a sitting room that was lined with shiny-clean windows courtesy of a black maid who came every week.

"I'd like to share something with you," Dessa B. said, and I stopped playing solitaire and she turned down The Price is Right. She had never started a conversation with me in such a way before. I sat up straight.

"Out where your Granddaddy is buried," she said, "is another grave. A child I lost. Her name was Barbara Ann." I have this memory that she showed me something--a photograph, or something in some kind of an album, but the memory is too fuzzy for me to confirm. I think we might have been looking at something together, but I don't remember what it could have been.

"Oh," I said. "She's buried out there?"

"She lived for a few days and then she died."

"When did you have her?"

"A long time ago," she said.

"Was it sad?"

She smiled weakly. "Yes it was," she said. "It was very, very sad."

"I'm sorry, Grandmother," I said. I got up from behind the card table where she played bridge with her friends once a week and walked over to her. I wasn't sure what to do. I felt like I didn't know what I was doing, and Dessa B. was a testy and temperamental woman, but I stood beside her where she sat on one of the cushioned Florida room chairs and leaned down and gave her a hug around her shoulders.

"Thank you," she said, hugging me back. She didn't cry or anything. I had never seen Dessa B. cry and I never would. "Thank you, Anna."

I didn't think about Barbara Ann much at all after that. I had no details about what it meant to lose a child--in the womb or outside it--and while I certainly remembered the conversation from isolated time to isolated time, I had no means to comprehend it, no path of access to it, until I was about to turn 27. I had attended a cousin's wedding in Savannah and after the wedding, which Dessa and Tricia had both attended, I spent a few days with them. Dessa B. had by then developed infarct dementia and her memories of everything and everyone went on and off, in and out, and she tended to say inappropriate and mean things at times--probably because she was disoriented and Tricia, her caregiver, wouldn't let her smoke anymore. She was in a wheelchair but she seemed to remember me, smiling big and sweet and saying "Yey-yas," when Tricia introduced me and reminded her who I was.

Tricia wanted to show me a bit of Columbia, South Carlolina, where my family has had its roots firmly in the earth for a century or so. She showed me old houses where they lived, my grandfather's tire store, and at the hotel that night, on my 27th birthday, I watched Tricia care for Dessa--bathe her, help her eat and dress, help her in and out of her wheelchair, that kind of thing. I found the whole experience depressing as hell--I was still quite immature and I didn't understand much about much, and I didn't understand anything about selflessness or loyalty to your family. But thank god--I didn't let on to Tricia that this wasn't how I wanted to spend my 27th birthday. I went along, listened, and helped out as much as I was able, like the obedient grandchild I had been years and years before.

The next morning we headed to the cemetery. I don't remember the name of it or where it was or even what my grandfather's grave looked like--but I do remember Barbara Ann's grave, or at least the letters of her name engraved in a stone slab in the ground. "Barbara Ann" it said. Simple as that. I remember very little else, but I assume Dessa B. was sitting behind me, in her wheelchair, either remembering her or not, either remembering her husband or not, maybe catching a familiar smell in the warm spring breeze, maybe wondering who her child might have been.

Maternity Wear

2005-08-23T15:35:00.000-07:00

I've been so consistently complaining about the motherhood industry and getting angry about various products and product-pushing techniques that I've become rather desensitized to it all. I'm not quite as angry as I was before--although looking online at mobiles today made me mad (why couldn't I find a cute, scintillating little mobile that wasn't stupid or branded?)--but I feel that I must discuss the meaning of some of the images of pregnant women and labels on my maternity clothes.

First of all, as a good friend of mine pointed out, I NEVER see pictures in any magazines, birthing or mothering or otherwise, or on television, or anywhere at all, of women who are way into their 3rd trimester--women who are bloated and very large. The only time I've seen an image of a woman in this stage was on a Free Speech TV special about doulas, and the mother was in labor, walking around in a hospital gown, looking extremely tentish. She was enormous.

Unfortunately, I found her rather alarming. We get that big? I thought. Jesus Christ.

The fact that this was surprising and unpleasant to me is sad, because it means that despite the fact that I've been told, in many ways by many people, how big I will likely become and how big pregnant women can get, I have never internalized this knowledge--or that BIGNESS is a natural part of the process--because I have really never seen it anywhere with regularity. I haven't seen it represented accurately. (The occasional sighting of a hugely pregnant woman in the grocery store is not often enough for me to comprehend the concept of largeness--that's probably why so many of us find it shocking when we do see a huge woman like that.) You can certainly see pregnant women everywhere in the media, but they are not very big. They're overwhelmingly women who are in their late first or early second trimesters. They are apparently more pleasant to look at.

And anyway--who wants to see a huge, cumbersome woman with thick ankles just walking around, living her life, as if she's a natural phenomenon?

Which brings me to my next point. I bought some maternity clothes late in my first trimester/early in my second, and the labels were clearly printed with the following words: "Expands naturally with your pregnancy," or "for wear throughout your pregnancy," or, "Buy this item in the same size you would if you weren't pregnant--you can wear this throughout your pregnancy." I have found this to be total bullshit. While some of the shirts I bought still fit (some do not), none of the pants I bought fit at all anymore. They are totally unwearable--and my weight thus far has stayed within the "average" gain range.

What this means is the following: According to the makers of those clothes, I am supposed to gain weight in a very specific way: only in my stomach, like the wispy mannequins in the maternity store windows with their little bulbous second-trimester bellies and anorexic arms. I should not have an expanded ass (I do), or wider hips (I do), and I should not have larger thighs (I do; they chafe a bit, in fact).

And so we come across two more pop-culture concepts with significant internalizing potential: being big is unappealing; and if you can't fit into your maternity clothes, you've gained weight the wrong way. In places where women aren't supposed to be fat.

So what's your problem?--you might ask. You really expect the fashion industry to make an exception to their usual absurd standards for pregnant women, just because they're pregnant?

Yes. I do. And I wish they would. I wish a lot of things would change.

My mother said I should take the clothes back. "I can't," I said. "They've been washed too many times." But I did consider taking them back the other day.

"I'm so sorry," said the clerk, shaking her head, looking at the labels. "This must have been demoralizing for you." She was huge, pregnant, her fingers thick and her forehead damp with sweat. Her hair looked dull, like she'd washed it too many times. She looked like she'd just finished a long, challenging workout. "Why don't you take your pick of whatever you'd like to wear--we have a new market for pregnant women. We give them whatever clothes they want." She smiled and patted her belly. "We're very welcome here."

"I've never heard of such a thing," I said.

She nodded. "We're hauling in comfortable clothes by the truckload for everyone." She patted her belly again. Her hair was pulled back tightly. "Do you need some prenatal care? Some advice? Vitamins? Are you afraid? Are you without a support system? Finding yourself ambivalent at times? Do your thoughts sometimes frighten you?" She came out from behind the counter and took my hand. "In this store, pregnancy is real and important. We don't idealize it or make things up about it or make you feel bad about yourself. We'll do whatever it takes to take care of you and your baby." She pointed to the back of the store, where a line of all kinds of pregnant women was forming at the entrance to a room I could not see.

The clerk burped loudly and covered her mouth.

"Excuse me," she said. Then she farted. It sounded exactly like a whoopie cushion, like a deflating balloon, like a child making noises in her armpit. "Excuse me again! I no longer feel the need to supress anything anymore. It's just what we do." She pulled a roomy, soft dress made of silk with a scoop neck off a clothing rack and handed it to me. "This one makes you look like you are and it's soft on your skin," she said.

"Okay."

She led me back to the room--just inside the door were people waiting, smiling, their arms full. "Just put yourself in our hands," she said. "We'll give you whatever it is you need."

Fifth Grade

2005-08-18T18:52:00.000-07:00

I cannot think about the Pokie without thinking about fifth grade (and sixth--that will be the next blog). This was a terrible and important year in my childhood because it was so fucking absurd--and it's mysterious to me even now. In fifth grade, I started behaving in ways that characterized me and established my perspective on the world--one that was grounded in self-centeredness, self-consciousness, and insecurity.

My brother and I had just moved in with my mother from our father's house after the infamous custody hearing. I was numb to its effects, of course--but I'm sure the emotional fallout contributed to the way I started thinking. (My brother, being older, probably wasn't as numb to its effects, but I'm not going to tell his story.) After the first month of fifth grade passed, I started wanting very much to be pretty and popular. So I made a direct and conscious effort to achieve this by following the popular girls around the playground, sitting at their lunch table, and asking if I could read the notes they passed in class. I assumed all of this was fine with them. Of course it was not. I blocked out their reactions because I wanted to be their friend so much, and I thought that this desire, great as it was, would outweigh their annoyance with me. I thought they would take pity on me and see that I was a good, loyal person.

They didn't. Who the hell would, anyway--especially someone who's 11 years old? No one likes to be followed around by somebody you don't even know, especially girls who are general bitches anyway. However--I cannot be too quick to judge them, even though they were bitches, because when given the opportunity later on in my attempts to become popular, I was at times a general bitch as well. My desire for popularity--to be at the top of that clique-based heirarchy in public, middle-class schools that sets a social standard since so many kids allow it to--made a total hypocrite of me and of many, many other girls I observed. It robbed me and them not only of self-confidence--which is standard fare for adolescent girls and unremarkable--but also of integrity. A blow to the self-confidence of adolescent girls is not a big deal, and somewhat uninteresting. But an undeveloped sense of integrity is a very big deal, and worthy of considerable thought and efforts to understand.

For me to demean myself as I did, to "get in" with these girls, still troubles me. I wanted to gain their friendship, even after they were cruel to me, after they ostracized me, pushed me back and forth between them in the schoolyard, called me a puppy dog, etc. And now I think about it and I don't feel ashamed, exactly, or angry at them in particular--but I very much want to know why I didn't get angry at them at the time, why I kept wanting to be their friend, and what the hell their appeal was. They were not all pretty girls, they were not all wealthy girls by any stretch. I still don't really comprehend what it was I was worshipping. But in worshipping them, or whatever it was I was doing, I effaced myself, eroded my sense of self and of course my integrity, right along with my desire for their affections. And I'm foggy on what it was that fostered this sad, sad sacrifice of my character. It, whatever it was, is extremely abstract in my mind, very complicated, and raises a lot more questions than it provides answers.

I was such a little girl! I had no defense, no counter, to my intense desires for popularity. For whatever reason, I simply did not possess the means or the skills to keep myself from acting like a pathetic person. Damn. I certainly hope the Pokie can develop the skills and the sense of self that I did not have. I will try to instill this in her. But I also hope that she can forgive herself for what she lacks, a state of mind that has never come easily for me. Because how can we develop integrity at all if we don't cut ourselves some slack?

Learning How You Think Can Be Unpleasant

2005-08-14T10:16:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, the husband told me how he wants to avoid typical gender-role parenting. He started out the conversation with an example of some acquaintances of ours who operate in fairly traditional gender roles.

"I think that if we adopt roles like that, we'll be limiting who we are," he said. "I just don't want things that way. It's important to me that you feel that I do just as much as you."

I wasn't surprised that he had said such a thing or that he feels the way he does. He is cool and enlightened. I became very surprised, however, at my response--of course I agreed, but then I pointed out that the traditional couples he mentioned might fall into those roles because of their jobs--the husbands work full time and the wives work part time. So, I said, the roles they've fallen into sort of make sense.

Fortunately, I realized in fewer than three minutes that the broad concepts of my view here were totally wrong.

Since when does a part time job + raising child or two = less work than a full time job? Why is someone who has a full time career (a male, in particular) expected to do less in the area of child rearing? What kind of idiot besides myself thinks this way? Being responsible for most of the child care responsibilities, especially providing the emotional and psychological support any child requires, in addition to having a part-time job, is a shitload of work. It's every bit as taxing as any full time career and would be whether you were employed outside the home or not--if you take child-rearing seriously.

The key words here are of course "if you take child-rearing seriously." Breadwinning is regarded, generally, by me apparently, as the most important role in any family. Go figure!!! With my background? My I Was Neglected As A Child narrative and feminist beliefs? What the hell?

On how or why I came to believe this--and this belief is obviously more ingrained than I realized--I have some theories, most of them trite and boring and recycled: since child-rearing is regarded as women's work, it's of course thought of as unimportant; since money is what fuels the culture I live in, breadwinning in my mind (material) becomes more important than emotional well-being (spiritual). Blah, blah, blah. Both are accurate, but totally blah and certainly uninformative.

Then there is the matter of my own parents. My father excelled (in some ways) as a material provider but not as a spiritual one; my mother didn't excel as a material or a spiritual provider, although her efforts in the spiritual department were profound and genuine. Since my parents were divorced (that seems key here--they were not a team; they were distinct entities, so my expectations of each were very separate), I thought of my father as a constant source of material support and grew to not expect emotional support or what have you from him--except for some dramatic and nostalgic longings that therapy served mainly to highlight and draw out instead of make clear in a manner useful to my development as a person.

But from my mother, I expected not only spiritual support but material support. I have always EXPECTED more from her than I have from my father (hence my truly faulty logic when I responded to the husband yesterday). And that, perhaps, is where the bullshit resides: I expect more from mothers than I do from fathers. I think a lot of people do. I think such expectations are wrong. I think they are anti-community and certainly sexist and certainly don't illustrate anything about what's probably best for a child. I also think I'm damn glad I was lucky enough to articluate all this about how I think so that I don't waste a lot of time being uselessly hard on myself, as so many mothers do, as my own mother did. Makes me want to give her a big, wide hug.

Anna Avenue

2005-08-08T21:16:00.000-07:00

We went to the midwife today for my checkup (every four weeks). I had a list of questions this time--something I despise having because making a list makes me feel obsessed with myself and because What to Expect When You're Expecting advises women to bring a list of questions and concerns with them to their regular appointments. I threw that particular guidebook in the trash about a month ago because it was condescending as hell and too full of "When to Call the Doctor" sections, as if most pregnant women who began excessively spotting or seeing double or fainting or convulsing wouldn't think to do so.

The midwife was patient: No, a lump in the gum is not a pregnancy thing, so consult a dentist. The pain and pressure in your ribcage just below your breasts is probably normal, and you're 27 weeks--at the point where you'll start feeling that kind of discomfort--so try working on your posture. Diarrehea is one of several bodily reactions you can have to the iron in prenatal vitamins. You've had hemerroids before, right?--so these are nothing new; keep taking baths; you're used to them. Most first-time mothers do have their babies a bit on the late side, so your family should probably come a week or ten days after your due date. Skin can really change during pregnancy--that spot on your thigh might not be a wart--might just be extra skin bunching up.

Thank god that neurotic list was overwith. Now I can get my blood pressure taken and go.

"So, what kind of childbirth classes have you guys looked into?" she asked.

"We're signed up for one," I said. The husband described it and the midwife knew the nurse who was leading it and offered approval. Cool. Let's go.

"If you're doing hypnobirthing, that's probably all you'll need. But you should take the tour of the birthing center." She stood over me and showed me the next date they were offering tours. September 13. "You need to go to this one." She sat back down. "Have you guys gotten a pediatrician?"

A what? We'll need to take our child to a doctor?

"Uh... no," I said. The husband shook his head.

"You need to do that," she said. She handed us a sheet with a list of the ones in town. "Call now," she said, "and set up a time to meet with one. Talk to your friends; see who they recommend, too. If you like the one you meet with, you can confirm things. But don't make four appointments at once. Just one at a time."

Ok. Let's go.

"You realize," said the midwife, looking right at me. I swear the woman was reading my mind. "You'll start coming every two weeks now."

"I will?"

She nodded. "Yep," she said, smiling. "You're in the final stretches here. So we'll set up the next three appointments on your way out."

She checked my blood pressure, checked the Pokie's heartbeat, which was about 150 and sounded fine, told us where she thought her head was (right above my pubic bone--good--her back seems to be on my right side, where she tends to settle in).

The husband and I set up our next three appointments. He was grinning all the way out to the car. "It's getting more and more real," he said. "Damn, I'm excited."

"Yep," I said. You know, I don't even really have a doctor. Should I get one now that I'm going to have a child and she'll need one? Gotta take care of that. My rib hurts--feels like something's about to pop my right lung. There goes a ripple--Pokie's moving like a lizard. Gotta prepare for the birth and start reading the hypnobirthing stuff, even though I talked to a friend yesterday who got an epidural, loved it, and said she felt empowered by lessening the pain and that she did indeed experience every second of her daughter's birth, in her soul and in her vagina. So maybe I've been totally wrong about everything. Absolutely everything. And what the fuck do you do with a baby, anyhow? I've never changed a diaper in my life. And I'm so terrified--yes, really scared--of being tired all the time that I know I am truly a weak, silly woman. My fears of my own fragility are coming to fruition.

"I'm so excited," said the husband.

"Yep," I said. The Prozac could give the Pokie temporary jaundice or tremors or result in a low birth weight. And I'm drinking too much caffeine. Maybe that's why in the last ultrasound they found a little too much fluid in the renal pelvis. Maybe caffeine has a sort of diuretic effect on fetuses, too.

"Are you ok?" asked the husband, unlocking the remote control locks on our new Subaru. We got a bigger car because we worry about such things. Need room for Pokie and dogs, for god's sake.

"No," I said, getting in the passenger seat.

"What's wrong?"

"I'm just feeling a little overwhelmed." How will I have time to have a Pokie? There aren't enough hours in the day for me to both grade papers and worry and write do stupid shit like clean the windows and unload the dishwasher. And I'll have to take the Pokie to the doctor every other day, or something. And Pokie's room is currently full of stuff we don't have room to put anywhere else. God, our house has no storage space. Where will all that stuff go? My god--I'm worried about storage space?

"You know," said the husband, driving us out of the parking lot. "This is happening."

I stared at a smear of grime on the windsheild. Felt her heel in my rib. What if it's a boy? What will I do then? Hand it to the husband? I've no idea what to do with a boy. Talk to it, or what?

"You need to get at peace with this."

"I need to get at peace with this?" For fuck's sake. Grow a vagina and try this yourself.

"If you're fighting this, you need to let it go."

"What if I can't, in the next three months? Don't put pressure on me." Ha! I can assert myself. Just not to myself.

"I just want you to be happy about this."

"Well, don't tell me how I need to be feeling," I said. This is my path, after all. This is Anna Avenue over here. "Don't 'you-need' me like that."

"You're right," he said. "I'm sorry."

"No offense," I said. "I know this is sort of trite, but there's a lot going on that you can't possibly understand."

"It's not my body," he said.

"I know," I said.

"This is going to be great, though." He grabbed my hand and kissed it. Thank god for him. How people do this without partners or support networks I cannot imagine. "Really, it will."

Sharks

2005-08-07T07:42:00.000-07:00

This is rather cliche, but when I was growing up I remember a moment that might have marked the end of my innocence as a child.

I was in fourth grade and I had a boyfriend: Neal VanErsvelde. A boyfriend at my elementary school at that time meant that he asked me to "go with him," I said yes, and he held my hand at recess and kissed me on the cheek. He never called me on the telephone, I never went to his house, and he never went to mine.

I was actually somewhat indifferent to him. He was my first boyfriend and that made me excited and it made me feel good about myself--made me feel sort of pretty or something, I guess, even though I had never really been conscious of feeling pretty or ugly or anything in between. I was just sort of there all the time. (Looking back, I realize I was depressed. Not badly or seriously--but I don't think I really felt very much in general during this period. There were no mood swings or tantrums or fits of euphoria, where I ran around with my little-girl feet and smiled and laughed. My parents might remember things differently--maybe I was cheerier and more reactive than I remember--but I remember my early childhood years, with of course some exceptions, as being distinctly passive, quiet, and unmoved.) But I didn't dream of Neal or anything, and I didn't really care if he kissed me or not or whatever. This might have been because he was extremely short and chubby and not very cute. But he was charming. I remember the way he moved his hands and securely held mine in his, like a confident jock.

Two weeks passed. Then, when we were walking to the line the aides made us form before we could go back inside (those lines are damned important, you know, they teach children things about lines), he said he wanted to break up with me and handed me a note.

"How come?" I asked.

"Because you're a slob," he said. "Okay?" He patted my hand reassuringly and got into line and I stood there beside the jungle gym, attempting to comprehend.

That day when I was walking home from school, I read his note. It was one short, poorly spelled paragraph that said something again about my being a slob. I cried a little on the way home, but not because I cared. I really didn't. I cried--and I remember this clearly--because that's what girls were supposed to do when their boyfriends broke up with them. I remember fostering the tears in my eyes as I cut through the Guroff's backyard, and I remember hoping someone would see me and ask me what was wrong.

But what I remember even more clearly than anything else was the fact that he called me a slob. No one had ever called me that before, so I thought about it and attributed it to the fact that I wore the same clothes for days in a row (sometimes a whole week if I liked what I was wearing; I remember this lovely, flowered shirt that my grandma had sewed for me with flowing sleeves to the elbows), bathed only on Sunday nights, never washed my hands or face, and never really combed or brushed my hair. I might have even smelled. I have no idea.

This was the end of a very specific kind of innocence: I became aware not exactly of myself, but of my image. Of where I measured up in this regard. And slowly, over the next year, the awareness grew into a worry and then into a preoccupation and ultimately an obsession. (I'm not saying this process is universal. I'm saying this is what happened to me.) My ability to have fun had been compromised. That's a big part of a child's innocence.

This week, I saw this in a little boy at the writers' festival I mentioned in my last blog. The circumstances of our lost innocence were entirely different. He had behavior problems--was on medication for some kind of psychological disorder or something--and other kids wouldn't include him. He tried. He approached a group of boys and made a joke, or he approached one who was working at his desk and tried to read what he was reading over his shoulder. But he was weird, and temperamental, and annoying, and over the week, I swear, I saw him become more and more aware how annoying he was. Of his image. Of his role in a group.

What's universal here is of course the process by which we understand that we have an audience. Not just any audience, but an audience who will judge us. I became aware of that function when I was about 10; the boy I mentioned became aware (he probably already knew) of this at age 8. I guess the more we digress from standards of social behavior and appearance, the earlier we learn about our audience's capacity to judge.

There is certainly something good about gaining this awareness. If we want to grow up to be wise, judgement and rejection is something we need to experience. But no one gets wise by themselves. I didn't have the ability to understand that the judgement didn't have to be a big deal, that I could very well not let it bother me and go on about my business, so my parents should have talked to me about it, explained this to me, or showed this to me. (They also could been attentive enough to make me take a fucking bath.) But they didn't. I tried to make sense of it on my own, and since I was only 10, I obviously didn't do a very good job.

