kerouac says

that we're out of the closet? i told scary advisor last week--and, actually, it wasn't so scary; she only groaned, and then apologized, and then moved on to the next topic. she was actually touchingly concerned that i was doing the wrong kind of yoga. anyway, the facebook announcement ensued, and now it's out.

on another note, everyone we love: please stop getting married this summer. we can't go to any of your weddings, it seems, including the best one's, in scotland, and that is a bitter pill. small baby, you are maybe the only thing that could keep me away from a shindig like that.

i'm trying not to pout. this is the best reason to miss things ever (and takes some of the pressure off the fact that we probably can't afford to go to all these important weddings anyway. sigh).

but scotland, man. jeez.

Labels: chickpea

we have movement! as of a week ago, it became clear that at least 60% of those maybe-gas-bubbles, maybe-fetus-flips are actually the more exciting of the two. i LOVE this. in meetings, i very carefully crawl inside my own abdomen to check in and see who's moving. the other morning, there was a really distinct one--like, more a thump than a swish--and then it happened again, but of course when i freaked out and flipped over and put the monkey's hand on the thump site, it stopped happening. didn't mean to startle you, baby. do that some more.

i made baby clothes. these are divine; they are small and relatively shapeless, easy to finish, no tricky parts, and then you feel like a domestic goddess afterwards. and i made some tops to wear as i continue to expand, one of which is pretty cute and the other of which will look okay to wear cleaning the apartment, if that were something i did regularly.

here's the thing about the belly and the showing: when will it start? there were a couple days over christmas where i couldn't button my pants and felt like i looked like a whale. and now, pants button okay and i just look a little . . . thick. i think maybe there was some bloating that's resolved, and that's part of it, but i hope i'm--oh, this sounds so incredibly annoying: i hope i'm gaining enough weight. try not to read that in a valley girl accent if you can help it. my appetite has revved down noticeably, and we don't have a scale, and the i've been absent from the gym (eep), and i feel like i'm not getting any bigger. whatever. i was fine when the midwife checked at the end of december and probably can't have gotten too un-fine in the ensuing weeks. especially given the daily doughnut habit i've developed as insurance against my flagging appetite. because that's what the baby needs; more glaze.

we find out the sex at the end of the month, assuming s/he cooperates. i wanted to talk about both kinds of names in the interim; the monkey would rather just not start until the field is narrowed. this makes sense, but once we know, all the other possibilities will evaporate, and i want to play with them while they're still viable. we totally do not think the same about the naming thing. i guess he hasn't been doodling names he likes on pee-chee folders for twenty years.

anyway, we'll let you know.

Labels: chickpea

it is easy to imagine you, prospective baby, as a happy secret that is only mine. sitting in a college cafeteria wearing a maternity t-shirt that i don't quite fill out (despite the inexorable largening of these breasts; when will it end?), no one knows about you but me. this is maybe the only time you will be mine alone, before you're a person, before you can do a single thing without me. later i'll be happy to investigate you as your own person--really, i can't wait to meet you--or to share the parenting of you with that guy who helped make you, but right now you're only mine, my happiest secret, and i can barely contain my glee. world, i know something you don't know, and it is the best thing ever.

Labels: chickpea

so, i passed the exams! and had to nod and smile when everyone told me to go get hammered afterwards. it's a sad thing, not being able to celebrate a major achievement with a cocktail.

that was a while ago, though. and it's been quiet since. nothing too exciting seems to be happening in the uterus. it's time enough that i could be feeling some tiny movements, and i feel like maybe i do, but also, maybe it's gas. whatever it is feels a little like muscle cramps, so maybe they're . . . actually muscle cramps.

i'm starting not to fit into my pants so good. in fact, that started over christmas. so did some barfing, but that turned out to be food poisoning. (turned out to be food poisoning, she says casually, as if the memory no longer left her quaking in her socks.) but after that subsided, it was a nice time of leaving my pants unbuttoned and being waited on. my mom and i even went to a diaper store.

and the monkey leaned down and told my belly that he loved the baby. this could not be more predictable, and yet: i never predicted it. it knocked me flat, the idea that he is going to love this baby. i don't know what i thought, that he was just . . . going along with all this to be a mensch, but no. real love. or the beginnings of it.

there are times when all of this seems far less fraught than i feared and assumed. i as much as i sometimes still think this is a prop baby i will have to give back, i also see myself in some well-lit room with a good haircut, being my best self while i talk to a little baby. that's kind of how i thought marriage was going to be like before i gave it a shot. and i know better; my hair does not always look so good while married and i am certainly, unfortunately, rarely my best self. but imagining it is easier than i anticipated, and that's something nice. i'm unaccustomed to imagining the best case scenario.