I don't think the boy I mentioned is doing a very good job of it, either, and I don't know enough about him to find fault with his parents. And he's got issues that will most likely give him more grief than I experienced, so he probably needs some more help. He's a good pool player, as I saw when we went to a big restaurant for lunch one day. He picked up a pool stick and showed a few other kids how to play. He was fine. He has something that I think can get him through, something I didn't really have--a skill. As I was watching him, I thought, I hope that boy takes lessons. I hope that boys' parents invest in a pool table. I hope that boy plays pool every day for the rest of his life. A pool shark. Maybe that's what he'll turn out to be.

Anna is Pregnant

2005-08-02T20:19:00.000-07:00

On Monday, I started my first day of teaching at this young writers' festival, a week-long, non-schoolish camp for kids ages 7-13. For five hours a day, I assist the teacher as she facilitates the students--they write poetry about emotions and creeks and short stories about funny newspaper headlines and images they observe downtown. It's hard work since there are 35 kids, but it's pretty much a blast, especially for them. They just love it.

When it was my turn to introduce myself to the children, I had planned to tell them I was pregnant. Even though I'm showing considerably, I like to tell students of whatever age directly that I'm pregnant so they feel comfortable with it--so they don't think they have to look away from my belly or not ask a simple question about it or something.

But I forgot to say anything about it at all. A few hours later, when I was eating lunch with three of the girls in a shady spot beneath some trees, one of them named Gabrielle, a chubby, talkative, short child with braces on her teeth, of course asked about it.

"I don't think you're fat or anything," she said, looking down at the grass, her PB and J in one hand, "but are you pregnant?"

"Yes I am," I said.

"Do you know if it's a boy or a girl?" asked Shannon. On the walk over to our lunch area, Shannon had told me about her future wedding ring. She wanted it to be like her mom's but not exactly--4 diamonds instead of 2.

"Nope," I said. I flicked an ant off my shin.

"When my mommy had me, the doctor was really bad," said Grace. "She was in the hospital for 3 days, and she tried to have me for hours and hours, but she couldn't, and so she went home and laid down, and then she had to go back, and it hurt, because the doctor was really bad."

"Wow," I said. "Bummer."

"You have to be careful," said Shannon. "You can't drink or smoke or anything."

"Because it could cause birth defects," said Gabrielle. Grace nibbled on her Cheetos.

"It's hard to have a baby," said Gabrielle. She held up her hands and made a circle with her thumbs and index fingers. "Your thing has to get bigger and bigger and bigger until the baby comes out. It hurts bad."

"My mommy said it hurt for hours and hours and hours," said Grace.

Why I didn't tell them something like: "I'm sure you were worth it," or "I know your mommy thinks you were worth every single hour," I do not know--but I was pretty entranced with the level of their knowledge and the way they thought about birth; I wanted to listen and not interfere with what they were saying. I did not know nearly as much when I was their age. When Gabrielle held up her vaginal diagram, I was in fact stunned. (Not because she shouldn't know--because she was so comfortable talking about it. Right on.)

But I don't blame these girls for thinking that birth is all about pain, as it most certainly is about pain and endurance. I'm doing hypnobirthing and reading some stuff about how to focus on other elements of labor and birth that are just as important--the experience, the meaning, the bonding with other mothers--but it's not surprising that girls and everyone else thinks that birth is about mostly pain, especially since birth is totally medicalized and since it's talked about and shown on television as nothing short of excruciating agony.

So far, I've gotten only one concept of birth as anything other than physical agony through reading Spiritual Midwifery. Thank god for this book. The women and their partners are all hippies to the core, so the writing is pretty funny--they call contractions "rushes" of energy, they make out with their husbands during labor ("that's how the baby got in there," says Ina May Gaskin, the midwife, "and that's how it gets out"), and they regard the contractions in general as good, good things. They welcome them. They get excited when contractions grow closer together. They get excited when rushes come and the baby is coming and their vaginas are stretching and moving and excelling and accomodating their babies.

There is no way possible that the medical community could ever produce written material like this, with its focus on the negative and the risks and the fear, and I find it disheartening and probably inaccurate in many, many ways. Since most--almost all--births go just fine, why is birth regarded as part of medicine and why are its risks and alternatives (C sections, epidurals), so front and center? Shouldn't birth be its own field that uses the support of the medical community? There is a big distortion going on here.

Perhaps, though, the distortion is leftover from the days that I sometimes think about and cannot imagine, days that still exist in a lot of places around the world, I'm sure: when women wondered if they would die in childbirth or right after from infection because maternal death was so common--when women vascillated between euphoric excitement and powerless terror that they might never live to see their babies grow up. This could certainly explain why the distortion not only lingers but dominates.

Another reason, however, is of course that the medical community slowly co-opted the field of birth because it was being run by women and doctors didn't think women knew what they were doing, even though centuries ago midwives knew much more--volumes more--about women's bodies and the birthing process than men did, whether they were doctors or not. From there, the medical community made a lucrative industry out of birth, as it does in one way or another with every illness or condition that it absorbs. And if you make an industry out of something, you'll probably wind up not respecting the material--human or otherwise--of that industry--you'll probably wind up exploiting the industry's source, even if it is human beings, in order to make money or stay powerful or become powerful or all of the above. Makes perfect capitalist and sexist sense to me. God dammit.

Later on that day, at the writing festival, the teacher was telling the children about lunch for the following day, when we would all be going downtown for pizza.

"Are we going to take a bus?" asked Sam.

"It's only 5 blocks," said the teacher.

"And buses are expensive," said a little girl.

"That's still a long way," said Sam, scribbling on his notebook cover, looking down.

The teacher laughed. "I am 57 years old," she said. "And I can hike 15 miles in one day."

"I'm pregnant," I said, from a chair in a front corner of the classroom. "And I walk 3 miles every day."

"That's right," said the teacher. She pointed at me. "Anna is pregnant."

The children all gazed at me as I sat there on a wooden chair in the front corner of the room. "Oooooh," they said. "Woah." Then three of the girls started clapping. A few more of them joined in, and in about 2 seconds all the children were clapping.

"Do you know if it's a boy or a girl?"

"When is it coming?"

"I thought you were pregnant."

"I was wondering if you were pregnant."

"I knew you were pregnant."

"I told you she was pregnant."

"They're clapping," said the teacher. "Wow. They're all clapping."

Nostalgia

2005-07-29T18:08:00.000-07:00

I saw this woman in Safeway yesterday--a young woman, probably a freshman in college or thereabouts--and she was suffering from a massive hangover. It was about 11 am, and she was in gym shorts and a tee shirt, the skin around her eyes swollen as if from an insect bite. Her lips were all puffed out, and her hair was up in a nest, and she was waiting in line with a man who had a carry-basket full of bread and lunchmeat. I wondered if she had spent the morning vomiting, if she was waiting to chow down on some food, of if she was picturing the bed she would crash in after leaving the store.

I have had more hangovers than most people I know--hundreds and hundreds over the last 17 years. Being 6 months pregnant, that feels like another world entirely right now. I suppose it feels pretty good, this unrelenting sobriety, since it's one thing to be hungover when you're 18 or even 25--you bounce back quickly, even though you feel like shit--and it's another matter altogether to be hungover when you're in your 30s. My love of drink was definitely getting tiresome.

The other day, I was at a gathering with some friends who were all enjoying wine in the shade of the late afternoon. I poured myself 1/4 of a glass, sipped and only slightly missed the remaining 4 or 5 glasses I'd normally consume. My friends joked about the fact that before the pregnancy I had been a heavy drinker.

"At one in the morning," said one, "she would try to get everyone to a bar so we'd keep drinking."

I nodded. "I could stay up all night sometimes." This wasn't exactly true, but it was close to accurate and it sounded cool to me. To the others it probably sounded immature. And it is, that bragging thing that people like me do when we talk about how we used to drink and do drugs and whatnot. The pride is pure nostalgia, which of course means pure bullshit. It just makes me so comfortable. I think about how I used to be--confident in my abilities to carry myself so well when completely blitzed, free to do whatever I wanted--and I feel free and light and very much in control. Often, however, I was out of control, so this doesn't really make sense either. I suppose nostalgia and feelings in general do not make much sense most of the time. One of the men at the gathering who I didn't know turned to me.

"So when the baby's born, will you go back to it?"

"Well, no," I said. "I'll be breast-feeding."

"You can have a glass of wine or so," someone said.

"Probably no more than that."

"What about when you're done breast feeding?" asked the man. "Will you go back then?"

"Then I'll have to take care of the kid. So probably not. I'll have my moments, but that's probably all." I sipped my water.

"So this is it," the man said.

"Pretty much."

Strangely enough, I wasn't bummed about this change, about making and feeling this proclamation for basically the first time. I'm still not bummed. It's kind of like the Pokie's moves in my womb. I'm unimpressed by them because they're part of the process, and I'm unimpressed with myself because this change (and we don't know whether it's a change yet anyway--so far it's just an intention) also feels like part of the process.

And I don't feel like I was headed in this generally sober direction anyway, although not drinking my face off at every opportunity that presents itself (receptions, happy hours, a potluck, a night alone, an extraordinarily good day, an average day, a bad day) is probably a very good thing. A positive thing. An adult thing, something a little more substantive than paying a shitload of money to have trees trimmed or buying life insurance or paying off a car. This change feels natural, for the most part, as do most of the others that have begun since I got pregnant--whether I like them or not.

And this is what's fucking important: natural, good things have happened since I got pregnant. I don't drink like a loser anymore, I eat a little better, I exercise more regularly, I'm more aware of motherhood and mothers and pregnancy and women than I've ever been before, and I love my damn husband more than ever. But I'm getting to be somewhat uncomfortable--pretty big, pretty lumbering, pretty wary of getting bigger and becoming more uncomfortable in the next three months, and I'm swaying a bit from all the depression and anxiety, so focusing on the POSITIVE has been really tough. But all kinds of positive things are happening to me, to my body, to my baby and to my attitude.

I think. Who knows how I'll feel about all this in hindsight? Will nostalgia kick in, or will truth kick in--will I see the good things about this period when the Pokie walks for the first time or successfully poops in her little potty or holds hands with her best friend? That's what's supposed to happen. You have the baby and you see that it was all worth it. Your suffering. Your discomfort. Your mental anguish and worry. I have to say I do have faith in this cliche--is it okay to have faith in such a cliche? In any cliche? Does it make me stupid or brainwashed or something? What if in a few years I think or feel that having the Pokie wasn't worth the sacrifices? Will that make me awful? Yeah. It will. If any mother does feel this way, she sure as hell isn't going to admit it, not to anyone. A father might be able to get away with it--and he'd be considered maybe a total asshole or maybe just a "guy," the excuse for male infraction of the highest order--but a mother saying such a thing? No way. There would be no forgiveness or understanding from anyone.

But I don't see how having a kid couldn't feel worth it once it arrives, once the baby has willed itself from your body and you've helped it find its way it's out of there, and it's crying for you, longing for something it can't articulate.

Middle Class Jolts

2005-07-26T20:47:00.000-07:00

The anxiety has been pretty severe lately; I've had much trouble sleeping and I've been exhausted and frustrated and very, very worried about my health and Pokie's health as a result of being exposed to so much stress from me.

So I now have a team of Specialists for Middle-Class Depressives like myself working on my case. The psychiatrist who prescribes my Prozac has upped the dose and has counseled me once or twice on the phone in the last week or so; the yoga instructor is glad I'm there; the acupuncturist is calling me if anyone cancels before my appointment at the end of the week. But most important of all is the counselor, who I had my first meeting with today. (I feel this is all rather ridiculous, this faling into the role of princess and crew, but with the Pokie coming I'm more worried about myself, so I'm trying harder than usual to fix myself.)

I have had much experience with counselors of the generic variety and with counselors of the more specialist-variety. My mother first plunked me in front of one when I was 10. Today, the new counselor asked me about my first experience with counseling and I did my best to recount that one.

"She had blond hair and her name was Judy," I said.

"Do you remember what you talked about?"

"No," I said. "My mom took me to her because our family was breaking apart, divorce, etc. I think I was having stomach aches a lot."

I then recounted a few others--and now that I'm thinking more about it, it was only a few. I left out Ronnie, the gentle one who for three months after my 18th birthday got me to be easier on myself (ha!); Dr. VanDeSomething, who was a neuropsychologist treating me for bulimia (when I told him I felt fat, he told me I wasn't); Linda, the straight-up no BS one who after being my counselor for two years fell asleep one day when I was talking about something (I must have been damned interesting); and Sheri, a very nice lady who helped me through the tail end of grad school when anxiety struck. The ones I mentioned to the new counselor today--the ones I recalled--were Rhoda, a mean bitch who made me quiver with fear throughout my adolescence, and Gary, who sat back and listened to me talk endlessly and often pointlessly about myself during my undergraduate years.

I haven't been to counseling, however, in about eight or nine years now, because, you know, I sort of figured I perhaps didn't need counseling anymore. I was also tired of it--extremely tired of it--the note-taking that characterizes the first session or two, when the counselor writes down basically your abbreviated life story, the receiving of handouts that are 20 years old, and of course all the jargon: hard on yourself, not okay, dissociation, blah, blah, blah.

But I've got the Pokie coming, and the last time I thought about it for even half a second, anxiety is not good for a fetus or an infant or a toddler. So back I go into the soothing--and yes, it is soothing--cushy, middle-classness of the counseling world, with its drywall and flowery furniture and soft knuckles and choice of couch or chair and large potted plants.

I liked her okay. She's no one I would want to have a drink with, I don't think, but she wants to go straight to the problem--the goddamned anxiety--and we spent only a minimal amount of time on my "history" before she proposed tangible solutions--coping skills that I hadn't before known about, strange little cognitive exercises that she'll lead me through.

More importantly, she said loudly and clearly that I am not crazy, nor will I be. When she said this, I started to cry.

"You know that already?" I asked, relieved as hell.

She then went on to explain that my anxiety isn't a result of some inherent insanity, which is what I've sort of always feared, but a result of my childhood environment and what I learned and didn't learn as a child about feelings and how to manage them and blah, blah, blah. (Not to insult her--it's just more interesting to write blah, blah, blah.)

One might think that after 20 years in therapy before the age of 35, I would have figured this out--that my anxiety has an external cause--one fostered by specific events during those formative years. I have figured this out before. I'm just incapable at times of accepting and believing it. I just want so very much to be more resilient and to take myself less seriously.

But it's time I realized that I'm not, and I don't. It's about time I accepted myself as is and sent endorphins full of calming chemicals down to the Pokie. It's also time I felt damn, damn grateful for all these resources that can help me feel better and be functional--most of which require some money and some health insurance, which a lot of people do not have, which a lot of mothers who might be crawling with anxiety do not have. So thank god for the resources, for that warm jolt of relief that I'm still buzzing on as I write this, the jolt that let me remember who I am and be ok with it and feel hopeful and know that I'll get better. But damn the system for making these jolts too inaccessible to people--especially mothers--who are a hell of a lot worse off than I am.

Feeling Fine

2005-07-24T16:45:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I was finishing up my daily pregnant walk at about 7pm. The huge park I take trails through is shaded by aged oak and walnut trees. The ground is wild with ivy and poison oak and thick fallen limbs that are often allowed to deteriorate on their own. My dogs were loping ahead, off the leash because a ranger wasn't around and because they enjoy peeing on dried thistle, digging their hind legs into the earth, and sniffing at every dog-pee area they possibly can.

We were all clouding the trail with dust--just enough to coat my socks and calves--when I noticed across the street, on the cusp of a middle-class neighborhood lined with ranch style houses, two little boys sitting on a curb. One was brown and one was white; they both had dark hair; they were wearing shorts and tee shirts. They sat on the curb, their knees bent and moving around as they talked. They must have been between 7 and 9, and they looked about as comfortable there on the curb as two children could possibly be--in their neighborhood, on their curb, fiddling with their feet a little, talking.

I remembered those kinds of moments. Where you're just a kid, and you're sitting on the curb in front of your dwelling with your friend who you've been playing with all day. Maybe you played Pretend; maybe you played tag; maybe you went roller-skating or skateboarding; maybe you hiked along a creek and climbed a tree; but now you're winding down, sitting at your dwelling, bouncing your legs to the rhythm of your neighborhood and the tones of the world in your head. You're not worried about anything. You're totally secure and you don't know what insecure means. You are fine in every way and you don't know you are--you're just talking to your friend, or else you're not, and the two of you sit on your curb, bouncing big sticks on the toes of your tennis shoes or the surface of the street, scratching a chigger bite on your knee. Sometimes you might just stare at the house across the street whose front you know so well, and from there your eyes might move up and look far into the sky. You're feeling just fine and you don't even know it. That's how fine you are, how happy. You're just a kid, hanging out with your friend.

Class

2005-07-15T19:30:00.000-07:00

This week, I was talking to a colleague who is one of nine children--she's in the middle of 3 brothers and 5 sisters, and they're close. They were poor, though, which I of course didn't ask her about, but my immediate reaction was not one of bourgie middle-class liberal crappiness, like "Oh, you're from one of those poor and uneducated families that don't believe in birth control," or "Oh, how dreadful--I bet you were starving." My reaction was one of envy.

I have one sibling, an older brother, and until recently we were estranged for most of our lives because he was a sadistic prick to me all my life. (Once I succumbed to adolescence, I was a prick back, but up until then I was sad about how much he hated me and walked around as the little victim that I was. I'm not slamming myself for it; I was just a child. But that's how I acted. I didn't stand up for myself until adolescent anger started coursing through my brain.) When my colleague told me how many siblings she had, I immediately knew that she had fought like hell with her siblings, of course, but that she also been surrounded by alliances, by people who stood up for her, by people she played with and hung out with and allowed to protect her and who she protected in return. I think I probably knew this because I know her enough to see that she REALLY has her shit together, that she's got goals for herself and her life that she has taken steps to accomplish. In short, she's a hell of a lot further along than I was at 21, and I can't help but wonder if coming from a large family had a great deal to do with it.

Don't misunderstand--I'm not romanticizing poverty. I'm sure things were very hard a lot of the time, and I know they were because she told me so. But in the midst of the hard things, she had camaraderie and support and a sense of responsibility because she was taking care of people and things and situations. She probably had a wide range of examples set for her--good examples and bad ones--and so she made her own mind up about things.

I did not have this opportunity. A small family isn't everything it's cracked up to be, especially if all your examples suck. For the most part, I have to say that all mine did. There was no range. There weren't enough of us to emerge resilient from the bad things. I had no counter to constant drunkenness, neglect, mistreatment, absence, etc. My colleague certainly did, and it shows.

So it seems that over the years, I've reached new conclusions about family. And for this I am really, really glad. I'm no longer the middle-class brat who turns up her nose at the concept of large families: the expense of them, the management of them, the point of them. It's still very easy for me to say, while watching, you know, Supernanny or Dr. Phil, something like, "God, why do these fucking idiots have so many children?" Or, a comment by the husband one day: "The problem isn't their parenting skills--it's their IQ." But those shows are structured--as the husband pointed out--to get us armchair-couch potatoes to judge people and then of course to worship said nannies or Dr. Phil or whomever. Those shows are hyper-structured; there's nothing real about any of them.

What is real is that women are allowed to have as many children as they fucking want to, and they shouldn't be judged for it. And I don't judge my colleague's mother. What I do is wonder how the hell she endured pregnancy nine times. I wonder if she was tired constantly (I'm sure--how couldn't she have been?), if she was worried about all the children she was having. I wonder a bit judgementally why she didn't use birth control, and I then I wonder if perhaps birth control didn't work when she did use it. I wonder if she's Catholic (probably), and I wonder if the woman just wanted a fucking big family and so had one. I suppose that once you have a few kids--3 or 4, maybe?--you've got babysitters and teachers a-plenty--and in many ways, that strategy makes a lot of sense. That's a path toward self-sufficient children, really--at least one proof of this theory is that most of my colleagues' siblings are doing just fine.

I feel like such a liberal middle-class elitist, knowing so little about my fellow humans and why they make the decisions they do. I also feel like I've really missed out on meeting some cool, mature people since my class so sheltered me. I thought I was some kind of exception to a sheltered and narrow perspective because my family was fucked up and I learned from it--somewhat, anyway--but I'm no exception at all. Disfunction cannot penetrate class; it did not make me well-rounded. I'm not saying I wish it had, because I would have preferred a fun family life growing up. I just find it really, really unfortunate that so many of us are made so ignorant and divided by our backgrounds and our beliefs.

We All Need Hugs

2005-07-15T18:57:00.000-07:00

The large belly is just odd. It feels like someone is stuffing my gullet full without regard for me or my opinion about it--without regard for the consequences to, you know, me. I feel my belly stretching out, feel ligaments pulling and getting tight, all the time. It's funny. I just never thought that my belly would feel tight every minute--I never thought it would actually feel like it was being inflated--but that's exactly what it feels like.

I must say, it's pretty uncomfortable. When I lie on my side, the stretching stops, but then the Pokie comes out and starts doing her little boom dance in my inner caverns. I feel extremely negative and crappy for saying this, but the booms don't make me fuzzy or even awe-inspired. They just make me feel like--Well, this is how it goes. This is what happens. This is part of the process. I find her movements to be unremarkable.

God damn. Is something wrong with me? Aren't I supposed to feeling ecstatic, curious, just a tad warmer, or something? Aren't I supposed to put my hand on my belly and smile joyously? Don't misunderstand--her movements do not annoy me or anything. I just wonder why I'm not more amazed by them, why I don't find them sort of sublime or breathtaking or euphoria-inducing.

I find myself in the unfortunate position of having to get positive about being pregnant, of visualizing more positive moments with the Pokie versus being afraid of all the changes and afraid of all the strength I will have to summon. Positivity does not come naturally to me (I'm sure this comes as no big surprise to the 3 or 5 of you who have been reading this blog), and I guess I'm rather alarmed that a baby inside my body doesn't magically change who I am and how I regard things. But I wasn't expecting to change into a more positive person as a result of getting pregnant; I simply wanted to hve a child, and of course I was looking very forward to it. I didn't think--consciously, anyway--that Pokie would take away my cynicism and that damn negativity in my mind that I have fought rather than accepted for most of my life. I did not, however, think I would worry so much, that I would be so uncomfortable (god, for this I am really ignorant), and most especially that I would have to make a conscious effort to focus on the positive side of having a baby. The fact that I do have to summon up the positive is pretty disappointing to me.

I discussed this with the midwife at our last appointment a few days ago. "If you're anxious and depressed," she said, "then that's where you are." Ok. So be it. But couldn't I catch a break from it while I'm pregnant, for fuck's sake? When I'm about to be a mother? Is any universe/energy force on my side here? Can I just not think about how fucked up everything is for once in my life, or could I please for once just not feel the weight of potential failure at something important? Man. I feel like I'm in a battle with my head and with my very self. "This," said the husband the other day, the "this" being the negativity, the cynicism, the weight, "is who you are." So the problem probably isn't the negative. The problem is probably my refusal to accept that I am this person who feels this way about everything.

Do I want the Pokie to feel this way about everything? This world view will surely rub off on her the way my parents' world views rubbed off on me. Degrees of the rub might vary, but the rub happens to everyone. It is a fact of life. No question about it.

And the answer is no. I want the Pokie to be critical of the world and question it all the damn time--but I think it will be healthier and she will be happier if she can access the positive with more ease than I can. So what do I do? Change? Ok, sure. I'll just go change. Thank god for the husband, who is less afflicted than me--she'll have plenty of counters to my low moods, chemical or not.

I just can't expect myself to do some kind of psychological overhaul to prepare for a kid! Jesus. That's ridiculous. Is this actually what I was expecting? Are the new, fresh coats of lovely paint that the husband and I have paid to have put on our walls symbolic of what I wish I could do with my personality? Maybe that's why so many people redo their houses before kids come--they hope the external change will foster--or is--an internal change. Maybe we all wish we weren't the people we were, at least to some extent. Maybe my problem is that I wish this more fervently than I should instead of giving my sorry, negative, whiny ass a big thankful hug every hour of the day. If Pokie were negative all the time, I'd hug her till she dropped. Why not do the same for myself?

Menstruation Part II

2005-07-09T17:36:00.000-07:00

I don't remember when I was told or knew completely that menstruating could get me pregnant. For me it was a social ritual--I was like all the other girls, mature and like a woman, walking the halls of junior high in my purple oxford with matching purple shorts and pristine white socks and tennis shoes carrying a very large secret: I was bleeding and when I went to the girls' room, I was doing adult things. I was changing my pad.

And this is what sucked. I felt short of some mark I was supposed to reach because I didn't know how to separate my bleeding from my skin and my body by means of tampons. When I felt myself bleeding, I felt like I should wash up, take a shower, like everyone could see the pad through my purple shorts. I thought pads were "gross," as did a lot of other girls. The secret bleeding didn't feel secretive enough--I didn't feel sleek or modest or sophisticated or older. I felt like a bleeding smelly child.

At the beachhouse, where I got my period for the first time, I had tried to use a tampon, but the applicator was a total mystery to me. I read the directions, but I swear to god they didn't say, very simply (maybe directions have improved since): "Slide the first half of the cardboard up your vagina, and plunge the base forward inside yourself. Now you have one cardboard cylinder inside another, so pull out both cardboard cylinders. You now have a cotton tampon securely in place, and you can pull it out easily with the string in a few hours." I remember studying the directions with one leg up on the toilet seat like the nice outlined woman in the picture, but I wound up positioning the applicator right outside my vaginal opening and attempting to plunge the cotton cylinder up there without first inserting the cardboard. This of course pulled and pinched my skin and made me wince with pain, and the tampon sat low in my vagina, making me feel like I had a cork in my crotch. So after trying 3 or 4 times, I gave up and figured that tampons were clearly for women who could endure more discomfort than I could.

When I finally figured it out, I was at school, at junior high, and I was so preoccupied with how my pad felt against me and whether people could see it through my shorts that I thought I might explode, so I asked to use the restroom, tampon in pocket, determined to try again. (I think I might have brought one with me to school that day in order to show it to my new menstruating friends. We all had menstrual supplies handy and it made us feel cool.)

I disposed of my pad, stood up in the stall with my shorts and underwear around my ankles and positioned the tampon as usual. For some reason, probably since I was menstruating heavily that day, the cardboard sort of slid on up there by itself in this nice little vacuum motion, and I suddenly understood those goddamned directions. I shot the cotton in, pulled out the cardboard, and the balance was officially reached: a separation from nearly all menstrual sensations, a logical parallel to the separation from menstruation's existence.

And so I have to say something about the Pokie. (What kind of a blog is this, anyway?) Of course Pokie will be so fully informed about a period and about the female anatomy that she will run the risk of getting too much information too soon, before she can articulate things in her own brain and before she can find the language to reflect on anything. And then when she's old enough to reflect, she'll probably hear it all again, and then when she's a teenager, she'll probably hear it all again. I think I'll tell her every little thing about it every single day of her life until she's unbelievably embarrassed by me and finds herself in strange and awkward mental positions.

Well, so be it. If only all women were bombarded by such information when they were children. Just think of how we might regard our bodies, how a greater number of us might march through adolescence and adulthood with confidence and inner knowledge instead of insecurity and anxiety. Just think how different our world might be.

The Belt Lesson

2005-07-09T09:25:00.000-07:00

I started menstruating at 14. A normal age, an unlovely time. My family (father's side only, since the parents had been divorced for years) was on our summer vacation at a remote, modest, sandy beach cottage in Florida with extended family--cousins, aunts, uncles. When I discovered the bleeding, I told my aunt. She didn't realize it was my first period and when I tried to explain to her that it was, she lit up another cigarette and said, "Oh, this is your first time?" and I think she then showed me where some maxi-pads were; they had been sitting in the cottage for probably several years, back on a shelf, still securely wrapped.

My aunt didn't explain how to use them or what a period actually meant for I believe a mix of two reasons. One--my aunt was probably preoccupied with her hangover and with the hours left until about 4:00, when she could resume her regular consumption of bourbon-and-water. Two--she probably assumed that my mother had explained everything to me. Incorrect. The only thing I knew about periods was that my friends were getting theirs and I was one of the last ones. I did not understand that it enabled me to become pregnant. My mother never explained this rather important fact about periods to me--although she did, in her fervent adoption of Women's Movement principles, when I was 10 years old, demonstrate how to use a pad and belt. Yes, that's right. A belt, like a buckled plastic thong device to hold a maxi pad in place that even by that time--1980--had become outdated. To even find maxis without adhesive took us a few trips to various drug stores, but my mother was goddamned determined, when my period was literally nowhere in sight, to take me back to our roots, or something, so I would know exactly how taxing it was to be a maturing woman.

So--the belt lesson was in fact the only in-depth menstrual exposure I had ever gotten--with the exception of silly girlfriends who got their periods before me and complained about them. When I went to use the maxis with adhesives, I fortunately figured how they worked (thank god), but what I didn't know--at all--was what to do with them once they were ready to be changed. Just throw them in the garbage? They sort of smelled. Roll them back up and keep them in a bag in my suitcase until I got home? Or--better yet--flush them. Of course. This made the most sense to me--and no one was offering up information, and I wasn't about to ask anyone.

So I flushed the huge, bulky used things down the toilet and guess what? It clogged. And our cottage is small (it's a real beachhouse, not a sand mansion), with ancient plumbing. So somehow the whole plumbing system in the cottage got blocked up, and my father, nursing what must have been horrific hangovers day after day--especially when exchaning stories with his sisters until late at night every night, which is what the adults did at the cottage--had to call a damned expensive plumber, who showed up right in the middle of my father's dinner making.

I can't narrate what happened next precisely, but the plumber unearthed a huge ball of used maxis that had absorbed enough water to create a 100% blockage, and when my father learned of the cause, he yelled at me. Yes, that's right. In his defense, he had no idea it was my first period, was probably not buzzed enough to relax, and probably assumed that I knew better. In his non-defense, he yelled at me for "flushing Kotex down the toilet" in close earshot of the entire family--cousins, aunts, uncles. God knows why they didn't all start calling me Clog or Paddy or something.

The next day, my cousin and I were sunbathing and my other cousin soaked us with the hose. We started a water fight, and I didn't know, since nobody told me, that pads are not waterproof. Nothing leaked, but it was rather eye-opening. I would not discover tampons for another four or five months, and I would do so on my own, because when I got home from the beach and told my mother that I had gotten my period, I still got no information. I got "How wonderful! I'll take you out to dinner tonight to celebrate!", which made no sense to me since the last time my mother had discussed menstruation with me, it was to explain how to tighten what I saw as some kind of masochistic holster.

The biggest reason her happiness eluded me, though, was because I didn't understand what was happening to me. I understood gradually over the next few years through sexual activity and worries of becoming pregnant. This is of course the worst way any girl should learn about her reproductive potential. I am still resentful of my parents for failing me in this regard, but I'm even more resentful of our school system--which instead of telling us boys and girls when we were in the seventh grade to take cold showers after heavy petting rather than go further should have explained basic elements of anatomy and reproductive processes. If anyone needs help in understanding the necessity of sex ed in school, let's look over at my liberal, political, intellectual, aware, women's lib-steeped family, who totally dropped the ball on this issue and didn't realize it. If school had been doing what it should have been doing, my whole fucking sexual coming of age could have been very different. I could have at the very least had information--and anyone, politician or conservative or mother or father or whoever the hell you are--who is against the concept of sex ed in school, I am sorry to say, is a fucking idiot.

Stupid Parents

2005-07-04T16:21:00.000-07:00

Last week, the husband and I were at a potluck. We were sitting around in the living room, full of ribs and bread and burritos and things, with two of our friends and two children who belonged to none of us. They were ages 6 (girl) and 4 (boy), and their parents were outside with the other guests.

The little boy kept walking up to each of us. "I'm going to hit you," he said. And then he would do so, giggling like a wicked little insect with his hand slap-flat. Slap-slap-slap, his whole body bouncing.

The girl came up to me where I sat on the couch and pointed at my belly. "Is that your baby?" she asked. She had curly blond hair that hung to her shoulders and pale skin and big blue eyes. She was interesting.

"Yep," I said.

"Can I hit it?"

"No," I said. "You absolutely cannot hit it."

The boy walked up to my friend, a black woman, who sat beside me on the couch. "Your hair's frizzy," he said. Then he flattened his hand and pretended to bounce a ball on her head. "Boing, boing, boing," he said.

"Oh my god," I said.

"Chase," said my friend to the boy, grabbing his hand, smiling. "I'm going to tell you something."
He watched her face intently.

"Don't ever touch a black woman's hair." We all laughed.

"Boing boing boing," he said again. We stopped laughing. Then he leaned squarely into her face. "Hey, woman," he said.

"Her name is Tina," we said. "Call her Tina."

"Woman, woman, woman," he said. Tina was watching him, studying his rudeness. He walked over to me and hit my knee.

"Woman!" he declared proudly.

"Call me that again," I said. "And I'll slap you across the room." This kid. What a fucking nightmare. Someone needed to slap him. (Someone needed to slap him? What the hell was wrong with me? God, I was angry. Unfortunately I was angry at the kid--I should have been angry at his parents. I know this now. I didn't a week ago, not right away.) What would I do if the Pokie acted like this when I wasn't around? And what was this, anyway? Was this normal behavior or what? Some weird sort of racism that he'd picked up from parents or culture or something? Is this what I can expect?

"You," I said, looking down at him coldly, like a Victorian governess. "Are a very rude little boy. You know that?" Pointy-chinned little meanie. I could just imagine how he treated girls on the playground or babysitters. I could imagine what this kid might do to me if I was a little girl. And I got pissed.

"Woman, woman, woman," he said. He went back over to my friend. The four of us adults were now looking at each other, questioning. None of us knew what to do. None of us had kids, and his mother and father were right outside. Do we get them, call them (they were coming in every few minutes to fetch beers and tell their kids to be nice), explain to this kid why his behavior was unacceptable? Discipline him?

The girl by then had faded into the room somewhere--probably because the husband had told her, when she started hitting us too: "You are acting just like your brother." "No I'm not," she said, crossing her arms. "Oh yes you are," the husband said. And from then on she was sort of quiet. Her brother was absorbing all of our attention. Probably the point.

"You have boobies," the boy said, staring at Tina's breasts. We all turned quiet. "Boobies boobies boobies."

Tina looked at him, speechless. Totally aghast. We all were. What do you do with a kid who isn't yours? Then she looked at me.

"Oh my god," I said again.

"Boobies," he said. And he reached out and poked her breast.

"Don't do that!" said the husband.

Somehow, the boy knew he'd crossed a line. "Okay," he said. So he got back in her face. "Woman, woman, woman."

Where were this kid's parents? And how could I have threatened him like I did? And how could parents just dump their kids into the laps of strangers like this? What the hell was going on? Is this standard practice? Am I wrong and naive to be totally appalled by this kid's behavior, and totally appalled by the parental neglect demonstrated here? How do these parents think their son is going to turn out? Treat people? Treat women?

10 years down the road: Chase is fucking everything in sight without a care in the world--totally unaware of consequences or feelings. Maybe he gets a girl pregnant and then abandons her. Maybe he gets abusive. Or maybe he just puts his own need for attention above everyone and everything else. The parents say to themselves--no, no, this is not the way it should be. This is unacceptable behavior. Or they don't care at all--they just let him assimilate into this fucking mysognist culture and accept it as part of life, as boys will be boys. ("The kid was 4," the husband just reminds me. "Be quiet," I say.)

These stupid parents who I am drawing conclusions about based on one major encounter remind me of this other parent I know a little better. She raised her son in this totally toxic environment and then when he misbehaved, she got overwhelmed, angry, blamed her son for being a crappy person who couldn't behave. She never got anywhere, with her son or perhaps more importantly with herself.

The next day, the husband and I were eating dinner with my father-in-law. We told him what happened.

"We just didn't know what to do," I said. "Even if it were the Pokie acting like that--I mean, what do you do?" It was a rhetorical question--I wasn't expecting an answer from him. My father-in-law is wonderful; he's been wonderful to me and to the husband, and I love him, but he wasn't the greatest parent.

"You take the kid for a walk," said the father-in-law, cutting his meat, nodding. "Ask him what's going on, talk to him."

"Oh," I said.

"Explain to him that he needs to behave differently."

"Wow," said the husband.

"That makes sense," I said.

My father-in-law put his fork down, his voice calm, unsurprised, unshocked. Prepared for anything. "Just take him for a walk or something. Spend a little time with him, cool him down a little."

The things our parents know. I swear.

I am Hereby Back On Prozac

2005-07-01T19:24:00.000-07:00

The light that I had been waiting for, hoping for, and putting too many of my eggs in has not seen me through. I have tried; I have been exercising every day; I have tried reassuring myself and using my poor husband to do the same (he's done the best he can, you know), and I have finally said fuck it. I feel like shit. I am depressed and anxious. And I am now taking Prozac again. I swallowed that first pill, resuming my daily dose, with great, great anticipation and not a lick of guilt.

Let me say that I was reading an article in the distinguished and highly intellectual and extremely well researched Parents magazine yesterday that said the effect of SSRI inhibitors on fetuses was negligible, and that what probably has a greater effect on the well-being of the fetus is the mother's mood.

So there. I sure as shit agree.

I also read in the same mag and had read elsewhere and had reached the conclusion myself that if I'm depressed and anxious while pregnant, it's entirely likely that my risk of post-partum depression will be higher. And I will be damned if I'm going to have issues and all kinds of shit going on while the Pokie is being a cute sweet needy baby or a cute sweet moody toddler or a cute sweet impossible child. I will of course have all kinds of issues--I always do--but I don't need any chemical ones stirring things up.

It's also entirely possible that my blogs will be a little lighter, a little funnier, a little less fucking depressing, for fuck's sake. For example,

Two days ago my husband received an email from an old friend who just had her second child. She said that having kids had made their lives so much better that it was amazing. She actually said their lives had become blissful.

Another comment I got a few days ago from an acquaintance when I ran the "blissful" comment by her: Well, she said, I don't know about blissful, but wow, yes, life has been better. A lot better, a lot fuller. Definitely.

Here here. Let's have a little more of this. A little more of the light stuff, the fun stuff, the truth that doesn't have to hurt and reveal unpleasant and oppressive habits, the kind of truth that gets to the point of having a child. Let's refocus. Let's try to discard some of the baggage I can't help but pick up when I walk through our culture and look for the other sides of things, the things that I--and I think the whole birthing culture, don't really get enough of.

What do I mean here, though--the birthing culture, or the culture of intellectual social critics that I associate with and read work by? I think I mean a little of both--but perhaps it comes down to advertising. When I for example hear or read the good stuff--why it's awesome to have a child--it is so often accompanied by a product or a brand or a stale, overused, meaningless cliche, that I judge it and turn it off and don't find it genuine. The negative stuff is pretty straightforward--no one's going to try and sell me a pink blanket or a Mommy-to-Be Kit while trying to make me understand that breast milk is packed with toxins from the industries that pollute our world and get away with it, or that millions of indigent women in this country cannot get adequate prenatal or postnatal care.

So unless it's coming from someone I know and respect, well... all the good things about having a kid just don't seem to sink in. Things seem so bad sometimes, in fact, depressed or not, that a lot of the positives seem disingenuous or lacking in perspective.

So. I was next going to read Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born (that should surely cheer up any mother to be), and I will read it--soon. But I think it might be time instead for a Girlfriend's Guide. I really want to give myself permission to enjoy my pregnancy. To be honest, that feels sort of impossible right now, as my mood has sucked for weeks and weeks and I've been unable to do anything about it. But it is time for me to seek this goal, take some pleasure in my growing uterus and in these strange low booms beneath my skin that could be the Pokie and could be gas. Time to pat my belly and nap and talk walks in the heat and be pleased with what's ahead.

Extraordinary Ordinariness

2005-06-20T17:54:00.000-07:00

My longtime friend is one year older than me--36--and has two sons, ages 2 and 4. She's just stopped nursing the former and the latter has been potty trained for quite awhile. Another woman I know is 42--her two children are in college. Another woman I know is 39--she has teenagers.

I do have a few friends who are my age with infants, but I am by and large feeling totally overwhelmed by the fact that I am approaching middle-age and I have not yet accomplished things in my life I want to accomplish (a few books--even one would be nice, or at the very least a published piece every now and again, as nearly all 6 pieces I sent out last August have been rejected and I haven't published anything, really, in a few years now) and I don't know when I will accomplish these things, if ever, and I worry about what life will mean if I don't accomplish these things, and I am about to have a kid.

I have settled into apathy since getting married. I realized this the other day when I was watching Personal Velocity--this very contrived and poor movie overall that nonetheless contained two great writing moments: one when a little girl sees a family's cat and asks, "Is that your cat?" "Yes," says the matriarch. "Come here, you fucking cat," says little girl. The other moment--the one related to my point--was during a voice over when the protagonist said that her marriage drained her of ambition.

I realized that this might be what has happened to me. I've gotten a little heavier, a little more complacent, a little more easily discouraged by rejection and disappointment, a little less comfortable doing new things--like saying fuck all this and starting a new career. The husband is not responsible for this: he's told me only about 20 times that he supports me in whatever I do, and he behaves in a way that supports his words.

So this is my problem. Whatever it is. I'm afraid it might be depression, leaking in through my genes. I have been using my seasonal affective disorder light for a few weeks now. Seems to be helping kind of, but then I get winded by these very dark spells, this malaise (remember The Moviegoer--the protagonist's malaise? I love that book), these why-I'm-here moments, these what-should-I-do-to-be-happier-and-find-contentment-with-myself afternoons. And extremely frustrated with my own laziness and apathy and tired efforts to improve the way I think and feel and live.

I don't know if this is part of the well-socialized woman or not, but I have met very few men who go through their lives in this sort of cycle, in this sort of acute, actionless reflection. But this is the imperfect brain-world of the mother who writes this. She is not happy. She is not looking forward to everything. She is not even, lately, excited. She is heavy with the baby and the malaise and she is dissatisfied with the world, and she doesn't have Binx Bolling's convertible to drive herself to the beach.

I guess she will do the best she can, because this is what mothers do. No secrets there. Look at all that women have gone through since the male medical establishment took over--no bullshit there, no possibility of safely dismissing the feminists who point this out. Experiments on birth giving performed on slave women without anesthetic, strapping women down in order to pull their babies out with forceps, the total institutional and societal neglect of impoverished women in need of prenatal and postnatal care. (I've learned all this just recently from reading The American Way of Birth by Jessica Mitford.) For god's sake! What's up? The history of birth and birthing practice in this country is enough to make any woman feel oppressed and anyone feel sort of depressed--or at the very least painfully aware of the hypocrisy of a culture (specifically politicians) who espouse all this total bullshit about caring for children. Give me a break. It's pretty painfully obvious that the poorer the children are, the less our capitalistic culture gives a flying fuck.

Anyway--I'm shooting for natural birth, no drugs or monitors and I hope no episiotomy. I firmly believe that women should educate themselves and make their own choices, so that's what I'm doing. I don't want to be immobile during labor. But if my labor is long and I decide to go for an epidural... I will feel like a loser and a weakling and like I have succumbed to the male medical establishment. How dramatic of me to react in such a way to something that hasn't happened. (Of course, what Mitford leaves out is how the medical establishment has massively reduced maternal mortality and most likely birth defects in the last century--but I haven't yet finished the book, so we'll see.)

Whatever happens, it will all be ordinary--the birth of my child will be one of the hundreds or thousands that happens every day, every minute. And what feels the strangest of all is that something so ordinary--pregnancy and birth--feels unique in my body, so monumental in its importance and its uniqueness. I find this unfortunate--that I have trouble seeing links between the ordinary and the profound. Why do I feel like one cannot be the other? What explains such a world-view?

Feeling Sort of Screwed

2005-06-20T17:06:00.000-07:00

Earlier, the husband and I had a spat. I'm afraid it was close to an official fight, although we have gotten better about fight intervention in the last few years (grabbing the moment when it goes from warmed discussion to mean and keeping things static--a skill I highly recommend to anyone who is married and depressed and moody and moreso all three while pregnant). This time, when things started to escalate, I sort of shut down and went for a nap--more like a three hour lie-down--and started thinking about what exactly I want to do with my life. I teach for a living now and I'm pretty good at it but feel it isn't enough, isn't what I got my degree for, isn't what I'm supposed to be doing, and most importantly of course will not lead to literary or political fame and recognition.