Labels: chickpea

the idea of writing all this down and publishing in bulk once the news was out seemed good, but it's difficult to get motivated without the potential for immediate recognition. i'm not sure why; it's not like the fours of readers that might stray back after the hiatus would rush to comment on the news that a lime-sized fetus* has rendered me completely unable to take a crap.

(true.)

i'm in puerto rico, in the aftermath of an academic conference. which, the conferencey parts of it--the actual panel thing i was on--were quite nice. but the crappy hotel i booked to save money and the extra days i thought that saved money meant i could stay have combined to produce a too-long, too-shabby expanse of time-that-i-should-have-used-to-study. for my giant comprehensive exams which start on friday and for which i am feeling underprepared.

in fact, i should be doing that right now. but it's hard to do anything disciplined when all i want in the world is to be coddled a little bit--to be dry (it's humid and stormy; everything in my world is slightly damp), to have a hot shower, for the incredibly vulgar mosquito bites that dot my legs to fade, for my skin to be clear and luminous (thanks for the acne, fetus) and to eat something i made in my own kitchen.


* i get these emails from the american pregnancy association? i signed up for them; it's not like they're stalking me. these are the usual emails telling you what's going on in utero this week--which limbs are forming and moving, which body parts are fusing shut or dividing or differentiating or whatever. last week the chickpea was the size of a grape. this week, a lime. i think it went: aspirin, blueberry, grape, lime.which seems enormous. like, you can actually hold a lime.

Labels: chickpea

after the day in which no one has been quite nice enough to me, if there is a nice enough, if i'm not a whirlpool that sucks in nice and cannot be satiated. i need all these dumb labs done, just normal ones, just . . . you know, do i have syphilis (NO) and crap like that, they do this at the beginning of pregnancy, i have read about it on the internet, and like a good soldier willing to schlep in order to save fifty bucks, i bring the lab orders to campus to have the blood drawn there. because there are at least four tests (of the eight) on this list that are freebies at the student clinic, but are $20 at the lab.

except someone just made a policy that they won't do this anymore. because pregnant ladies' lab results kept getting lost, and pregnant ladies who are less on top of it than i am didn't notice, i guess, that their labs weren't getting back, and didn't insist on printing their own copies of the results. no offense, less overachieving pregnant ladies; i know this is not your job. but i am on this kind of shit. i don't prefer to wrestle with the system, but i'll do it to save some money. it's that kind of month. it's that kind of year. it's that kind of baby. they're those kinds of dental bills coming down the pike, and an unemployed summer of breastfeeding coming up, and another person to insure, and i have to stop thinking about this now.

instead of fixing the system so that THE RIGHT FUCKING PERSON GETS EMAILED with the lab results, they just made a rule so that pregnant grad students have to shell out more cash to have the same tests done at the fancy lab. the CBC the midwife ordered? at school: free. if i need it because i'm sick: free. if i need it because i'm pregnant: go back to the expensive hospital. and man, i know it's twenty bucks, but it's like none of these people have ever been in the place where twenty bucks matters. listen, it matters.

i wonder, very briefly, what it would be like to do this without concern for money. and then i think about the pregnant lady at the taco truck on the corner by the bus stop, and how maybe she doesn't have insurance at all (or, what do i know, maybe taco trucks are incredibly lucrative and she drives an alfa-romeo) and how we actually have everything we need. we have everything we need. including an apparently thriving fetus and no syphilis.