During the fight I realized that the husband is worried about space--about where he will work in our home once the Pokie arrives since she's taking over my office and so we're moving it to a different room and sort of eliminating his work area. (I came up with a way to give him a work area--we'll see if it pans out). I suppose he's worried about lots and lots of things too, all kinds of things that might be less heady than my worries, even though he's not outgrowing his bras, crying several times a week, cursing when minor routines get interrupted (sleep, coffee-making), suffering from at times extraordinary ligament pain in his pelvis, having trouble catching his breath because of either asthma or Pokie putting pressure on his lungs, experiencing low-grade but regular back and hip pains, and beginning to wonder if those mild vibrations in his lower abdomen are a Pokie growing her way into the uterine wall and not gas.

I sound pretty bitter, pretty angry--rather unpleasant, in fact, considering that the husband is a good husband, not a shitty one--but I find myself succumbing often to irrational resentment (it's really not the husband's fault that he can't get pregnant), whimsical anger (let's curse and hurl objects because I can't find my sunglasses), and sometimes even blind fury.

It would be nice for me to say that this type of behavior isn't like me, but in fact it is like me. It's the me I don't share with anyone except the few who can endure it and will forgive it. When I was a teenager, it was my mother and brother; now, it's the husband. The private me is simply a bit exaggerated right now. It is fun to write about, hormonal or not--I love any opportunity to use long sentences--and maybe I'm actually glad for an excuse to finally be the bitch I've always wanted to be.

The problem is, being a bitch still makes me feel like shit. It really always has--my life has been a pattern of behaving badly to people I love and then feeling like total shit about it. I feel rather deceitful, too--behaving one way in public and another in private. Makes me feel like an impostor and a liar. These days, I feel like a rather psychotic and sublimely unstable impostor and liar. The latter feels a lot worse, a lot more out of control, and rather difficult to repair or change.

I'd like to say that this strikes me as unfair: I'm going to be a mother soon, and here I am losing it with regularity while on my way to being a mother, and my worries about losing it too often with the Pokie have become magnified and my worries about my parenting abilities have become at times so great that I experience panic attacks, as I did for years when I was in my 20s.

I thought I was finished with panic attacks. I thought I was at least somewhat finished with not depression but that despondent depression that keeps you lying down for hours in the middle of the day. Well, I'm not. I'm on my way to being a mother, feeling pretty good about it at first, and then I get pregnant and my emotional state begins to feel like it might be collapsing.

Way to go, nature.

I suppose, though, that mothers need a good kick in the ass. But god damn. I was speaking with a woman today who commented very nicely on the public me. I had just finished teaching, and my classes went well--they were with an age group I hadn't worked with before, and I was on that nice teaching high--and said woman was working in our main office.

"Wow," she said. "You look gorgeous. Just totally gorgeous!"

"Really?" I asked.

She nodded. "Yes."

"You're seeing me at a good moment right now," I said. "You know how you feel good and pregnant sometimes?"

"Like beautiful pregnant?" she asked. "The glow?"

I nodded. "I don't always feel this way."

"I did," she said. "I felt that way the entire time I was pregnant."

"Even the first trimester?"

She nodded. "I swam every day. Even dove up until eight months. I just loved it."

Why are some women happy-glow pregnant while others are not? Why isn't the answer to this question known to everyone in the world? There are probably studies out there that I need to find--but why don't I know about them already? Why do people just smile and say this diversity of experience in pregnancy is different for everyone without knowing why? I'm sure much of must be social, but just as much of it must be chemical as well, must be nature again, that force that forms our bodies and our minds, trying to teach us in a very perplexing way to accept who we are at the moment, or to be strong for fuck's sake, like your mother was, or to be prepared because who you are can change in less than a second.

Shopping Sucks

2005-06-16T22:00:00.000-07:00

I have never liked to shop. This is not because I attempt to reject my bougie-ness or my middle-classness. It's because I do not shop well. I do not shop for fun. I shop out of desperation to feel good and pretty and like an original fashion thinker.I want to look brave and creative and interesting.

But I am a total failure at achieving this. I am a woman of shopping skillessness. I am 35 years old, and every time I go shopping, it's as if I have never been shopping in my entire life.

When I was a teenager, malls were a routine every weekend. I'd put on a truly unattractive argyle sweater with a tight neck and matching socks, spray my hair into a perfect poofy question mark, and meet my friends down at the mall so we could walk around and look at all the shit we couldn't afford. The mall was where we went, and it was a way for me to exercise my extreme self-consciousness by worrying about how I looked walking around in the mall, if I was wearing the right sock baubles or the right butterfly barette or if I had sprayed my question mark enough to keep it from drooping. It was sad. It was a waste of time. I never looked right, and I didn't know what right was, and I was too intimidated to try wearing different, funky, things.

So here comes college. Malls now give me anxiety attacks. My shopping-savvy, cool-as-hell, confident friend and I (how the fuck do I meet these kinds of people?) drive to the mall and after about a half hour of looking at hundreds of shirts and pants and dresses and shoes that I either want a whole lot but cannot afford, or think I want but cannot process on my body--do I like this? why? why not? is it supposed to look like this? why am I here? why am I buying something? why don't I have more money? who is responsible for all this bullshit, all these questions? what will people think of the fact that I am wearing this? is it up to their standards? who are they, anyhow?--I tell my cool friend that I'm going to her car until she's finished.

"It's 100 degrees out there, and I have like three more stores to check," she said.

"That's okay," I said. Hoards of people. Loud, desperate people, looking at a bunch of shit that they wanted. I wanted it all too. It made me feel weak. It made me feel out of control. It made me feel like shit.

"Can I please have your keys?"

"Here," she'd say, rolling her eyes. And I'd wait in her car and stare into the dashboard and sweat until she was finished.

It was fucking ridiculous.

So now, I buy predictable, ugly, boring clothes. I go to fashion warehouses and spend too much money and I never feel satisfied with how I look. I just feel like I have to have something. I always want to lose weight. I have a closet full and a bureau full of cheap, ugly, dumb clothes. I hate them all. I am a dupe. I am a fool. I cannot not care and I cannot shop with common sense.

And I am attempting now to buy maternity clothes.First of all, this whole thing is a fucking racket. A pair of jeans with a zipperless fly, the top half of which is cut off--along with the waist--and in its place is a sweatband. That's right. A sweatband. These jeans are uglier than any seven dollar high necked tee from Ross Dress for Less.

The first time I saw a pair, I thought I was going to puke. A very pregnant woman who was looking through clothes next to me lifted her tee shirt and showed me her jeans--the "panel" (what they call a sweatband that extends over your entire stomach so that the waist goes practically up to your breasts) was the size of California.

"Wow," I said.

"Yeah. I can't wear anything tight at all anymore. She doesn't like it," the woman said, patting her belly, "she kicks around and gets mad."

"As she should," I said, nodding, heading to Old Navy to buy a bunch of oversized tees that made me look like a football player and a fashion idiot, so I washed them and wore one the next day. "As she should."

Flesh

2005-06-12T20:43:00.000-07:00

I am pregnant. I am now wearing maternity clothes (shopping for them is akin to hell without the physical torture--the complexity and utter bourgeoisness of which is for another post); no longer lying comfortably on my back; getting up to pee over 4 times a night, whether I've limited my fluid intake after 6pm or not; outgrowing the maternity pants I bought a month ago; moody to the point of tears several times a week; filing my finger and toenails more often because they grow so fast; noticing wrinkles in the skin around my nose, more gray in my hair, thicker flesh padding my arms and thighs, and a frequent inability to speak the correct word.

If this were a humorous pregnancy guidebook, the next line would be its own paragraph and would state: And I love it. But this is not a pregnancy guidebook and the humor it contains is somewhat dark and not as funny as I think it is. I do not love it. I feel that this is all somewhat of a drag. I do know that the Pokie will be worth it--at least moreso now than I did when I was utterly exhausted and nauseated every day.

When I was in my 20s, I never intended to get pregnant, ever. "I don't like children," I would say. Or, "The desire just isn't there. No ticking clock or anything." Or, the most frequent response to the question from a drunk friend or prospect: "I just could not handle being so fat."

The clock didn't start to tick; I didn't have an overwhelming, burning desire. I still don't, really. It seems like it's simply an appropriate, logical, good thing to do. What I had and have is a partner with whom having a child is a clear and positive option. The husband is the one who made having a kid more than a possibility. If I had married some loser (god knows how this didn't happen, by the way) who was addicted to something, dishonest, negative, inactive, depressed, moody... well, I don't think the possibiliy would have manifested itself. The husband is not perfect by any stretch, of course (right now, he is actually laughing his ass off at "America's Funniest Home Videos"--but he is equally repulsed when the ad for the new Heather Locklear/Hillary Duff movie comes on). He's a good, smart, positive person--and he's great for someone like me, who tends to dwell on negative things, drink way too much, and is bent on a wierd kind of self-destruction. If my reasons to have children sound unfeminist, fine. It's entirely true and accurate.

The fatness is a little overwhelming. I have gained about 12 pounds. I am not gaining "too much weight," although I can't help but want to look like one of those pregnant mannequins with a very thin body and a perfect ball of pooch. I met a woman who looked like one of those mannequins last weekend.

"Hey," said her husband, as I was standing in line, waiting to get off a ferry. He nodded at me and then at her. "You two should talk." I looked over at her and then at her belly--they were two very distinct things. I wouldn't have known she was pregnant at all if her husband hadn't said anything. She was swollen and fleshy absolutely nowhere else, a tiny woman.

"Oh," I said. "Wow. How far along are you?"

"Seven months," she said. "How far along are you?"

"Um... just over 18 weeks," I said.

The woman actually gasped. Rather disheartening. But right after her gasp, as if perfectly natural, she said, "How are you walking around? I was still so sick then." So it seems that she wasn't really gasping at my size, as my companions asserted after our exchange.

But the fat thing... well, what am I going to do about it if I gain a little more than I should? Go on a fucking diet? Reduce the # of calories I eat every day when Pokie needs them? Worry about how on earth I will ever take it off? Feel fat, for god's sake? What kind of fucking sense does that make? Am I really that American? That well-socialized?

Fortunately, no. I'm not terribly worried about my weight or about taking it off after the Pokie is born. Why not, I have no idea--probably something about the naturalness and commonness of pregnancy, of how it doesn't really matter if I take the weight off or not when I'll have the Little Pokie sleeping on my shoulder and learning to move and talk and reason while me and the husband watch and smile and beg for relief and maybe send a video into Tom Bergeron.

Maybe I'm not as stuck at fourteen as I think I am.

Forbidden

2005-06-11T08:42:00.000-07:00

When I was about eleven, my mother and I were sitting at the kitchen table, probably eating. My mother was most likely attempting to make conversation with me and I was most likely ignoring her. Then she said,

"I've made a decision."

I looked up.

"I don't want you to see your friend Jenine anymore."

"What?" Jenine was in her 30s; she was gay; she had an infant son. She lived up the street and I liked to drop by a few times a week.

"She's too old for you to be spending all this time with her. She doesn't have a healthy life." My mother didn't have a problem with Jenine's sexuality. It was her age and the fact that her former lover kept stalking her and occasionally dropping by to beat the shit out of her. Jenine spent a lot of time in her apartment lifting weights while her son watched TV.

"I don't care what you think," I said. "Jenine is my friend."

"Anna," she said. "I am absolutely forbidding you to see her at all anymore. You can walk on up to her house and tell her what I've decided if you like. Then that's it."

I stared at my mother, face stern and resolute. She had never forbidden me to do anything before. (The only other time she forbade me to see anyone was when I was 17 and I was spending a lot of time with a 35 year old man.)

The kitchen was quiet as the inside of an abandoned barn.

"Do you remember what you did?" Mom asked during my recent visit. We were sitting in her living room, recounting our apparently favorite memories of my adolescence.

"No," I said. The husband sat beside me on the couch, equally curious.

"You were so angry you flipped up the kitchen table. Stood up and flipped it right over." She made a motion with her hands.

"Oh my god," I said. I put my hand over my forehead and closed my eyes. I didn't suddenly remember the incident, but I heard the crashes and clanks and I heard the the table boom! and felt it shake the floor. (It was a large, heavy table. It must have taken considerable effort.) And I felt--really felt--my anger. God, it was enormous.

"Jesus, Anna," said the husband.

"Oh my god," I said again.

"It's better than being passive," my mother said. "It's much, much better than being passive."

Mom

2005-06-03T07:22:00.000-07:00

"I remember when I was pregnant with your brother in Cambridge. It was very cold, and I was walking along outside with my big, huge coat on, and I felt happy and confident. It was as if I knew my purpose, knew what life was for. It was one of the only times I've felt that way."

--My mom. May of 05.

When I heard her say that she felt happy and confident, I became happy. I don't think I've ever heard my mother say such a thing about herself before. She has always struggled to feel happy and confident. When she said it was one of the only times she's ever felt that way (Jesus!)--I felt sad as hell. Guilty--or maybe it wasn't guilt. I think it might have been sorrow that I felt, watching her talk to me as honestly as she could. Maybe it was sorrow for women who only feel happy once or twice in their lives.

And should I feel sorrow for the fact that she says she was able to achieve this state of mind only through pregnancy? I am a feminist, and because of various vague inaccuracies that feminists and their oppressors have put forth over the decades, I feel sad when a woman says she achieved happiness through maternal roles. The fact that I feel sad about this is truly, truly unfortunate and is a direct reflection of flaws in the feminist movement and an effect of the propaganda about feminism that has taken over public discourse since its inception.

So I will be good and goddamned if I'm going to be a dumb, ignorant feminist who feels anger and sorrow for a woman who discovers a new level of happiness or fulfillment through pregnancy. I just wish that my mother could have found a way to maintain it after she became a mother. What happened? She would say she was oppressed. Check. She would say she never discovered her individuality or her autonomous potential as a human being before having children. Check. But this language is straight from the movement and so, like any language that's straight from any movement, I can't help but question it--as we all should.

Maybe she gave birth and found that motherhood wasn't what she thought it would be. Maybe her expectations were too high. Or maybe she just didn't like being a mother.

I am trying very hard to be realistic about the Little Pokie. I might fail in this endeavor. I might get depressed after she's here. I might not like being a mother. I might get overwhlemingly angry at all the cultural baggage and all the media-driven motherhood piles of crap that come my way. (I guess I'm pretty much already there on this one.)

Regardless, I am lucky as hell to have the husband--serious support and partnership--and to have more resources than my mother had. Frankly, though, I don't think I'll discover happiness or a sublime purpose for my life through motherhood. I think it will make me extremely happy and extremely sad and extremely every other emotion on the spectrum. Maybe this is what happened to my mother: The happiness wore off and she was all over the place, surrounded by the real.

I'm guessing she was right where she was supposed to be, that it was all very beautiful in its own right, and that nobody--not a feminist, not a doctor, not her mother--ever told her so. Damn them.

Pokie Takeover

2005-06-02T18:45:00.000-07:00

Here is what my mother does upon my arrival to visit her: attaches herself to me as if with suction. I took a nice pregnant exercise walk one morning, and when I returned, she actually followed me from room to room. She wants me to stay with her every second of my visit. When I said I wanted to head down to a coffee shop to write for awhile, she looked alarmed.

"Mother," I said. "What would you rather I do?"

"Stay here and talk to me," she said.

"But I've been talking to you for four days," I said. "Can't I go do something on my own?"

"Of course," she said. "I'm just telling you my true feelings."

"Be nice to your mother," said the husband, jokingly--attempting to diffuse.

My mother has always been this way with me. Not because I am such an impressive person, but because I live far away from her and only see her once or twice a year and because she feels guilty for all the mistakes she made being my mother. She has also been ill lately, so these tendencies have become more pronounced. (Actually, she's been ill for a long time, so these tendencies might be due to her illness or due to who she is. I wonder what the difference is?)

How do I react to this--to my mother's clinginess? Her intense desire to be with me? When I was a teenager, I used to hate and resent her and lash out. I was just fucking mean. Over the top mean, in fact. I told her to fuck off, to go to hell, to leave me alone. I said things to her that I should have had the shit beaten out of me for. Someone should have explained to me that my mother was busting her ass, trying to provide my brother and me a home, that I should be more respectful. (I say "someone should have" because I was incapable of controlling my anger or seeing the big picture. I hope the Pokie will see big pictures, or I hope I or someone she trusts can explain them.)

This last week, however, I found myself wanting to lash out at my mother all over again. She was driving me crazy. Not just the clinginess--her obsession with dust, her respect for Dr. Phil and Tom Cruise, her childhood stories--and the more she was herself, the more annoyed I became and the more angry I became with myself for being an impatient, ungrateful brat.

I have an internal vicious cycle with my mother. I always have and I probably always will. This week, I realized that it hasn't gone away. The last time I visited, she was in the hospital, and the cycle disappeared. My mother was sick; she needed me. This time, my mother was better, and old, somewhat inexplicable thoughts resumed more powerfully than ever. Their emergence shocked me. I was not expecting them. I was not expecting to get so angry. What the fuck? What's happened to me?

Fortunately, about six years ago, I stumbled upon a good therapist. I have had many therapists in my life. An extraordinary number, in fact, considering my age, and most of them have been poor. Most therapists are poor, I would argue. Most of them suck at what they do. This one did not.

"Why do I get so angry at her?" I said one afternoon. "She's the nicest, most giving person in the world. She has no money but gives what she can to everyone else; she listens; she's inquisitive; she's genuine. But she makes me want to kill her." And all of this is true. My mother is the nicest goddamn person in the world--certainly one of the nicest people I've ever known. Compassionate to a fault. Sensitive. Extremely caring and self sacrificing.

"It's a defense mechanism," the therapist said. "I think your mother makes you sad."

"What do you mean?"

"You've said that she doesn't have anything--that she hasn't made her life what she wants it to be."

"Yeah."

She leaned forward, made severe eye contact. Good therapists know exactly when to do this. "Instead of letting yourself be sad about it, you get angry."

"Oh." And right there, the sadness--complicated and truly heartbreaking sadness over my mother's illness and poverty and struggles--unfolded itself in my gut. This was the beginning of my ability to curb my anger, to talk myself down from it. To understand myself and my mother.

This week, though, I had forgotten all about that conversation until about three days into my visit--pretty unusual, considering that this is how I learned to respect and cope with her. (This doesn't make much sense, really--if any of you knew my mother, you'd say, "Cope with? What's to cope with? She's great". But again, I'm talking about an internal cycle. It's not something everyone would understand, and it's not necssarily always relative to external events, past or present.)

Ironically, I think it's the Pokie that has distracted me. Wow. 18 weeks pregnant--you know, having a child, and my abilities to nurture my relationship with my own mother had suddenly dwindled. I was a wreck.

Damn. That's not how I wanted the Pokie to take over.

So I walked over to my mother and gave her a hug. "I can write later," I said. I touched her shoulder and the anger dissipated, as it always does. "I'll stay here and hang out."

"All right," Mom said, looking at me over her glasses. "You don't have to, you know."

"It'll be fun," I said. "We'll eat some lunch and talk."

Fourteen

2005-05-22T17:13:00.000-07:00

I have had a headache since about 9 a.m. It is now 5 p.m. I had a headache yesterday as well. This one is a bear. In the temples and stagnant, creeping back and forth across my forehead. Tylenol hasn't done shit. Before the Little Pokie, I never had headaches unless I was hung over. (Not as much of a rarity as I might believe.)

I am also tired, sleeping poorly, rather depressed despite the Arrival of the Light (been using it for about a week now) and very, very moody. I refrain from ripping the face off of any bastard who speaks to me: supportive and loving husband, generous and doting father-in-law, loyal hound, snuggly kitty. No one is spared. At least I'm fair.

At this point I am feeling rather dubious about being pregnant for another five months and equally dubious about being a parent for the rest of my life. I snapped at the dogs just now; will I snap at the Little Pokie? I find everything gets on my nerves; will everything about the Little Pokie get on my nerves? I feel like tasks both menial and grand are too hard, too overwhelming--buying a gallon of milk, making the bed, doing laundry, revising an essay, grading papers, determining grades; will Pokie's needs overwhelm me all the time?

The answer to all these questions is yes, of course. But I'm worried that the self-centered, lying, desperate fourteen-year-old who jumps at the chance to be released from my evolving (at least I hope) personality will take over. I swear, I feel like I'm fourteen again. When I was fourteen (and I don't mean for this to be a generalization about teenage girls; our experiences are unique, despite what shitty movies like Thirteen and TV shows like Oprah Winfrey would have you believe), I bled acid. Between 7-11 binges and liters of wine coolers on the weekends, I ate small children. I asked my mother to stop speaking to me because the sound of her voice was enough to make me want to murder her. Can you imagine such a thing? Your child hating you so much that she looks at you and says, "Mom, could you please just not talk to me anymore?" Then, being my mother, she of course would talk to me--hello, good morning, what have you--and I'd say, "God dammit! I fucking asked you not to speak to me! What's your problem?"

I am able to hold back, however, with the husband. Thank god. He does have the leave option, unlike parents--or should I say mothers, since fathers are the ones who do most of the leaving from what I've seen--so I suppose this leave option reigns me in. But these last few days, Jesus. I feel the fourteen year old emerging, kicking around, spreading herself through my perspective, and I think she's found some room to take over. Maybe it's "the hormones." (Oh how I am beginning to despise this expression.) Maybe "the hormones" are giving me flashbacks. Or maybe what I've always known to be true is true: I haven't really changed or matured, so I've always been basically the same person I was when I was an adolescent. Or maybe over time we become conglomerates of moods that pervade during periods of our lives.
Maybe we don't get over any phase--maybe we just learn to maneuver through them so we don't drive people away, like husbands. Like good friends. Maybe this is what being human really is--an evolving process of restraint, of give and take, of stifling one voice and giving room to another.

Distance

2005-05-19T09:42:00.000-07:00

The other day, a woman called from her home across the country. She has a husband and two little boys, their approximate ages being 2 and 4, and she and I have been best friends since about 1993. In 1995, we travelled to Europe together, our backpacks enormous--really enormous, and therefore conspicuously and laughably American. We lived together for a few years in Texas, waiting tables and figuring our complex selves out, and during that time we shared everything there was to know about each other, cried and reasoned through various serious traumas in our lives, explored our art (her to a greater degree than me), and all the while drank our faces off. I have never had so much fun.

I cannot imagine my life without her.

Anyway, she called.

"I've been reading your blog," she said.

"Oh, cool!" I said.

Writers say a lot of things about feedback and criticism from readers. Most of it goes like this: they appreciate a good reader, one who rips their work to shreds; they need good criticism, which means someone to point out our bullshit writing--what doesn't matter, what's beside our point, what's superficial, what's grandiose, and for god's sake what's boring. I certainly feel this way.

However, our preferred response is something like the following: "This is the greatest writing I have ever read in my life. It's absolutely phenomenal. You have changed my life completely. You will be famous soon."

"Yeah," my friend said. "You sound so depressed."

"Depressed?" God damn.

"I'm worried about you," she said.

"What do you mean?" I asked. What I really meant was how dare you dislike my blog? And, how could you be worried about me? I'm fine. Don't you love everything I'm trying to do?
Don't you appreciate my forthrightness?

"I just think that when you have your baby, you'll feel differently about everything."

It seemed to me that my friend was telling me my feelings now didn't matter--that all this anger and frustration and pissed-offness would evaporate as soon as the Little Pokie arrived. This troubled me. So I was more indirect.

"Part of my goal in the blog was honesty, though," I said. "I mean, I'm really trying to be as honest as I can about whatever I'm feeling. That's my point."

"Yeah," she said.

"I'm not going to be fake," I said.

"I don't want you to be fake," she said. "I just think that after the baby is born you'll feel differently."

So--after I have the Pokie, I'll feel that everything was worth it. Well, sure. God, I fucking hope so. I can't really see a child comparing with a struggle to find materinity pants that don't bind.
But I felt like my best friend was missing my point. Criticizing my writing--ok, dream shattered again--but that's routine. That's character building. Missing my point, though, I thought to be another matter, one that concerned me a lot more about how my blog was coming across to the three of you.

"And what do you mean by well-socialized, anyway?" she asked.

"Well-socialized?"

"Yeah. Everybody is well-socialized. It's how we survive."

"I'm using the term ironically."

"I know that."

"I got the term from Gloria Steinam, actually," I said. "Probably should have given credit for the phrase the first time I used it. I saw her give a lecture about 12 years ago, where she said that 'a co-dependent is a well-socialized woman.' I thought it was great."

"Uh-huh."

"So..." What the heck was her deal, anyway? Why didn't she understand? "I'm using it to criticize social roles and behaviors of women."

"I know that," she said. "But in other cultures, the term doesn't work the same way you mean. And what about animals? Animals have to be well-socialized. It's how they survive."

"You're thinking of the term in an anthropological way," I said. "In a broader way than I'm using it. I'm using it from a cultural stance."

"You're just so angry," she said.

"Well, yeah." I said. "I'm angry. I've always been angry."

"What's the point of it?" she said.

"What do you mean what's the point?"

"All you can do," she said. "Is change your own life."

I totally disagreed. "That's true," I said.

"So why focus on all this? What good does it do? I don't like the way feminists just go on and on and on. And you know," she said. "Most people don't have the time to worry about all of this."

"What do you mean by 'go on and on and on'? Do you hear this kind of thing all the time, or something?"

"No," she said. "I don't hear it all the time. What I mean is that all you can do is change your own life. You have to. It's all you can really do."

This has always been my friend's mantra, more or less, before she even started articulating it. She's never run around preaching it at all; it's simply who she is. And I can do nothing but respect the hell out of her because she has in fact changed her life in more ways than one over the last decade or two. It's what she's always done--and it's what I've never really been able to do, not in the ways I've envisioned. My friend is one who acts. She doesn't dwell on anything. I am the opposite. I act only to certain degrees and I dwell on everything.

When you live far, far away from your best friend, you can have conversations where your differences are extremely, even uncomfortably, pronounced. This was getting to be one of those conversations, and then that thing happened where the subject of the conversation wasn't really what the conversation was about at all.

"You sound really bitter," she said.

"Aren't you a feminist anymore?" I asked.

"Of course," she said. "I'm just a feminist who does most of the housework and provides most of the child care in my home."

"Well right on," I said. "If it's your choice, then right on for you."

"Feminists," she said, "should foster women being proud of whatever they do. Like, the other day I was in the park, sitting next to a few mothers, when one of them said something about how could a mother put her child in day care. And I thought, 'Well, I'll never be able to communicate with this woman who I could bond with, who's sharing this experience with me, because of some stupid bullshit.'"

"I agree with you," I said. "I hate it when feminists do that. Did you read my blog about breast feeding?"

"No," she said.

"I was thinking about you the whole time," I said. And this was entirely true. "You'll love it." I didn't know if this would be true at all.

"I just don't think you can judge anyone," she said. Her baby was crying in the background. She was trying to put him down to sleep, but after a few minutes of quiet, he started crying. What a drag that will be.

"I have to go," she said. "This kid's just not going to sleep."

"Okay," I said.

I told another friend of mine--who lives in the same town--about our conversation.

"She said I was bitter. She said she was worried about me."

"Well, she doesn't see you every day," my other friend said. "I read your blog and then I see you and I see that you're fine. She doesn't have that contact."

So it was true. My blog is a long strand of bitterness. The husband and I wonder about what will happen if people who don't know me read this (ever). Will they dismiss it as stereotypical, worthless, feminist bitterness (a genre that I think the inarguably anti-feminist media has created, anyway)? Is this my problem? Why don't I just change my fucking life and quit bitching about everything, if I'm so damn miserable?

The thing is--I've always beeen miserable. I've been miserable to varying degrees ever since I was a little girl. Things drag me down. My eyes are always heavy. Apathetic anger attempts to boil in my gut all the time. I am incapable of not thinking about oppression and how fucked up we have all become. But my friend who lives far away is incapable of allowing how fucked up we have all become to dictate what she says, thinks, or does--and she's certainly incapapble of not worrying about her best friend, who, let's face it, at times sounds and is pretty fucking depressed about being pregnant, becoming a mother, and media phoniness and hypocrisy that surround it and everything else. Jesus. Why do we go on?

I called her back yesterday.

"You know that conversation we had about my blog?" I asked.

"Yes," she said.

"I'm blogging it."

She laughed. "I'm going to be the evil best friend, huh?"

"Not at all," I said. "And only three people read it anyway."

"Okay," she said.

"But--don't you think it's kind of funny sometimes? My blog? I mean, I'm trying to be funny."

"Oh yeah," she said. "When I read it, I laugh. Really."

She is my friend. And she will be my friend for a long, long, time. Distance be damned.

The Dukes of Hazard

2005-05-16T17:09:00.000-07:00

Well, damn. It's true. Here's how it happened. Here's how I think it happened.

Childhood either started it or served as the springboard to it--like every habit I seem to have or develop. The life of my brother and I settled with constant TV. It was what we did. My parents divorced, mom left (I'm sure we watched a lot of TV before she left, but I don't quite remember), and when my brother and I got home from school, the house was empty until 5, when my dad got home from work. So every afternoon from about 3 till 6, we watched TV. I believe the lineup was as follows: 3-4: don't remember. 4:00: Gilligan's Island. 4:30: My Three Sons, Bewitched, Welcome Back Kotter--don't quite remember. 5:00: no TV, piano practice for a half hour. 5:30: Hogan's Heroes (this one I remember because news was on every other channel, so I had no choice). 6:00: no TV, dinner around the table. 6:30: Wheel of Fortune, maybe, or Name That Tune, or Family Feud.

Our primetime lineup began promptly at 7 pm. I was an ABC child. I remember Tuesdays distinctly. 7:00: Happy Days. 7:30: Laverne and Shirley. 8:00: Three's Company. 8:30: don't remember, but I remember that Soap was on Thursdays at 8:30. Charlie's Angels was Wednesdays at 8, Hill Street Blues was Thursdays at 9. Mondays and Fridays I don't recall, but I know I watched TV pretty much every day from school's end to dinner and then from dinner till bedtime. When I had it, I did homework, but very few days of my childhood went by without television, usually hours of it.

I was a huge Charlie's Angels fan. I once wouldn't stop crying and yelling because my brother one Wednesday wanted to watch that William Shatner movie called Invasion of the Spiders or something, about tarantulas that invade a town in the desert and eat through walls, and I wanted to watch a Charlie's Angels rerun. Those chicks had it all--money, jobs, self-sufficiency, beauty, guts, fighting skills (um, whatever), an office full of couches and carpet and plush chairs, long hair, tight pants with curvy butts. And they always got kidnapped by somebody. I loved it when they got kidnapped, and I loved that they didn't have boyfriends or husbands. (I'm sure there's some kind of feminist banter out there that they were still dependent women, subservient to a patriarchal voice on the phone or something. I could buy that. But I still think there was something pretty independent about them, and I don't think it was the worst thing in the world for me to be watching. Three's Company--now there's something that should have been totally forbidden by a parental entity).

Anyway, my TV habit is old. It's been a habit since I was an itty bitty child. When there was nothing on, like on Saturday or Sunday afternoons and football or sports took over the screen, I fiddled around and sat in my room. Nothing to do. I felt very uncomfortable when the TV wasn't on. I felt like something was wrong with the air around me, with the space I inhabited. I look back on it now and it's ironic, because things were wrong. Things were at times extremely wrong. When the TV was off, when it was all quiet, I think this knowledge had a chance to surface, to make itself known.

I blame my parents for this somewhat--especially my father, who was just drunk and sad and really detached from the lives of his children. He didn't plunk us in front of the TV because he would never have done something so active as to plunk us somewhere. He just sort of left us alone, almost like we were adults. But the blame I place on him isn't hard-core. It's negligible. I'd like to sort of shake him now, wake him up a bit, ask him, "Why didn't you do stuff with us? What was the matter with you? You really thought it was ok, just letting your children watch hours and hours of TV every single day?"

But he wasn't engaged for a lot of reasons, and not just because he was drunk all the time. He wasn't engaged because his marriage had deteriorated and dissolved. He wasn't engaged because he had a routine--he worked hard, every day, and had two kids to raise and nurture. That's a lot for anyone. Some will do it better than others. He wasn't engaged because, I think, it was all just too much for him to feel about, to talk to his kids, to learn about them, to figure out what was going on with them. Some people in my family might argue that all that is because of the alcoholism--they might be right. But it doesn't seem that way to me, looking back. It seems quite honestly that he was doing the best he could with a big pile of emotional shit that he for whatever reason hadn't the reactionary potential even to comprehend, let alone act in a way that could counter the deep, heavy psychology of everything that was going on--with my mother, with his children, with his mind.

So he was not there. TV was.

And I certainly can't blame anybody, really, because I've known for decades now that I watch too much TV. I watch junk. I watch shit. I put off working on my own writing to watch vacuous, made up mouthing, like All My Children, or CNN, or Oprah (she's gotten really empty), or prime-time cop shows. All of these--especially the dramas--are honest-to-god, steaming crap. Crappy superficial and cheesy writing, mediocre acting, predictable plots full of stereotypes. I know all this and I watch them anyway. The question now is why. Why in the world?

Then, it was because of that oppressive feeling that came whenever the TV was off--like I was suddenly on my own, suddenly alone in a barren space. And now? Well... the cliche phrases all certainly apply--it's easy to watch TV; all you do is sit there and absorb it; its nice to veg out after a hard day (or an easy day); it's only TV; I like to study popular culture. But the real reasons, now, in my 35th year of life, are the same as when I was a child. I get uncomfortable when the TV is off. I get a little worried. I get a little unsettled. I feel like something ominous is on its way. And since this feeling has been with me for such a long, long, time, I trust this feeling. I mean I really, really trust it. It feels instinctual.

But the Little Pokie is on her way now. I don't want her to watch TV all the time or have nothing to do when it's off. (This strikes me as truly sad--that I felt this way when I was a kid. Almost makes me want to cry.) I don't want her to sit in her room on a Saturday afternoon, waiting for 8 pm to roll around so she can watch some crap like The Love Boat. (Friday was the Dukes of Hazard, then Dallas--a CBS night; Saturday was The Love Boat, then Fantasy Island--an ABC night. Dallas I can look back and live with, I guess--it's stupid in the same ways that cop shows and AMC are now. But those other three? My fucking god. Has there ever been a show more truly, truly stupid than the Dukes of Hazard? My father was so passive that he used to watch that show with me. Why didn't he ever say, at the very least: "You know, Love, this show doesn't seem very intelligent." Where the fuck was he?)

So now I have to stop watching TV. What this means, really, is that I have to stop watching crap--which means that I have to stop watching almost all TV. I worry sometimes that the mindlessness passes through my skin into Pokie's brain. I worry that by watching TV now, I'm setting her up to be addicted to TV before she's even born.

You'd never think that something like not watching TV could be about something greater. For me, it's about defiance of something false. It's about not only saying fuck you to a lot of old, extremely powerful shit that weighs me down but also making the fuck you mean something.

And of course, it's about the wonderful Little Pokie. Because of course she's already wonderful, and I'll be damned if I'm going to do anything to fuck that up.

Sainthood

2005-05-11T16:19:00.000-07:00

This morning, I threw away the last of a box of candy the husband got for his birthday so I'd stop eating four pieces of the stuff every afternoon.

This afternoon, I got (not dug--got) the box out of the trash and ate the rest of them anyway. No wonder my ass is so pregnant. I'm even eating the marshmallow one.

So I guess this means I'm not faring so well--although I betcha there's plenty of women out there who've done the trash dive, pregnant and craving or happy and craving or sad and craving or whatever. But I am an officially depressed person, I believe. I'm waiting for the delivery of my light.

But maybe I'm not. What to Expect is filled with what to expect from your moods while you're pregnant. This month, it's the following: "instability... mood swings... irrationality... weepiness... a feeling you're not quite together." So here's my question: if all of the above (and there's more! frustration... apprehension) is a normal part of pregnancy, then why aren't these kinds of women represented in the--

do you think I'm going to say media? no. We can't expect reality from them. CNN for example is the most farcical bunch of redundant bullshit I have ever seen. 2/3 of their broadcast journalists look like they're about to shoot a porn, like they're full of satisfaction with the way in which they just finished getting it up the ass.

covers of guidebooks? In their tone? In pregnancy magazines? This cult of happiness is making me really resentful. And... well, depressed. This is NOT the happiest of times for me. I wish I felt more represented in my community (although I've been so frustrated by the repetition and the generalness of it that I haven't explored the whole community--not yet, anyway).

I tried a new magazine earlier this week: Mothering. Another one from the natural food store. It's a hippy mom magazine, full of ads for only organic products and cloth diaper covers and the like. Nothing wrong with this, of course. I might go for all of it--certainly better than a houseful of polyeurethane and flammable polyester on Pokie's little butt.

What really got under my skin about Mothering was the articles. They espoused the value of this ultra-sonic organic way of mothering in the most self-righteous way you could imagine, as if mothers who opted for more conventional things were all a bunch of inferior people. Women don't always not go organic or natural because they're uninformed, you know. A lot of women just make choices that are appropriate for them. Why be so exclusionary?

For example: breast feeding. I swear, if I read one more thing about the wonders of breast milk, I will surely, surely hurl. According to What to Expect and the few web sites I've seen and the magazines I've read (Brain, Child is an exception), breast milk is a miracle liquid. The things it can do are equivalent to sorcery, to sublime healing.

And so this is true. It is rather amazing that the Little Pokie--if the breast feeding thing works--can survive on my breast milk and nothing else for the first year or so of her life. Not water, not vitamins, not milk. Just my breast milk. Ok, then. I am woman. I rock. I make babies and their food. Killer.

But breast milk apparently will not only nourish Baby, breast milk will also prevent Baby from getting sick, from getting colic, from crying, from bothering you, from skin rashes, from whatever you can think of. The list of what breast milk can do is endless and awe-inspiring and possibly, I guess, accurate. But I'd venture to say it's a hair over the top. This particular article in Mothering stated that nursing could strengthen baby's jaw, lead to proper alignment of her teeth and proper development of tongue muscles--complete with testimonials from dentists about the money parents could save on possibly huge dental bills in the future.

I respect breast feeding and everything, but are you fucking kidding me? Nursing my baby will save me money on dental bills in the future? They had this diagram of how the baby's tongue and mouth muscles wrap around the nipple, adjacent to a diagram of how the baby's tongue and mouth muscles wrap around a rubber nipple. The diagrams were hopelessly poor, so you couldn't really tell anything from them anyway--except for the fact that the breast nipple and the rubber nipple both resembled trombones the baby was attempting to swallow, and that the rubber nipple went straighter and further back into the baby's mouth. The latter is apparently very, very, bad. You may as well toss your kid into trash if you're going to give the poor thing a bottle, make it swallow a nipple the size of a brass instrument.

Why can't this magazine be more inclusive of women who can't or god forbid choose not to breast feed? I have three friends who recently and not so recently gave birth--none breast fed, for various reasons. You notice I didn't say legitimate reasons. I said reasons. These reasons are nobody's fucking business, and these ultra-feminist naturalists should do more to reach out to them in their pure and holistic ways of life. My father, I believe, was breast fed, and he had braces for nine years and has scoliosis and terrible back problems; my mother, I believe, was breast-fed and developed severe, horrific eczema when she was a child and still has asthma; and I, I believe, was breast-fed and had braces and headgear and all kinds of problems with asthma and I have a touch of arthritis and depression.

Breast feeding isn't everything. Get over it, everybody. I am never buying this magazine again. It has a lot of good products. It has some valuable information, I suppose, about "natural birth." About how it's the best way to go. But what if a woman doesn't want to endure the pain? Why should we expect her to? They had this article about a natural birth activist--which I can understand, since a lot of women might not be educated about it--that started out with a dialogue between a woman and her daughter. The daughter says that she doesn't ever want to have children because she made her mommy hurt so badly during her birth that her mommy cried. The narrator then tried to explain to the child that it was a "good pain."

Give me a break. A good pain. Jesus. We are not all so saintly. I thank god for it. I now think that I will work harder to respect it.

Prenatal Wonder

2005-05-11T11:58:00.000-07:00

Over a week since my last post. The three of you must be dying by now.

Last week, the husband and I went to a clinic for an ultrascreen of the Little Pokie. This differs from a standard ultrasound in that it's more advanced and shows more detail, but it's just as non-invasive. We decided to have it done because I am 35—which, as just about anyone in the entire maternal world will tell you with very little prompting—puts the Little Pokie at a significantly greater risk of Down's and other chromosomal disorders. The ultrascreen is detailed enough for the tech to take measurements of fluid levels in Pokie's neck, a measurement that’s a fair indicator of potential problems. It doesn’t clear any fetus of anything; if measurements are within a normal range, the measurements then lower the fetus’ risk of some chromosomal disorders.

We could also have an amnioscentesis, where a tech syphons amniotic fluid out of my womb with a giant needle, but this procedure carries a risk--about 1 in 200 amnios result in miscarriage. We decided not to do this after reviewing the list of risk factors for chromosomal disorders and learning that the only one we had was my age. The list consists of, among many things, having a history of such disorders in your family, like dwarfism and retardation. My family’s disorders are indeed historical—but knowing ahead of time that the Pokie might be an alcoholic with bi-polar isn’t a possibility right now in our world. If this were possible—to predict my baby’s problems, diseases, etc.—I don’t think I could abort it at this point and time, and if the Pokie were to be diagnosed with likely Down’s or something worse, I still don’t think I could abort it.

Going into the ultrascreen, I wasn't particularly worried about Downs or other conditions, but I was certainly thinking about them, about what would happen if it turned out the Pokie likely had some kind of "defect." Aborting it now, at my age, when I’ve been preparing for the responsibility--crying, worrying, napping, contemplating, already loving the Pokie quite a bit and at times just as wary of the changes she and our love for her will bring to our world--would be tantamount to wrong in my own personal code of ethics. (Barf. I hope I don’t really have one of these.) If I were to abort a fetus simply because it was "imperfect"—not because it was too sick to live—well, I'd feel like some kind of wicked evil plastic surgeon, like having a baby were all about me and what I wanted instead of about the baby. I’d feel like the control freak of control freaks. Like a watcher of “Extreme Makeover” gone terribly awry.

All fetuses, however, are about mothers and what we want. How could fetuses be separate from a mother's procreative desire? Looking at the physical scenario here, we could safely say they're not meant to be distinctive from one another. They happen in the same body—one feeds off the other—in the same physical space. They share the same ooze. Separating them, and especially expecting mothers to separate them—to feel something when she doesn’t or not to feel something when she does—is totally illogical on anybody’s part. I don’t care where you fall on the abortion spectrum, and I don't care what I say about what's right and wrong.

Anyway, the husband and I arrived at the lab. I had done as instructed: one hour before my appointment, I drank 2 cups of water, so that by the time I had my ultrascreen my bladder would be full. On ultrasounds of any kind, a full bladder shows up black and tissue shows up white—so a full bladder makes the fetus easier to see. This contrast is very easy to understand; it is much less tolerable to have an extremely full bladder for a fucking hour. My god. This is one of those things that Prenatal Wonder stories leave out.

When we saw the Little Pokie, she (we have no evidence that the fetus is a she; we simply think she is, and we're not going to learn the sex) was lying on her back, head facing whatever it is she can see in there. I believe it’s nothing at this point.

The husband oohed. I aahed. He got misty. I got misty. It was pretty goddamn cool. She looked a little like her arms were bent behind her head, like she was looking into the sky. She wasn’t moving.

“How come she’s not moving?” I asked.

“Babies have cycles just like we do,” said the tech. “They sleep sometimes, they move sometimes.”

“I thought she would be moving,” I said. “I’m a little freaked out that she’s not moving.”

“She’s just sleeping,” the tech repeated. “In a cycle.”

We all watched her for about 10 minutes, the tech sliding the wand over my belly and bladder.

“Why hasn’t she moved yet?” I asked. I coughed. I always have to cough. I have moderate asthma.

“Do that again,” said the tech.

“What?”

“Cough like you just did.”

I cleared my throat and about two seconds later, the Pokie sort of… well, convulsed. Her back arched and her head pulled itself off the… ground?… and then settled back again. I could see the profile of her lips, tiny and puckered against my bladder.

“Why is she moving like that?”

“There we go,” said the tech. She turned the monitor to face the husband and I, and then the Pokie turned her head toward us. The tech clicked a key on the keyboard to freeze it.
“There’s the face.”

Of course there was no detail whatsoever—just the shape of her head, very oval and large, with indiscernible bumps on each side and a shading where you'd expect a nose to be, an eye, a bend of bone.

“She looks like an alien,” said the husband. He tends to call female television stars aliens, too—the ones who are terribly and grotesquely thin, with hugely made up eyes and hair that’s supposed to look blond but looks green.

“Yep,” I said. “Little Alien Pokie.”