Labels: chickpea

i had a dream that the baby was moving. like, MOVING. in the dream, i remembered hearing other people say that once you recognized the flutters of a moving fetus, you realize you've been feeling them for a while--and that freaked me out, because it was way too early to feel the amazing somersault i had just felt, without even thinking about how the moving must have started a while ago. giant overachiever baby.

in the dream, i called her a her. it made me feel all soft after i woke up, but so would calling-him-a-him have done.

meanwhile: i am feeling, sort of often, like i have adrenaline coursing through me. and i'm not even that freaked out. it feels oddly chemical, like maybe one of the baby hormones is PANIC. and i can't take any magic bean slow-downer pills. an anxiety fairy has pitched a tent in my chest. right now it seems to have gone away for a bit, which is good because i don't want the chickpea on a steady diet of acetylcholine, or whatever special cocktail fight-or-flight pours.

i had this sweet fantasy that when i got pregnant, i would save up money so i could have a massage every month. i was prepared to scrimp, too. and then the monkey went to the dentist, and, rootcanalcrowncrownperiodontistcavity, and now we are going to have to get a mortgage for his mouth. and five other things came surprise due all at once, and now . . . all extras are out. sigh. pregnant ladies who have to be off their anxiety meds cannot go to the cheap bathhouse in koreatown to relax because the superhot soaking tub poaches their fetuses. they cannot take their klonopin. they cannot enjoy a martini. they cannot have that nice ganja gelato from the dispensary. they try to breathe and mediate, but when the anxiety pixie is hosting a drum circle in their chests, this doesn't go so well. thank god we still have yoga.

Labels: chickpea

guess what? the whole world is different, except oddly, disappointingly, exactly the same. this week the embryonic disk becomes a tube! this is huge! you have some bumps on you i can't remember the name of that later will become muscles and organs! this is so gigantic, and yet i look, and mostly feel, exactly the same. except i can't have any beer. so far, this is kind of a raw deal.

we're going to see the midwife in a couple weeks, and i don't really know what she's going to say. good job with those vitamins? keep going to yoga? it'll be too early for the heartbeat, and so far as i can tell, there's just not that much to know right now.

every time i wake up and cuddle with the monkey, i think: will we never get to do this again? once there is a baby or a kid or a teenager or whatever, someone with needs? in the future, won't i have to be making banana pancakes right about now, or keeping someone off drugs, or working a third job? it wouldn't be a life change if i wasn't catastrophizing.

my mom makes a beeline for the baby clothes in any store, my dad says. i imagine her knitting a tiny hat, and i lose my shit. we are having a baby who will wear a tiny hat. a hat.

Labels: chickpea

your dad called you an asshole the other day. he didn't mean it; you're just being kind of shy about excreting that one hormone that comes out in pee. so far we've had a negative test, a positive one, a really faintly positive one, and another negative. finally the nice nurse at ucl@ did what the first one should have done, which was leave a standing order for the urine test so i don't have to make an appointment each time. i'm going back in at the end of the week, and that test had better be positive.

because i'm sure i'm pregnant. pretty sure, not having been it before. my basal temperature has stayed high, which is promising, but the first piece of sureness was those weird fluttery twinges in my gut, like my abdomen was excited. and then the waking up early. and the heartburn (really? already?). i will take it. universe, i will take it. one baby, please. right here.

i have been calling you a zygote, for political reasons, but i'm really looking forward to your being a baby. although whenever i visualize it, you seem like a prop baby, like a baby i somehow know, even in this fantasy, that i am going to have to give back. here's the deal: i am never giving you back.

i told the yoga lady about you, even though you are only a chickpea. i didn't want you to fall out during plow pose or anything like that. i told your tante anni that i was pretty sure you were on board. and then i told k-to, in a weird email rush. and then i told the supermarket man as i bought root beer, and the neighbor and my spanish TA (both of whom i was asking for preg doctor recommendations, not just because i am a blabbermouth). i am, though. i am a blabbermouth. the monkey, i mean your father, is a little skittish about telling folks, and even though i told him i need to tell my people, i'm trying to let his moderation guide me. perhaps i should wait until the pee test at student health turns positive (come ON, mofos).

and maybe the grocery man does not need to know.

okay. do good in there. do some cellular stuff. i can't wait to know more about you.

Labels: chickpea