“We all look like aliens at first.” He was referring to those fantastic, amazing pictures in A Baby is Born that educated on us on our alien/salamander stage of development. Before that, in the first few days we’re conceived, we look like plastic—a blue blob for a heart and a thick red bendy tongue-like thing for a brain that sits on top of the blue blob, like a deluxe sundae topper.

“She’s no different.”

The tech let me expel one cup of urine before the doctor came in to verify measurements. I did so gratefully, sighing in the gleam of the restroom, and wondered why, at this moment, at this pristine and pure instance of Prenatal Wonder, I was so uncomfortable and preoccupied with my full bladder. Wasn’t I more taken with images of the Pokie? Shouldn’t those images have made me forget all about my need to urinate?

They didn’t. I was in agony when the doctor finally came in. “Can I pee yet?” I asked, Pokie immobile on the monitor, probably hearing every word, the husband probably wondering if any force could ever remove me from thoughts of my own state of being. I, absorbed with my own state of being, wondered the same thing.

“Almost,” said the doctor. She pressed lightly on my belly.

“Ugh,” I said. She took some measurements. Then we were done.

On the way home, I gazed at the pictures of the Pokie the tech had printed out, a little white body with an arm floating above her head. There’s a pretty good one of a foot and a leg. I put the pictures in the glove compartment, balancing them between two small manuals so they wouldn’t get wrinkled, and held the husband’s hand as he drove.

“Are you happy?” he asked. “

Yes,” I said.

“It’s not like the heartbeat?”

“No,” I said. I was a little grave after hearing the Pokie’s heartbeat for the first time, a little heavy and pensive.

“I feel very content,” I said, squeezing the husband's hand. It was a lovely, sunny day, and the Pokie was safe in the glove compartment, where her pictures stayed for nearly a week. Now they’re on my desk, just sitting there. She’s nearly three inches long by now.

I Am A Spoiled Bougie Brat

2005-05-03T10:09:00.000-07:00

This weekend, the husband and I went to visit the father-in-law: a three-hour drive, one night away from home. Did I look forward to it? To experiencing a new place in the mountains, an area I hadn't seen before? To having a nice dinner? To getting away, getting out of town for awhile? No. I had a lot to do this weekend, and I frankly didn't want to give up the time.

We arrive, and the father-in-law's girlfriend's house is just lovely--clean, quiet, nice, tucked away in the hills of Northern California. The father-in-law, who has been truly wonderful to both of us for as long as I've known him, and his girlfriend are even more lovely. We go to a winery and I have a sip of Chardonnay and buy some bottled marinades. We return to her house and I take a nap. We meet some of her friends--a remarkable 85 year old couple who appear to be in their 60s. I love just letting people talk. It was a good, calm time. Then the husband and I went to bed.

We not only had our own guest room--we had our own floor. The father-in-law's girlfriend has a giant den and a bedroom and full bath in her basement for guests (her children and grandchildren often visit). We had all the space in the world, all the freedom and privacy we wanted.

But the bed was tiny. You see, I am used to our king-sized bed--the one I insisted on charging years ago because I cannot sleep well with anyone--lover or friend--who is too close to me. By too close I mean within several yards. Early on in our relationship, the husband and I suffered through a full--niether of us sleeping because of my discomfort and unease. When we moved in together, we graduated to my queen (apparently I don't like being too close to myself, either) but soon that had to go, so for years now we've slept in a king that we only recently paid off. I still keep the poor, patient husband awake, yanking on the covers for my full share, jerking and rolling into one position after another.

Well, the father-in-law's girlfriend had my most dreaded bed: a full. It was the smallest full-sized bed I have ever seen, and it was so soft that I almost fell out of it when I had to get up and use the bathroom every 10 minutes. Why couldn't I just go to sleep? I had a bed--a helluva lot more than millions of people in the world. But sleeping for me was absolutely impossible, especially once the husband fell asleep and I was left to feel my neurosis down to the bone. Neurosis-free people get on my nerves. I want to wake them all up and give them something about themselves to worry about.

So I get up and go into the den and make up the hide-a-bed, which in the morning I compare to a torture rack. It was all metal, as old hide-a-beds are. I can't fall asleep until after 2. I have to pee constantly, I have to take the battery out of the clock on the wall so the ticks won't keep me awake, I have to have one pillow between my knees and one pillow in just the right place between my neck and my head, I have to be on my side just so to keep my right hip from hurting, blah blah. Endless blah. And this isn't all because of the Little Pokie. Every single problem I was having could have happened without her presence in my womb.

I had also forgotten to bring a warm jacket and my toothbrush. About a year ago, when the husband and I went to a music festival in the middle of the Southern California desert, I forgot tennis shoes and socks, shorts, a hat, a little daypack. When we go to the beach, I forget a tee shirt, sunblock, a towel. I am totally ridiculous.

So the fact that I am not a traveler, that I am not the free, laid-back spirit I have always wanted to be, hit me full force as I lay on the torture rack, rolling around, wondering how the fuck I wound up to be such a neurotic princess, wondering if the Little Pokie would turn out the same way.

I was about nine the first time I tried to sleep over at a friend's house. After I ate dinner with them--which I didn't really eat because it didn't resemble the food I ate at home--I started crying and asked to go home. The second time I tried to sleep over at a friend's house, it was at a slumber party when I was in fifth grade. That time I didn't cry--I just annoucned my desire to go home and left, and all the girls thought I was a dork. Girls are so astute.

My father's snoring used to not only keep me awake but scare me. I'd tiptoe over to his door and close it as quietly as I could, terrified of waking him up. My father did not abuse me; there wasn't really any reason for me to be terrified. I just was. Sometimes when my parents were still married, they threw parties, and I'd go to bed and scream and cry to see if anyone could hear me. Sometimes the dad or the mom came in and soothed me, and sometimes I cried until I was too tired to stay awake anymore.

So--much of my sleeping and traveling neuroses come, clearly, from childhood. I apparently felt alone and afraid much of the time. Will the Pokie be like me? An inexplicable pain in the ass? A princess? Generally more trouble than anyone has a right to be? I'm assuming, at this point, that she won't have to testify against one of her parents in court, or maneuver her way through a family of alcoholics. But I've been hearing and reading lately about folks who believe that we're born with our personalities. (No research to share just yet.) So my neuroses might not have been bred from turmoil or neglect or confusion. Perhaps my personality withstood and endured all of that, was resilient to it--and now, this is who I am. And now, this is who I always was.

So if the Little Pokie turns out to be a pain, I suppose I am charged with teaching her how to love herself anyway. This might be tough, since I am no role model for this. What do I do? "Hey, honey. Mommy's being too fucking hard on herself, and she's too hard on herself all the time, every day, like too many women in the world. But don't you do that, ok? You need to love yourself for exactly who you are, even though nobody does this."

"Ok, Mommy," she'll say. "I understand completely." Then she can reach up and put her arms around my neck and hold me until I feel better. Let's hope she's as patient as my mother was. Feeling better can take a long, long time.

Mothers Who Love Alfalfa

2005-05-02T19:08:00.000-07:00

This weekend, the husband and I took a road trip to visit his father-in-law. On the way, while he drove, I read a magazine I recently discovered called Brain, Child: A Magazine for Thinking Mothers. Despite the pretty awful title (mothers who don't think don't read it, it's of no interest to fathers--that feminist elitist rhetoric I dislike and try to avoid), the magazine is packed with substantive articles and personal essays about motherhood issues. It isn't mostly monotonous advice bordered in boxes with cute photographs in the margins, or layout after layout of pregnant models with airbrushed arms. And Brain, Child contains no advertisements.

Anyway, I read a brief descriptive article about a new music festival that's been going on for the last few years: Mamapalooza. Yes, that's right. Mamapalooza. The name and the concept struck me as pretty silly, although I did appreciate the idea in some ways. It's a festival with performances by bands of mothers. A few of the band names are Placenta and Housewives on Prozac (whose music I'll probably explore soon). It sounded sort of in-your-face and punkish and funny, but I was afraid of it taking itself too seriously, not being ironic enough or something. In other words, I judged the shit out of it because it was a woman-thing. (I can be a big misogynist like everyone else sometimes, too.) The article didn't imply that these women were trying to make a political statement--just that they wanted to perform as a community of mothers to attract other mothers, bond, laugh, and be creative together.

Well, this wasn't what I stressed when I described Mamapalooza to the husband.

"Sounds stupid," he said. We were speeding along the interstate, through a bunch of fields and orchards.

"Why?" I asked.

"What's the point of it?" he asks. "Why do they have to call it Mothers Who Rock?" This is the name of the movement who puts the festival together. "What is it supposed to do?"

The husband is a feminist and an Indie music officianado-snob. I'm well aware of both these elements of his personality and beliefs, and I like them. Despite the latter, his dismissal surprised me.

"What do you mean what's the point of it?" I said. "They're marginalized."

"So?"

"They're getting together to make their own music for an audience of their peers. What's not to get?"

"But what's that supposed to do? Why would you go for such a narrow audience? Why not open it up?"

"What do you mean why not open it up?" I was baffled. The husband, of all people, doesn't understand why a marginalized group would want to get together? What the fuck? And what the fuck was he doing, dismissing mothers? "They don't want to."

"What are you getting so upset about?" he asked.

"I just don't understand what you don't understand about this," I said.

"It's just like Lilith Fair," he said. "That audience thing."

"Lilith Fair might be stupid," I said. "But it's a group of women who want to put women's ideas and art at the forefront for once. Every rock and roll everything is really men's music, anyway! But that goes without saying. You know this!"

"But as soon as you call it a women's thing, the audience is restricted. Is that what they want? What good does that do?"

"I don't know," I said.

"Why are you so defensive?" he asked.

"They're marginalized," I said. "They probably want to make some kind of political statement to members of their own community. What's not to get?"

"Is that what the article says? That they're political?"

"Well," I said, wondering why I said they were political. "No. But they're certainly trying to do something like that. I think you're dismissing them because they're too gyno. You always do that. Anything by women for women isn't serious or something."

"I listen to women all the time!" he said. "Women guitarists, women bands, women everything."

"I think that's what's going on here," I said. "You're dismissing all this because it's a woman thing and it isn't this perfect-performance indie shit you like."

"You have got to be kidding," he said. "Give me some credit! So you think that I hate women or something? That I have a problem?"

"I didn't say that!" I said. "You always do this! Stop being hyperbolic!"

"I can think whatever I want about whatever I want," he said. "Give me some credit."

"You're the one who's judging them without knowing anything about them because they're mothers."

"I can judge whatever I want. I can think whatever I want about whatever I want."

"You certainly can," I said. I was trying not to swear at him. I was trying not to cry. What's happened to me?

"You're the one who politicized it," he said.

God damn him.

"Yep," I said. "And I am done fucking talking to you."

"What, you're done now? We're not talking about this anymore?"

"No." I turned the pages of Brain, Child as we sped along the interstate. Livid livid pissed. Determined not to be the one who spoke first.

We drove in silence for about 15 minutes. The husband offered me an Altoid. I refused by shaking my head. Not a word. Not first.

Then I broke. I always break. I fucking hate that. "I can't stand arguing with you when you get sarcastic and hyperbolic," I said.

"Why did you get so mad?" he asked.

"You just dismissed them so fast."

"So? I can dismiss whoever I want."

"Of that I am well aware."

"Why are you so mad?"

"I don't know! Shut up!"

"Do you want to talk about this or not?"

"Yes."

"Then what's wrong?"

"You dismissed mothers."

"What if I don't agree with them?"

"Then don't."

"So if a group of mothers decides to jump off a cliff, would you support them?"

"Come on!" I said. "That's slightly different than a group of mothers making music together."

"Okay, okay," he said. "So if a group of mothers, say..." he nodded to the field of alfalfa out my window. "Got together and stood in a field and proclaimed their love for alfalfa, would you support them?"

I nodded vehemently. "Yes I would!"

He started laughing. "You would?"

I laughed, too. "I sure as HELL would!"

The husband was getting hysterical. "So you would support MWLA?"

Tears were in my eyes. I was laughing so hard I was gasping for air. I knew I would get asthma. He pronounced it "Muh-huh-luh-wuh."

"Fuck yes!"

"Mothers Who Love Alfalfa? Standing in a field in solidarity?"

"Holding their goddamn hoes in the air!"

I have always been extremely sensitive to women's issues, and angry at people who judge them, and ignorant and reactionary when I judge them myself. I think that Mamapalooza is actually a great idea, but I don't know why these women have to call it something so canned, overused, and unoriginal. I think I'm a little disappointed with their choice of titles and I hate being disappointed in the creative energies of women whose work and efforts I would probably respect. I think that the husband had valid points and reasonable questions but got snotty, as music snobs do while sipping Bass Ale.

I think sometimes that I should and I should not take everything so seriously. It's just that we judge mothers so harshly for everything. So these musicians wanted to reach an audience by using an overused title. So what? Why do I get so upset about it?

I judged my own mother very harshly all my life until just a few years ago--I gave her a different set of standards than the ones I gave my father. I still struggle with this and despise myself for it at times, and I don't want to pass this cultural lapse onto the Little Pokie, nor do I want her to be afraid to own up to her own biases. Biases are fucked up, but they make us who we are. Biases can, for example, see you through a mundane drive and insulate you from what you don't understand. Bias is grounded in purpose. But once you see it, you can release yourself from all that tension that makes it so strong, and you can appreciate people again. After that, you can laugh until you ache, just like when you were a little girl, holding your stomach, afraid only of missing your next breath.

Pregnant Women Must Be Pretty Stupid and Somewhat Deaf

2005-04-28T07:27:00.000-07:00

Is there any other group in the universe, besides, say, dieters (like Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, etc.) who get so constantly reminded of what they're supposed to eat, as if no one ever told them? The first time I heard what pregnant women were supposed to eat and not eat, I think I was... um... a fucking teenager. Every time I look up, my weekly newsletter and my pregnancy guidebook (which I am about to set aflame in a backyard ceremony), is telling me really important things, like--eat a balanced diet, exercise, rest, feel good about yourself. And not only at week one--at week eight, thirteen, and probably again at week 35. While some people might say something like--well, these references are offering you steady support because pregnancy is hard--I would dare to suggest that these references think I'm a fucking idiot.

If you take some of these quotes in isolation--not only about food--they're pretty absurdly funny and annoying. Take this first one. I'm in week 13, and here were some pointers for me (this is not verbatim): "If your partner hasn't been involved in your pregnancy, he will now most likely jump in with both feet! This is usually the time when friends and family start getting more actively involved in your pregnancy." Until now? It's been 3 months! If it takes any partner this long to get involved, to not take you seriously until you start to have that cute bulge at the waist, I think we all have problems that a pregnancy guide could never come close to addressing. And this one: "You're healthy, you're still relatively thin, so feel good! Feel beautiful!" Well I'd better feel beautiful now, because once three more months have gone by, I'll apparently feel like a fat, cramped, unattractive shrew. I'm still relatively thin? Well if I weren't, I guess I'd already be feeling like an immobile cow, like a failure for being overweight in the first place. And here's a real favorite at week 13: "Have you started eating a balanced diet?" No, I'm afraid for some reason I didn't know this was important while carrying a fucking fetus.

What a guilt trip. This last one especially: if I haven't been eating a balanced diet (I personally haven't been doing great with food, but I've been doing all right), this means I was either unaware of how much a fetus needs good food and prenatal vitamins, or that I haven't given a rat's ass. If it's the former, I'm hopelessly clueless; if it's the latter, I must lack the proper proportions of motherly sacrifice and will power. Maybe some women do use pregnancy as an excuse to eat whatever they want (I've only met one woman who admitted to this, but she didn't admit to it--she just said it without a hint of guilt), but more often than not, I read about such women in pregnancy guidebooks. I suppose that's the place for them.

But why have I been doing only okay with a balanced diet, anyway? Why aren't I eating, for example, the "Pregnancy Diet," that What to Expect When You're Expecting recommends? No sweets, no caffeine, no processed food, lots of veggies and fibrous foods and protein--just health, health, health. A few years ago, I went on a diet--a very strict one--to rid my body of anything that it could use to produce yeast in my vagina. I was on this diet for three months hard core, and it was so strict it put the "Pregnancy Diet" to shame. The diet worked and my years of chronic yeast infections went away, never to return. So how come I can't summon the same sort of will for a supersonically healthy diet for my fetus?

Well, sorry to everybody who writes pregnancy guidebooks and makes huge posters and brochures for doctors offices about what we're supposed to eat--but I don't want to even try to be on a supersonically healthy diet. I got no excuses. I got no rationale. I don't fucking want to do it.

It's funny--after that last sentence I kept trying to explain my answer. My first attempt was a sentence about how getting my shit done while pregnant is hard enough; the second attempt was a sentence about how pregnant women are made to feel so crappy. But fuck it. I don't want to do it, so I'm not, and I'm going to let the need to explain myself sit uncomfortably in my gut as I end this post with the expectation of being regarded as a responsible, functional, healthy, honest person. Not just to my three readers, either. To myself. Because I still buy the bullshit and let it make me feel.

Appearances

2005-04-23T16:10:00.000-07:00

Just so my three readers know: I haven't posted in awhile because I've been swamped, busy grading papers and working. I also haven't posted in awhile because I haven't felt like it because I've been somewhat overcome this last week with depression.

I don't know where it swept itself up from, but it is most definitely here. I'm terribly unmotivated, terribly apathetic, and terribly negative and sad. I don't want to take Prozac because damn the medical community and its assurances that certain antis are fine during pregnancy. The medical community has thought that all kinds of things are fine during pregnancy that aren't. (Thank you Sandra Steingraber for writing the book I'm reading now, Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey Through Motherhood. More specific and engaging and true than any other preg thing I've read so far. Wonderful science writing. And thanks to the good friend who leant it to me.)

My plan? Well, I'm at 12 weeks now. According to the goddamn narratives pregnant women are bombarded with every minute of every day, I should start feeling better soon. But as soon as the husband and I get paid (a few days from now), I'm going to buy a light that psychologists use to administer bright-light therapy. I've done a hair's worth of reading about it, and bright-light therapy has helped a lot of depressed pregnant women. I'll do some more research, but I believe I'll sit under the light for about 10 minutes a day and I'll start feeling better pretty quickly.

If the light doesn't work, or if some happy hormones don't start excreting, I'm going to have to take some Prozac and I'm going to have to not feel guilty about it.

What I am now is just low. A little fuzzy with lowness. Don't wanna get up, don't wanna do anything--even things I like to do. And apparently, I don't wanna talk about the birth of my baby.

This morning we finally got in the mail the latest edition of A Child is Born, with unbelievable color photographs of fertilization, the journey of the sperm (I don't envy them), the development of egg into an embryo, into a fetus, into a baby. They were fascinating until we got to the birth part, where on the first page of the section sat a naked woman bearing down, vagina out for everyone to see, face contorted with effort. And I put the book down and didn't want to see anymore. I started crying. Nothing new there. That sure as shit shouldn't shock anybody.

The husband asked if I was afraid of the pain. I am not afraid of the pain. Labor hurts like mother fucking hell, and I know it, and I'm frankly not afraid of it at all. I don't know why not. I think it will make me strong and I think I will learn something crucial from it. I think I'm looking forward to it.

So no, I am not afraid of hours of excruciating, killer pain. I, Feminist-Wanna-Be, am afraid of shitting, of passing smelly substances, of my orifices making ungodly sounds that could put a solid fart to shame, of my face exploding with bared teeth and popping eyeballs, of my throat making guttural and grotesque sounds. I am afraid of not looking pretty. In other words, the well-socialized woman has asserted herself again: The most amazing, mysterious, beautiful thing in the world is in my future, and I am afraid of my fucking appearance.

Let me address the appropriate response narrative: when you're actually in labor, you won't give a rat's ass about any of that. You'll be totall focused on what you're doing. Yeah. This is probably true. So what--this is supposed to reassure me? This cliche is supposed to erase the fact that I am superficial enough to worry about this at all? This cliche is supposed to what--dictate my experience? Fuck that. I am tired of narratives and cliches telling me what to do and telling me which of my feelings are important and which ones are not.

No wonder I am so depressed.

I am a well-socialized woman, but I am also a very, very aware and angry woman who knows damn well that all this appearance concern is bullshit, that women are fostered into feeling guilty and inadequate if they don't fall within socially constructed mores of beauty, if they don't behave like good pregnant women, if they don't act like good mothers. See, I know all this. I've known all this for years and years. I become more aware of the way all these cycles work every day I am alive. My mother has had emotional breakdowns over them. So have I.

But awareness does not equal a change of thinking habits--in my case, anyway--and it does not free me from all this shit. You'd think it would. But it doesn't.

Yesterday, my class and I were discussing an essay I had assigned: "Hunger is Ideology" by Susan Bordo. It's about how the ideology of women is manifested and produced and reproduced in advertisements for food products. It's a tremendously informative and witty piece of writing--and it doesn't bitch about all this. It analyzes and explains how it works. It's not old, rant-like information. It's incredibly insightful.

One of my students who has children--several of them do; I'm teaching 4 mothers this semester--really reacted to the piece. She mentioned how she struggles with feeling like she doesn't take good care of her children. (I know this student quite well. She takes excellent care of her children.) One reason, she said, is because she hates cooking--the Bordo piece made it clear to her why she always feels so frustrated with herself, so inadequate, so under the mother par.

"So what do you do with this frustration?" I asked. (I am not a therapist kind of teacher at all. But her comments were something that deserved acknowledgment and exploration, especially in the context of the Bordo article, which alluded to really deep-seeded and dark problems that women in our culture have with food.) "Do you talk about it?"

"Oh no," she said, good-naturedly, as she always is. "I just feel guilty all the time."

"Do you all know what she's talking about?" I asked, looking at the rest of the class, which consists of about 11 women and 7 men. "That guilt that always nudges you for not being good enough, or something?"

Heads nodded. (Men are no strangers to feelings of inadequacy.)

"Well let me ask you, then," I said. "How come awareness of that guilt--that it comes from stereotypes and isn't logical or justified--doesn't enable us to shut it off? To just dismiss it outright and never let it in again?"

Silence. No one had the answer. Damn. Sometimes that class has answers that just blow me away. Not yesterday. A few students talked about the cyclical nature of stereotypes, how deep they go, etc. But no one really understood or knew why awareness didn't equal a change in our behavior and our feelings about ourselves.

Well, I don't have the answer either, and I don't have a nice ending where I can say that finding the answer is another thing the Little Pokie might bring to a world that needs her. I can only hope that she won't get as bogged down in bullshit as other women who are 35 years old and find themselves weighted down with empty concerns, concerns that don't do justice to our potential as fucntional human beings.

Bummed

2005-04-17T21:22:00.000-07:00

I thought I had turned this nausea/fatigue corner until yesterday morning, when I woke up and felt like I'd been nailed by a semi, like ball-bearings were pulling me to the ground. I've been nauseated and dead tired and god dammit, I've been depressed.

"It's just going to be so hard," I cried to the husband last night. And I mean cried. Sobbed.
Wracked with worry and ambiguous feelings toward the Little Pokie. What's going to happen to the husband and me once the Pokie is here, being the little dictator that babies of course always are? Will we exist no more? Will we still get along? Will we be too tired to speak to one another? Will we ever see each other again once we start working? Will we disagree on how to take care of her? Have emotionally draining bourgoise arguments about what products to purchase, like we did this afternoon, when I said I wanted a stroller and a car seat that weren't adjoined and he said that my desire for said separation of baby implements didn't make any sense? Are we headed into a world where our relationship will become more and more effaced by constant caretaking, discussions of diaper rash remedies, and swearing (how on earth will we ever stop swearing?), of whether the Little Pokie is crying for a feeding or a better day?

The answer: uh, yeah. Probably. This is probably where things are going.

But what's more troubling is death. The Little Pokie coming along is the start of the Death of My Adolescence. Of those moments when I drank my face off or waited tables all day and finished the week by hanging out with close friends, soaking in conversation and flirtation and the regular, orgasmic thrills that came with a life that didn't involve cares of consequence or long-term goals or anything even remotely "adult." When I camped all across the country with a close friend and didn't have a meta-care in the world, when all I wanted was to finish a short story and earn 50 more bucks to cover my rent. I didn't have cares or particular concerns for my well-being or for the well-being of the world except in a vague, inert way. I lived in houses with best friends and we stayed up late talking about our personal griefs, drinking, listening to music, going to shows at bars, going to the creek, eating chips and salsa, washing everything down with glorious abandon, getting to know ourselves.

So much for that. This is all coming to an abrupt end. It already has. I'm already buried in concern for my fetus, worried about getting enough calcium and sleep and protein, avoiding nail-polish remover and a running microwave. The thrills don't even happen anymore--those thrills of social interaction that you drown in while you're drinking. Although I really don't miss alcohol--and thank god I'm not tempted to drink--I miss very much that elation that always comes with a good buzz. A life with cares of consequence, in my case anyway, means a buzzless life, a life of unyeilding and frequent sobriety. No more Release of Tension at Happy Hour, no more inexpensive, long, easy road trips, no more treks to a dive bar for a cheap martini. Not with the Little Pokie in my womb and under my care.

And dammit, these last two days I'm just having a hard time accepting all this. What I'm supposed to say, as a well-socialized woman, is this: I know it's all worth it. I am supposed to say this in so many different ways to explain my ambiguous feelings and my reluctance to make sacrifices.

Well I don't know that it's all going to be worth it! How the fuck would I know that? I see mothers every day who neglect and mistreat their children; they clearly do not feel it's all worth it. If the women in my family felt like it was all worth it (with the exception of my mother), they sure as shit never told me. And what mother in her right mind would tell anyone that she didn't think it was worth it? What would happen to our expectations and our idealized versions of motherhood if someone said it wasn't worth it? Andrea Yates certainly said this through her actions (keep in mind her psychosis, though); mothers who for whatever reason kill or abuse or neglect their children certainly must feel, somehow, that the sacrifices aren't worth it. So where do their feelings come from? Are they normal? Sick? Sociopathic?

Let's hope I'm none of those things. I think we'd all know this by now--surely the husband would have a clue. What do these feelings mean, then? When I see the Little Pokie, all bloody and slimy and new and beautiful, will my love for her override all the love I have for the lifestyles I'd like to maintain? Will she override all the love I have for my freedom?

Probably so. Now that I'm writing about all this, I can actually picture the emotional override (thank god--it doesn't always come, this image) her amazing screams, her curious cries, her soft baby skin that I'll press against my cheek, her little belly button, all scabby and sore, her toothless, hungry little mouth.

I guess I'm having a baby. I guess I really, really am.

Nobody Told Me I'd Shit Myself

2005-04-15T19:44:00.000-07:00

Flatulence is certainly an issue in my life. I pass gas more often than I did before I was pregnant (which was quite a bit anyway--just ask the husband), and it has been rather rank. These are not your everyday variety. They are more frequent, more visceral, and more intense. And they smell very bad.

When I'm home, I have no problem letting them go. It is a relief to let them go. The husband adjusts. What can he do? I'm pregnant and it's his child and our marriage works. What does he have to complain about except the smell? And the smell goes away.

Of course in public, this is another matter. I will not be an anonymous gas passer. I refuse to pass gas when I'm certain no one will approach me and then suddenly endure the experience of someone approaching me, noticing with silent dismay that I have indeed passed gas, that I am uncouth and gross, that I have no self control.

A sound policy, in my opinion. One I formed LONG before I became pregnant. Apparently, however, I have a lot more to worry about than a plain old fart.

This afternoon, after I taught my last class of the day, I stopped in the restroom to pee (something I also do twice as often). I wiped myself and noticed that the toilet paper was, you know, sort of soiled. Not the worst thing in the world--everyone sometimes misses a little sanitary move. But this was a little heavy, a little shocking, so just for fun, not expecting to find anything, I checked my underwear.

I had shit myself.

Not a lot. Just a little bit. And I hadn't liquidly shit myself. What I saw, sitting there on the jon, was a significant dried patch/clump of shit in my underwear. I didn't scream. I inhaled sharply, removed my underwear, balled it up, and stuffed in a zippered pocket of my shoulder bag. (I made sure that the shit side was buried in the clean fabric.)

As I made clear, I do not fart in public--so this was no a runaway incident, no bubbles of deception. What had happened was what happens to a lot of pregnant women, something called (love it) fecal or anal incontinence. This usually occurs postpartum, but not always. I apparently got a little foreshadowing today of what might be to come.

Since I'm not even finished with my fucking first trimester, we can all imagine what will happen during labor with the Little Pokie.

"God, I hope I don't shit," I told the husband months ago. "Happens in labor all the time. It happened to Annie Lamott."

"You might shit?"

"Sure," I said, trying to sound, you know, perfectly and feministly okay with shitting in front of him and a handful of strangers, perfectly okay with my body doing what I suppose we all unfortunately think of as purely disgusting rather than natural and disgusting. Doctors, for god's sake, those motherfuckers, spend their lives exploring stool. It's what we are.

But of course I am really not okay with this. I am not in the least bit radically feminist or nonchalant about this bodily function. I am not okay with shitting myself or with anyone watching me do it. I am not as okay with the body and all it accompanies as I would like to be.

Perhaps this is what the Little Pokie is for. To reach the body in me, in all of us, the body that I, apparently, for some socially conditioned reason, no longer want to immerse myself in. One that long, long ago I was more comfortable talking about. I remember being at a friend's house when I was about eight. I was in her bathroom, taking a little-girl dump, the door of course closed. Then, from the hallway, my friend called.

"What was that?"

"What?"

"That noise?"

"Nothing," I said.

"Are you pushing?" she said.

I thought about it for a second. "Yeah," I said.

"It's hard," she said, through the door. "I do it all the time."

Lookin for a Heartbeat

2005-04-08T21:49:00.000-07:00

We started the first midwife appointment getting questions about our history. The husband's questions were fewer than mine for obvious reasons, but he had less to say.

"Anyone in your family suffer from heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes?"

"No."

"Alcoholism, drug abuse, depression?"

"No."

"Have you ever had a venereal disease?"

"No."

Okay--onto me. I asked the midwife if she might run out of room on her chart. The husband kept from cracking up until the VD question--I'm no stranger to them--and then he just let her rip. None of my answers were new to him. If you can't tell your partner about your past and laugh about it, about all the things you've done, the stupid and the wise, the foul and the sweet, then what the fuck is the point of having a partner at all?

Then the midwife examined me. The husband was in the room. When I heard weeks ago that he would/could be present for the exam, I was sure I wouldn't allow him back there. It seemed inappropriate and sort of disgusting. Why? Am I disgusted by my own body? Nervous about the husband really--like, really--seeing it? After all, he's going to be there, seeing everything, throughout labor and all the stuff that happens up to and after--wild and crazy discharge, strange odors, stitches, soaks, sitting my large ass on a rubber doughnut, absolutely no sex, possible infections, hemerrhoids, scar tissue. Why wouldn't I be comfortable with him there?

I suppose I've always thought of my time with doctors or members of the medical profession as very, very private, whether it's for a gynecological exam or an x-ray. I suppose this is an appropriate way to think about medical care, but it probably isn't an appropriate way to think about prenatal care. Everyone knows when you're pregnant, after all--and yet so few people, women included, know much about the female body or about how it works. But despite my own beliefs, my pregnant body feels like it should be private and off limits. Closed even to the husband. Don't I have to have some boundaries, for fuck's sake? Especially since they're all about to disappear with every expanding inch of my belly?

So I'm getting an exam--the midwife is sliding her fingers inside me, feeling my cervix, checking my uterus, scraping cells from the cervix for a pap, and the husband is standing at my head, looking at all the pictures the midwife has on the wall of babies she's delivered and their parents. (Around 1600 deliveries altogether, she said.) The husband is whistling a little, not in the least bit uptight, looking at the pictures, smiling at me from time to time. I wasn't particularly nervous, just pensive, but he was terrific.

On the way there, in the car, he'd said, "So you're going to have to take off all your clothes and everything?"

"Yeah," I said. "All the major exams are like that."

He shook his head. "Wow. Men don't even go to doctors."

I was surprised that he didn't know what women do in their regular gyno exams--but why would he know? Why would any man know, really, who didn't express a concrete interest? Unless a male porn star is ejaculating on the surgically enhanced breasts of a moaning receptacle, men have been trained by our culture to be not only repelled but immediately bored by the function of women's bodies, by how they work. As far as many of them are concerned (I'm not speaking about all men here--just every single one I've ever met or known in my life), the female body is something that they don't know about, that they don't have to know about, and that they don't want to know about unless it involves how to get us off--and sometimes even that isn't what they care about. Part of this ignorance is simply accessibility (it's not like they can just look down and see everything, after all), but the other part has to do with the fact that our bodies--how they work and why they work the way they do--just aren't presented by most anyone except for feminists as important. And we all know that feminists are just a bunch of whiny crank extremists.

When the midwife was pulling off her gloves, picking up the slide of the cells she scraped from my cervix to send to the lab, I asked, "So do I feel pregnant?"

She looked at me, just a little puzzled it seemed. "Oh yes," she said. "You feel right about 9 weeks."

That was Pregnancy is Real, Part One. I rested my head down, looked at the ceiling, heard the tiny little clink of the midwife's earrings. The husband was standing by my head.

The midwife then took out what looked like an a.m. transistor radio. "We're going to listen for heart tones now," she said.

"You'll be able to hear them?" I asked. Head went up.

"Maybe," she said. She parted the gown and the sheet to expose my lower abdomen, smoothed on some clear ultrasound goo, pulled what looked like a thick pen from the transistor, and started moving it around, pressing it into my skin in small circles. Head went down.

Boo--wheesh... boo-wheesh... boo-wheesh. Head went up.

"That's you," she said.

"Oh." Head went down.

"Yeah," said the husband. "They'll be a lot faster, won't they?"

The midwife nodded, moving the pen around, pressing. Boo--wheesh... boo-wheesh... boo-wheesh. The sounds came through in a mass of static and crackling, as if the antennae had broken, like the cheap radios my mother always used until the end of time. She still has one, a coathanger stuck into the antenna slot.

Boo--wheesh... boo-wheesh... boo-wheesh. Head stays down. She's moving the pen everywhere, swishing it in slow, concentrated squiggles from one hip bone to the other. Head goes up so I can look at the husband. He's staring at my pelvis, then at me. I say with my eyes that I don't think we're going to hear anything. Head goes down.

"There it is," the midwife says. Head goes up. Ptoom ptoom ptoom ptoom ptoom ptoom ptoom. Like a tiny puppy lapping water.

"Oh my god," says the husband. Ptoom ptoom ptoom.

"Oh my god," I say. Ptoom ptoom ptoom. It is not swallowed by anything. It is tiny, just barely making sounds through the crackling, but it's there. The midwife times it, holds the pen in place and declares it at 180 beats per minute.

The husband is weepy. He stands by my head and smooths my hair, kisses my forehead. "Wow," he says.

"Wow," I say. Pregnancy is Real, Part Two. I'm weepy, but I'm not elated. I am not, in fact, elated at all. I am ponderous. I am wondering how the that little tiny living thing got there, inside of my body. I'm wondering if it really should be there at all. It is a total shock. I didn't know what to make of it. I needed a minute, an hour, a month or two, a year or ten to digest this. This was big. This was Real.

This was the Little Pokie.

Doctors

2005-04-08T19:57:00.000-07:00

I would like to take this opportunity to be THANKFUL that I do not have to contend with, assert myself around, and feel dismissed by a male doctor during my pregnancy. I’m using midwives—a group of three who have a practice—and they are wonderful. I had my first appointment today. I heard the Little Pokie’s heartbeat. (More on that in the next entry.)

I am down on doctors more than ever. After reading Kaplan and learning how they exploited, demeaned, used, and overcharged women who needed abortions before Roe v. Wade, and after spending too many hours of my life in doctors’ offices for everything from tonsilitis to depression to foot pain to asthma while enduring rudeness, incompetence, and general marginalization of my concerns, I am hoping to be rid of doctors for as long as possible. If I need one, I need one, of course, but let’s face it: many doctors just fucking suck. Why they suck is because they are perhaps lousy sexist people to begin with, or maybe because the combined force of the medical institution—with its vacuous hallways and plastic plants and monolithic insurance representatives and orgasmic bureaucracy—and the capitalist system in which they try to practice medicine humanely have morphed these doctors into condescending, self-absorbed cretins. Cretins might make good doctors. Cretinous doctors might even respect their patients—in their own unpalatable ways.

This rant is likely a product of a memory that has lately resurfaced. When I was 22, I developed a pain in my wrist in an isolated spot. I was waiting tables full-time and started wearing those over-the-counter wrist braces, thinking the spot was a fluke and would go away. A month later, the pain was worse, so I did what any ignorant person who doesn’t have a “regular doctor” does: I went to the emergency room.

The male nurse told me to undress and put on a gown (one of those papery ones; it was pink and disposable).

“Do I really need to?” I asked. “I’m only here for my wrist.”

“Well, yes,” he said. “You never know what they’ll ask you to do.”

So I put on the gown, feeling weak and stupid for doing so (this is how it all starts, with the tiniest, itsiest bitsiest of things). I was waiting on the exam table, in my socks, underwear, and disposable gown, when in came Dr. Bellew, a middle-aged man who had what resembled hardened mashed potatoes lodged between his teeth. He marched straight over to me and stood right between my legs, his torso pressing against the edge of the exam table. He asked me questions and with each little phrase he breathed hard and quick, as if he were jerking off to a porno.

I didn’t slap the shit out of him. I simply edged back on the table as far as I could, which wasn’t very far, and answered his questions. He examined my wrist, declared nothing was wrong with it, instructed me to take pain reliever, and left—but right before he closed the door, he stuck his head back inside and made a comment I can’t quite recall (although for years afterward, I could). But it was a joke about the fact that I was wearing a gown and did not need to be. The implication was clear—he thought I was something of a little tease, a flirty young thing.

Why didn’t I slap the shit out of him, you might be asking? Like any educated woman with self-respect (there’s that useless meaningless term again) should? (I would like to answer this question, which is of course about sexual harassment, without the use of clichés, which institutions are incapable of doing.) I did not slap the shit out of him because, despite the fact that ANYONE who would have seen that interaction would have known I was being harassed—I was unsure that I was being harassed. And if I was being harassed... well, I was afraid of offending the doctor. I was afraid of hurting his feelings. I found him fragile and pathetic. I felt sorry for him.

I would very much like to seem smart and strong and witty and say that the reason I felt sorry for a man while he was in fact harassing me was because he was emasculated enough to get off on harassing his patients—people who are already, by definition, subservient to him, people who already have a lot less power than he does. Unfortunately, this is not how it was at all. I was not strong or smart. I was simply well-socialized, and a well-socialized woman such as myself is trained like a bitch to intercept anything that threatens the male ego and zap it. This is the active form of passivity that characterizes the well-socialized woman, a woman such as myself.

I hope that the Little Pokie will slap the daylights out of any man, anytime, who treats her like that doctor—like other doctors, in fact—have treated me. I hope she files complaints against such people—complaints I started to file on Dr. Jackoff but never completed because of fear and apathy. You’d think with a mother like me, the Little Pokie would know how to handle such things. But consider this: my own mother is a feminist. I wore ERA tee shirts to grade school and once did a Show and Tell to explain to my third grade class that girls could do anything boys could do. None of that stuff, until TOO MUCH LATER IN MY LIFE, made a difference in how I reacted and acted and behaved. What this means is that in the match between Active Passivity and Social Movement That Children Cannot Comprehend Unless They Are Allowed To Explore Their Own Questions, Active Passivity wins. And it probably wins in other battles that are a lot less clear cut.

So I’ll try to give the Little Pokie room to ask her own questions and find her own answers. But what if she doesn’t feel the same way I do? What if she doesn’t like feminism? What if she doesn’t see the oppression I see every fucking day and get angry about it; what if she doesn’t feel oppressed?

Well, she doesn’t have to. She simply has to walk out of any doctor’s office she wants.

Childhood

2005-04-03T22:26:00.000-07:00

About an hour ago, I was crying because I was worried about whether I'd love the Little Pokie after it was born.

"You take care of every stray animal you see," said the husband, "you fall in love with every baby you know. Why wouldn't you love your own?"

Good point. But what I'm worried about is genes. Specifically my mother's. (Although why I'm singling her out is a question worth exploring.)

After I was born, my mother was rendered impotent with depression she's been struggling with her entire life. She became extremely depressed and got into bed. "When I got out," she recalls, "it was spring." So my father, bless him, not only took care of me and my mother but also my older brother, who was then a toddler. My father did this while working full-time.

So after I was born, the depression took my mother away. Doctors of course called it post-partum, but since she was depressed already, I don't think that's quite accurate; it doesn't explain what happened very thoroughly at all. I suppose no label does, no word does, but in my mother's case, considering the fact that she's now struggling with depression to an even more debilitating degree, I don't think what she had is covered by the term "post-partum." It was more like a mental shutdown of some kind, maybe like a physiological giving up or something. (Try struggling with depression--major depression--for about 50 years. You must wonder why you try.)

I write all this about my mother as if I know. I don't. I'm speculating on years of stories and references remarkable in their vagueness and brevity. This is what children do, and many of them don't do it accurately. How could they? Parents are not going to tell us everything.

So my crying came from feeling overwhlemed by what's coming--but this overwhelmedness, which is of course common, was and is compounded by my past. By a past that actually had very little to do with me, a past that I think of ALL THE TIME now that I'm pregnant. As if I didn't think about my goddamn past often enough, consider it, recall it, feel it like a cool wind in the wrong season at various times of the year, month, week, day. I now think about my childhood all the time. Not just my mother's depression, but my father's neglect, abuse I suffered in varying degrees, the lonliness that followed and eventually drew me into some pretty fucking dark places, alone in my room, scared of my peers, feeling sort of desperate for... for... yeah, that's where it gets kind of impenetrable, because when I try to figure out what I was so desperate for, cliches fill in the blank. Love. Acceptance. Affection. Vomit. Those cliches and desires are about as informative as Fox News on a good day. They don't get me anywhere. They don't accomplish any kind of growth or facilitate any understanding. They sure as hell don't facilitate a change in destructive behavior--at least, they didn't for me.

But I was desperate. I was a very sadly desperate girl, especially as a teenager, and my desperation was most definitely connected to my childhood, to these chronic and constant voids of active and attentive and engaged parenting. (I was not, however, hungry, disabled, or impoverished. I think most of us would settle for neglected any day, but it's unfortunate that there has to be some kind of trade off here. I was in therapy for so fucking long that it's become natural for me to think of childhoods in terms of who lost the most: oh yeah, your parents were alcoholic? Well, mine were alcoholic and dead by the time I was seven. Oh yeah, mine were cocaine addicts and alcoholics and one of them killed the other one. And on and on and on.)
The thing is, lots of kids emerge from neglectful, horrific childhoods and they ain't desperate. So any generalizations or even conclusions don't really work--we have our own stories and we react to difficult situations in different ways.

Well, I'm afraid of getting depressed after I birth the Little Pokie, of not wanting to touch her, of not wanting to hold her or help her. I'm afraid of not feeling much for her. I'm afraid of numbness. (I had a student once--smart as hell she was, but boy was she an annoying loudmouth--who openly admitted in a class discussion that she did not feel attached at all to her second child but didn't suffer from depression. I admired her for her honesty but attributed her lack of attachment to her penchant for white supremacist ideas.) And this fear is probably "normal," sure--but it's grounded in a past that is becoming a greater and greater part of my present. Despite my age, my childhood has not ended. I don't really think it's ever supposed to. It's something we're supposed to draw on at various times in our lives, and for me, pregnancy is clearly one of these times. So maybe the Little Pokie is what will enable me not to "move on"--such a stupid cliche; I suppose if this were about relocating to the suburbs, the metaphor might work--but to figure some shit out, to think about my childhood, wretched as it was, in new ways. Ways more accurate. Ways more enlightening. What has not changed in my life, ever, is that I think a lot about my childhood; what won't change, I don't think, ever, is that I'll think a lot about my childhood; but what might change now, I think, possibly, is HOW I think about my childhood. Maybe when the Little Pokie finally emerges, my childhood won't be so dark anymore; maybe the actions of my parents will make more sense when the husband and I make mistakes; maybe I'll think of myself alone in my room as what it was BESIDES lonely, because it was more complex than that. It was actually better than that. It was me needing to be there, me simply needing, in an alone kind of place, finding a purpose, growing up. Thinking.

Awake

2005-03-30T17:53:00.000-08:00

Wow. This is pretty hard-core--nausea, fatigue, consitpation, gas, bloating, belly pains that at times HURT when I stand, as if I've just finished a grueling round of sit-ups. Sometimes sharp pains hit my lower abdomen for a second or two; then they go away.

I'm not having a miscarriage--what's happening is the ligaments in my pelvis are stretching and getting thicker to make room for the Little Pokie, so they hurt. They are sore. It's a common thing, but when it first started happening I was thinking ectopic, I was thinking miscarriage, I was thinking some obscure awful condition that would result in the end of my pregnancy. Sure I was. I rubbed the Pokie and told her to stick around, that I'd never, ever leave her. Then I called the midwife to confirm what I knew already about the ligaments and the muscle soreness, but of course I'm still a bit worried. I think it's probably impossible not to be. I think this is part of the deal.

Again I'm floored by the mental and psychological weight of pregnancy, and I guess I'm more floored by the fact that men are not a part of this at all; that they have no idea what it's like. I'm not saying they suck. I'm not saying they're stupid. I'm saying that they have no idea what it's like.

But having the husband--my god, what a difference. He's doing more household work, some cooking, being extremely understanding and nurturing. What if I were alone? What if I were a teenager keeping a secret? Jesus. What if I were a single mother who was pregnant with her second child? What if I didn't have the opportunities to rest and nap that my life and luck afford me? What the fuck is wrong with the world not to provide these things to pregnant women, regardless of age, class, or circumstance? Now that I have a bit of knowledge of what this is like (tip-of-the-iceberg-knowledge, I realize), I'm fucking angry. There is something really, really wrong with this culture. Every woman should be supported in every way through this incredible, unique, common occurence. Everyone, boys and girls, should be educated about pregnancy IN SCHOOL, about the female body, about sex and how it works and what happens when life grows inside you. Why would anyone in their right mind oppose such an education?
And if one of us doesn't want to be pregnant, well then--we have a right to abort our pregnancies. They're our bodies.

I read recently that Roe v Wade didn't technically give women the right to decide whether to have an abortion. Abortion was legalized under the mandate that it is a medical decision to be made by a doctor, not that it is a personal decision to be made by the woman with the--oh, you know--the pregnancy. So thank god for Roe v Wade, of course, but the victory was not as deep a victory as I think we think it was. (Thank you Laura Kaplan. I just read her book, The Story of Jane: the Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service.)

I don't want to abort this pregnancy, so I won't. If I wanted to, I would. It's not as simple as all that--abortion is hard for a lot of women; I don't care what pro-choicers say about it. How could it not be? You're certainly ending something; and you are killing something that's alive. I mean, you just are. There's no arguing this truth. But this is a question of control. It's a question of controlling your body. Because if we live in a culture that makes women have babies whether they want to or not--that forces women to have children--well, fuck. Then we're all doomed to hell. Who could do that? Who could look at a woman and say, Hey sister--I know you didn't intend to get pregnant, but we're going to make you stay pregnant and have a child because of what we believe. K?

I'd like to say the Little Pokie would understand my position. But I don't know. It feels kind of ironic or cold or something--to be pregnant and writing about abortion at the same time. Guilty is not how I feel, though--"guilty" is not at all the right word. I feel, despite the fatigue and flatulence, very, very, awake. And awake isn't always pleasant.

Breasts

2005-03-27T22:47:00.000-08:00

I am now in my 8th week, and my breasts are SORE. My breasts are, like, NOT EVEN FUN ANYMORE. I don't even want the husband to play with them anymore. I want them to be bound in a bra and left alone.

This is pretty unusual, to be so suddenly consumed by the function of the breast. (I imagine the husband feels the same way.) We all love them, sure. But when they're meant to be fed off of, we seem to balk. No one wants to see a woman nursing--especially in a workplace, for god's sake--and the last time I checked--on TV, in the news, in magazines, in any fucking place you can imagine except maybe a doctor's office--no one wants to particularly hear or write about breasts as not fun bags but functional bags. I find this trend rather unfortunate and rather divorced from reality. And what the fuck am I supposed to do for the next 8 months anyway, with the fun swollen out of my breasts? Am I supposed to feel like the ultimate true woman, or something, now that I feel my breasts as functional for the first time in my 34 years and they've lost their sexual context? Is this actually natural? Is this how it's supposed to be all along?

What about those boys in my junior high who called me Boom-Boom? Did those cute little pricks have any idea that they were belittling such grand things--such sources of health and wonder? They stroked my ego and obfuscated truth--boys will be boys, after all; ego-stroking and obfuscation are so often their functions on the grand journey of the well-socialized male--and I didn't know enough to do anything except blush and feel flattered and feel guilty for feeling flattered. I didn't know anything--and by then I should have. I was about 14, and I really should have known more about my body and about women and about men. Damn.

Oh the myths the Little Pokie and I--whether girl or boy--will have to shatter. The realities we will have to serve up. One after the other after the other. Like hotcakes at a cheap buffet.

Parents and Horse Shit

2005-03-23T07:42:00.000-08:00

I had an interesting conversation with my father last night. It was all about my mother, which is in itself unusual since my parents have been divorced for 23 years and the last time I spoke to my father about my mother for more than literally a few minutes was at age 9 or so, when Dad was grilling my brother and I about what we might say when we testified at the custody hearing.

Parents make a lot of mistakes. Some own them, some don't.

Those who don't are similar to my father, I think--he seems to feel that the reason he doesn't know much about my mother's illness is because I've been shady about it, not because it's been, um, crystal clear for the last 20 years or so that he wants to hear nothing about his ex-wife. The reasons I've never said, Hey, Daddy-O, want to hear about what Mom's been up to lately? are reasons meant to respect his privacy as a person, to give him room to be an individual rather than one of a partnership.

Have you ever honestly, truly, understood your parents as individual people? Or even as a couple to which you are in many ways irrelevant? Divorce certainly facilitates this process--but even with the divorce, I wasn't able to comprehend (not think of, but comprehend) my parents as having their own relationship, separate from me, until I was in therapy at age 27, when I realized that some of my father's moves during the custody hearing had nothing to do with my best interest--they had to do with his desire to make my mother suffer. (I'm sure my mother made plenty of moves with similar purposes--I'm just not quite as a aware of them.)

That moment was like hangover relief way too late. Oh, I thought. He wanted my mother to suffer because of issues that have NOTHING TO DO WITH ME. Issues that existed LONG BEFORE I EVER DID. Oh. It was then I understood the potential and depth of my own irrelevance to something I had always thought I was a center of. This was neither painful nor pleasing. I felt even then like it was a bland sort of beginning of something.

Beginning of what, I do not know, but talking with my father the other night about my mother was strange and unsettling. My father feels out of a loop that, by all institutional accounts, should be perfectly natural: a loop of information about my mother. I'm not saying divorce is a bad thing--it's just another institution that shapes our lives and dictates our behavior, which is what institutions are meant to do. I'm saying that it must be strange as hell for children to see that marriage is one institution with "norms" that another institution--its nemesis--ultimately counters. It must be extremely confusing, especially now that divorce is even more common than it was when I was a child.

So it seems pointless to ground any sense of what's "normal" into the Little Pokie, since she'll be getting messages to counter normalcy with every turn of her sprightly little head. Normal to me is divorced parents with separate lives. It's been rough but fine. Normal to other kids is married parents with together lives. It's probably been rough but fine. Makes more sense to instill values, I suppose, although the political implications of this term make me ill and I don't ever want to use it with the Pokie (like "self-respect," "values" is losing more real and tangible meaning with every passing day).

So rather than values--what's an appropriate word? Truth? Honesty? Fairness? Barf. Those all sound like steaming piles of nothing, like horse shit--looks like substance but really only hay. I guess I'm supposed to instill a sense of what's substantive and what's not, which is really determined by mine and the husband's "values" anyway.

So. Hrmph.

Barbies

2005-03-19T10:38:00.000-08:00

I played with Barbies for way too long. It was weird. I did not play with them when I was 5 or 6 or7; I played with them when I was 9 or 10 or 11, and Barbie and Ken fucked their brains out in a faux dream house I made with Barbie furniture on the floor of my room. Ken liked to kidnap Barbie and seduce her. This was the running storyline.

I don't want the Little Pokie to play with Barbies, though--I think they rot your brain worse than TV ever could. But as good friend recently pointed out--if Pokie starts asking for a Barbie, I'm going to have to get her one.

"Do they make a fat Barbie?" I asked her. "A nice stout Barbie with a chunky waist?"

"I don't know," my friend said. "I don't think so."

My friend also pointed out that playing Barbies is not going to turn a girl into a (fill in the blank: a looks-obsessed superficial bitch who wants a boob job when she's 18; a Dr. Laura lover; a wearer of light blue eyshadow at all hours of the day; a teenaged giver of unwarranted and undeserved blow-jobs). And well, she's right about that. We really don't give kids enough credit for being able to distinguish between what's real and what isn't.

The husband, for example, just said, "You're blogging about Barbies?" So I apparently make these dolls a bit of a bigger deal than they might be. The husband continued: "You might want to ask yourself why you're worried about Barbies when you're only 7 weeks into your pregnancy."

The husband is neither pregnant nor a woman--he makes this more apparant with every passing day, actually--so it might be difficult for him to understand that I think about the Little Pokie at various ages and phases of her life all the time, and I reflect on my own childhood constantly. His question is, however, worthy of an answer. So here it is.

I remember my experience with Barbie, and that doll just made me WANT. I wanted a boyfriend like Ken (not realizing of course that Ken is clearly homosexual), I wanted clothes like hers, I wanted to be pretty like her, I wanted to have long hair like her, blah blah blah. I wanted feet like hers--all ready to slip into stilettos, petite and sweet. I wanted her big blue eyes, always open and pleased. I became so preoccupied, in fact, with what I didn't have that I was unable to distinguish between what was important and what was not. I played with that doll in my room, alone, and fantasized about stupid shit rather than spending time with my mother, learning to cook cool meals, taking walks in the Iowa countryside, playing soccer, climbing trees, you name it. So Barbie absorbed me in what I would call an unhealthy way. A way that limited my potential to think and be active and learn.

I do realize that this was my deal, and that this deal is not the case with every girl who plays with Barbies. I realize, too, that I was probably swept away by a fucking molded piece of plastic because my family was disfunctional (start sadness and sympathy here). So mine might be a unique situation.

But god dammit, I don't really think so! I mean what the fuck are Barbies for, anyway? Aren't they supposed to make girls want, and make girls fantasize about what they don't have? Aren't they supposed to make girls wish they were pretty and skinny? What's the purpose of this doll, is what I'd like to know. It ain't a baby, so it doesn't fulfill their desire to mother. So isn't my experience with Barbie exactly what's supposed to happen to girls who play with them?

Is Barbie the worst thing Little Pokie could become distracted by? No. Definitely not. But is it symptomatic of what we've come to expect from girls? Yeah. I think so. And I think these expectations are crap. They're not empowering. They're not intellectual. They're not interesting at all. They're total bullshit.

I am now watching This Old House, where a nice lesbian couple is helping Rich Trathuie install a return duct on their furnace. So if the Little Pokie wants a Barbie, it's going to have to be a lesbian Barbie who can install things, fix things around the house, defend herself, be herself, look for solutions instead of escape from problems. My Little Pokie will have a Barbie who's good with her political hands.

Peter Cetera was Right

2005-03-17T16:40:00.000-08:00

Long ago, I thought of my body as separate from my personality and soul and general self. In college, I remember this discussion in my intro philosophy class where I said that the soul and the body wre two totally separate things and tried to defend my position. (Of course, I hadn't done the reading due that day, so my defense was weak and uninformed, but I dug the subject and for no good reason thought I was right. This is what a lot of students do. This is what college is for. This is where we should learn that we don't really know shit about shit.)

I said something like this, in many ways, over and over: "There is no way you can tell me that without my body, I don't exist. There is just no way that could be true."

Now, however, 17 years later, I feel pretty damn differently. (Thank god.) After a relative dying a few years ago of Lou Gehrig's disease (where your entire body slowly gets paralyzed while your mind stays intact), and after considering how a personality or a soul might be affected by, say, a disability, or a deformity, or a pregnancy, or any number of minor and major conditions--well, the idea that the body and soul or self are separate is just pretty fucking absurd.

I've had asthma since I was a child. This has certainly defined who I am. I have also suffered from depression for much of my life. Again, the me factor there. The bulimia issue: uh, yeah, that counts too. I am now pregnant. I am without Prozac while pregnant (just a little experiment to see if I can fare ok without it), and this is defining who I am, too, which is rather a bummer. The husband, in fact, is sitting in the next room not talking to me once again. Hormones + no Prozac = intimate relationships problems for me. I feel utterly incapable of communicating with him; I cannot tell whether I'm being reasonable or paranoid; I cannot tell whether I'm wrong or right. I'm leaning toward simply talking less to avoid conflict. (Probably not the best approach to this problem.) I'm so stuck in my head that on a walk I just took with the dog, I would have completely missed a small pack of deer right in front of me if said dog had not commenced chasing said deer. I have a weight in my head and in my gut. And it ain't the Little Pokie.

I am already considering taking the Prozac again to bring the body (this is my brain we're talking about--very much who I am) back around. And doing this, because I am pregnant, will make me feel even more like a failure, like a weak, depressed wretch who cannot summon control or even bring on a good mood. (Yeah, so? This is me, you know? Might as well accept it.) As Peter Cetera puts it in his classic, teen-girl-fantasizer, "Hard Habit to Break," you don't know what you got until it's gone.

But I'll wait another week or two to see if daily power walks won't lift the mood a bit, to see if a more palatable self emerges from this soul and body who clearly work with the husband and every other entity in the world to keep me down. God damn. How much longer does this pregnancy thing take, anyway?

Banana Comb

2005-03-11T18:55:00.000-08:00

My face is growing exponentially. It is larger, rounder, and what little curve there was between the bones of my cheeks has already vanished. I described my eyes this morning as two raisins in pastry.

Funny, isn't it--how I'm concerned with my looks while I'm pregnant. This strikes me as unfortunate. The husband said to me yesterday (the husband is wise in many ways), "Who cares what you look like when you're pregnant?"

I have two responses to this. 1)This is relatively easy for a man to say, although I don't hold it against him. 2)I care what I look like while I'm pregnant because I am a well-socialized female, and well-socialized females care what they look like in any context at any time.

In the climate of this culture, women and their bodies are not only not celebrated--they're not understood, even by many women. Until I was 21, I didn't even know that there were two openings in my vagina (one for urine, one for activities of my choice). This is embarrassing. I take the blame for being utterly out of it for way too long, of course, but this is really fucking ridiculous, that no one told me this, that I wasn't TAUGHT something this basic in 15+ years of school. If this is true of me, then this is true of a helluva lot of other women in the world. And it's funny, in a way--in a dark comedy it might be funny, as nice line of satire in a play. But actually, it's sad. It's really fucking sad.

So what I'm saying is that the reason I care what I look like when I shouldn't be (I should be celebrating these changes; they're miraculous, really, a gigantic mystery that probably contains our reasons for being) is because obsession with my image has infiltrated my personality.

My memories of the infiltration are more than memories. They're like little goalposts, little milestones of blossoming superficiality. The way my tummy hurt after my little fourth grade boyfriend called me a slob, the way that banana comb hooked itself into my hair, the way the waistband of those jeans pressed themselves into my gut, the way those Fudge Stripes came up after I used my index finger. Yep. Went to treatment for bulimia, in fact, when I was a teenager. (An utterly hilarious place. That place is perfect for satire. That place was satire.) I was bulimic throughout my adolescence and I had slips with it several times a year--purges--until I was over 30 years old.

A student in one of my classes said, when we were discussing the effects of the media, of images, etc., etc., begin the ad nauseum, "If any girl is stupid enough to throw up her food, then why should I feel sorry for her?" So if he's right--and his comment is right, in many, many ways--then why should anyone care about any girl whose personality is taken over by forces she's not savvy to? Why are we such easy, easy prey? So easy to convince that we should look thin, that we should cover our zits, that we should have straight teeth? Why don't we do something about all this crap instead of buy more banana combs?

I will be surprised if my Little Pokie is actually unconcerned with all this bullshit, but I'll be good and goddamned if my Little Pokie doesn't know all about her vagina when she's old enough to talk. I want her to walk into rooms full of people and explain our anatomy. I want her to put people off, send other little girls home to their parents asking about menstruation and ovulation and the urinary tract opening and the clitoris and the elasticity of the perenium. I want her to talk about some shit.

I'm now waiting for her to arrive so she can set my sorry obsessive ass straight.

Pokie Prozac

2005-03-09T19:49:00.000-08:00

I take Prozac. Just about every member of my family takes an anti-depressant or anti-psychotic or mood stabilizer of some kind. We have a history. (Not the husband. The husband's family is another animal altogether. A bunch of healthy and stable people who live for a very long time and have very few problems with addiction. I don't really understand them. But they're very nice.)

Prozac allegedly will not harm the Little Pokie. It is listed as a Category B drug, which means, basically, that when scientists inject rats and mice with the stuff in tremendously high doses, there hasn't been any detectable harm to the babies of said rats and mice. A category C drug means, basically, that when scientists inject rats and mice with the stuff in tremendously high doses, the rat and mice babies have cleft palletes or some other kind of problem. So you're only supposed to take a category C drug if the risk to the mother outweighs the risk to the fetus.

This is hilarious. So women who, when pregnant, define themselves by sacrifice, have to make yet another choice. Do I give up the antis because I am more important than my unborn child? God damn. What a shit sandwich.

Well, I think I'm going to try to ace the Prozac. I'm on a low dose--not an average dose--and so maybe it won't make much of a difference. Maybe I won't feel empty and useless and inexplicably sad. (I think this is highly unlikely, but I'm going to give it a try.) I can just imagine giving birth and the Little Pokie having the shakes, or tremors or something. (Side effects like these, as observed in the few studies that exist, go away in a few weeks.) If I gave birth and saw a tremor-riddled Pokie, I think I would drown in the guilt. I think every jitter would linger in my fucking dreams until I was 50. So it's certainly worth it to at least see if the non-Prozac existence is manageable.

I suppose I'm starting--startintg--to comprehend the enormity of the responsibility here. Caffeine is next. Since the Little Pokie discovery, I have gone from about 2 cups of strong coffee a day, and sometimes a big ol' diet soda in the afternoon--killer buzz--to one small cup in the morning of 1/2 decaf and 1/2 regular. (I feel like an aging princess when I ask for this at the coffee shop. I want to explain myself--Hey, I'm pregnant, so could you fill it up halfway with decaf?--just so none of the young Salvation-army touting hipsters, with their ratty hair and lacy tops and sense of style I have never possessed, think I'm uncool. This means that I'm about to have a baby and I'm spending time worried about what other people think of what I do. This is not a mind-set I want the Little Pokie to adopt. Any way I can sort of eliminate this character flaw, the one that's been characteristic of me all my life, in the next few months? You know, just CHANGE? Like, really fast?) Thing is, I sip on that small coffee all day long. Cold. I luv the cold coffee. So I'm thinking I'm making a caffeine addict out of the Little Pokie. Next week, it's nothing. Bring on the headaches. Bring on the grumpers. This is the Little Pokie we're talking about here.

It's a Baby

2005-03-05T18:45:00.000-08:00

I calculated the pregnancy length wrong. The due date is determined (I think) by the date of your first period, not the date of conception. So I'm actually nearing the end of my 5th week.

There is a shitload of information out there about pregnancy. Diet, chemicals, exercise, shits, liquids, moods, vaginal discharge, movement, shoes, gums, disease, medicine, pets. My fucking god. I'm still in shock that I'm pregnant and not single or trashed.

I was rethinking my last post and realized how harsh "the destruction of a fetus" sounds. It's pretty disturbing, actually, and it might be equally disturbing to not regret destroying one. (It certainly would be to the gentleman who stood outside the clinic while I was getting my blood pressure taken; he was screaming, "It's not a thing! It's a baby! It's a baby! It's a baby!") But this is the problem: so many pro-choicers are afraid to discuss abortion frankly and honestly because of how pro-lifers might react, especially those male pro-lifers who find a fucking practice that's been going on since the beginning of time--eons before industrialized medicine--somehow offensive or wrong. Try getting pregnant when you don't want to.

My breasts hurt. They're very tender. The husband can't hug me very hard. I reassured him, told him that they'd only be this way for the next two years or so. My hair is turning frizzy, and my clothes are just the teeniest bit tighter. (Although I can't really attribute this to the little pokie just yet. Could be the Girl Scout Samoas.)

Specific Regrets

2005-03-03T20:42:00.000-08:00

We are sure it is a girl. We have no evidence to support this, and we might be wrong.

When I was 25, about ten years ago, I got an abortion. My regrets are gone, but when they existed, they were not about the procedure itself or about the destruction of my fetus. I did feel a sense of loss, but it was melo-drama. It was TV material, appropriate for a soap-opera or a public service announcement with girls in tight tee shirts who cry. These kinds of regrets, I now believe, were inauthentic.

My authentic regrets were about my fucking a man without protection and fucking a man who was a moron. My authentic regrets were about my own lack of judgement, the absence not of self-respect (because "self-respect" is so overused that it doesn't mean anything anymore) but of a sense of self, of the unique power that drives any human being to make decisions and be present. This power was for various reasons muted in me. I doubt I could have summoned it even if I had known what was the matter.

I hope my little pokie will grow up knowing her power. She might not. She will have distractions that the husband and I will have to make her understand are distractions--inauthentic, pop-cultured little wisps that eventually disappear.

Pissed

2005-03-02T17:49:00.000-08:00

I skimmed several pregnancy books today, and for the first time ever I saw that the subject of men was relegated to one chapter. As a woman, who of course her entire life has had the subject of herself relegated to one chapter, I found this ironcially satisfying. I also found it appropriate, since pregnancy is about my body and it is ultimately my experience. In this context, perhaps relegation makes sense. In many others, I do not think it does.

I am approximately two weeks pregnant. Since the husband and I have been "trying," it is perfectly natural that I know I'm pregnant this early--although I think many women don't know until at least a month or so down the road.

I discovered I was pregnant approximately two days ago. I took two home pregnancy tests one day apart. They were both positive.

Yesterday, I was fretting. I was just fucking depressed. Worried about the world, about how I would take care of the little poquito in all this strife and suffering. Worried that there is still a whole lot I want to do minus child--so what does this mean for the child? It was as if I had second thoughts.

Then the husband came home and I shared my thoughts with him. We talked. We hugged. It eased my depression immensely, and since then I've been thinking about all the women out there who decide to have children without such a source of support. Teenagers or otherwise.
I could imagine few situations more difficult.

So people who judge single mothers, or restrict their abilities to make decisions, or relegate their experiences to single chapters--I hope somebody shows mercy on you.