pregnancy observations: 19 weeks

favorite snacks / treats these days: popsicles, jalapeno potato chips, sour gummies, fried rice

started motherhood, a confession by natalie carnes – sent to me by a friend – and it’s already so so wonderful. very grateful for the just-right books that have found me for this season.

the beginnings of a baby quilt. this child will be warm and clothed – those are things I can definitely provide.

I think I felt the baby move twice for the first time the other day, two distinct feelings after walking the dog out in the heat. I called Isaiah right away to tell him. Two small jabs like big bubbles popping, or a limb or a hand moving outward, trying to wave. The feeling has repeated a number of times since then, with different variations. always strange, indistinct, but what else would it be? I feel gratitude every time – like getting an update when someone you love is driving on a long trip. “Made it to Indiana!” A little check in to let me know that they’re alive!

Woke up with a headache and a very lightly achey abdomen. gas? last night’s yoga? normal soreness? something else? each day brings new strange worries. I write the dates and details of ones that feel notable in a list in the notes app on my phone in case something becomes of one of them and I need to remember the timeline. It feels weirdly foreboding to have a list like this, but I’d also hate to be found without the information I need if something happens. 

I’m not supposed to sleep on my back anymore because the weight of my uterus could compress an essential artery and cut off blood supply to both myself and my baby. The things you don’t know about until your pregnant! I’m naturally a side sleeper, but, still, sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night inexplicably on my back, and feeling deeply comfortable. I roll back over to my side. I now sleep surrounded by pillows, which helps somewhat, but doesn’t shake the strange feeling that unconsciously my body does what it’s not supposed to do and feels comfortable doing it. 

my belly is round and more firm to the touch than I expected. when I look at photos of the anatomy of pregnancy now I genuinely feel amazed that everything fits and it all still works somehow. what a wildly weird ordinary thing pregnancy is!

more anxiety than ever, especially about Covid-19 surges in my county, and also all the new aches and pains I’m learning about, all of which seem alternatingly alarming and normal. everything combined puts my mind in a weird state of worry and detachment mixed together.

I’ve been reading lots of birth stories and a few childbirth books – trying to learn enough about childbirth so that when it happens I will hopefully at least somewhat feel like I know what’s happening to me and how to care for myself through pain and unknowing, but not so much that I become bound up in any particular timeline or expectation. Birth stories are fascinating to read – each mother’s particular self comes through in their retelling of what happened and how it felt.

I feel very vulnerable, quiet, and almost like whoever I was before becoming pregnant has been gently obliterated. There is an ongoingness in me, but it’s way less forceful than it used to feel. Time moves over me like water. Feeling this way seems appropriate though. It doesn’t feel like a bad thing. It feels like I’m being swept clean so there’s space for the baby. Like nesting, but in my self instead of my home. I welcome the change. It makes me fear tragedy even more though – in all this preparation, what would it mean if something were to happen and there wasn’t a healthy baby at the end of all of this? Where would that leave me?

need to figure out how to trick myself into drinking enough water! sometimes pregnancy feels like one minor failure after another.

my clothes are starting not to fit properly. here comes the dance of figuring out what I can wear and for how long!

I’ve been thinking a lot about names, and I think my mind is starting to settle on some favorites for either a boy or a girl. if the baby cooperates, we’ll be finding out the sex next week at our first ultrasound! I have a gut feeling it’s a boy? no idea where that hunch is coming from – might have been a notion I had that just stuck, or mother’s intuition?

that ultrasound though – feels like such a moment of truth. hope beyond hope for a normal healthy baby, growing and intact and fine. I’ve been waiting for it for weeks and weeks now, but as it comes closer I feel nervous and almost resistant. is it better to keep the womb a black box, to not look inside? what if the news is bad?

still so comforted by being with my dog. such a warm presence in my long lonely days of being home all the time. and very grateful for our daily walks – I think I’d have a hard time forcing myself to leave the house if not for walking him.

doing prenatal yoga when I can manage it. trying to eat vegetables every day. allowing myself lots of cheese – protein! I made some chocolate chip cookies for the first time in years. so much sparkling water, so many bagel + egg sandwiches for lunch, so much tabasco sauce. beans and rice for dinner. figuring out what to eat feels so hard, and I’m definitely not ravenous like some women report in their second trimester, so every day I’ve managed three meals + snacks feels like a triumph.

Isaiah and I have been watching veep and the leftovers. alone, I’ve been watching search party. during the day, I listen to podcasts almost all the time, to quell the loneliness.

I wish for life to be more beautiful, more dynamic, with more movement and change. I want to take more photographs, write more of it down, but I feel stuck in some stagnation right now. It’s summer, very hot and humid, the green things are all drying up, the roses have all died (except for two or three that are hanging on to their petals for dear life!), the grass is golden. Even the air is stagnant, no breeze. I have no where to swim, no waterfall to stand under (and knowing myself I’d be afraid to anyway for fear that some strange bacteria would get in my mouth or nose and make its way across the placental barrier to the baby somehow). I’m like bread baking in an oven, nothing to do but sit and get puffy and firm to the touch. all of this alleviated only by a handful of spectacular afternoon thunderstorms, where the wind whips up for ten minutes and then a dramatic downpour for another ten, followed by sunshine again. always surprising, always passing through so quickly, the only evidence afterward being that everything is drenched for a while. what does it all mean? it means that I’m pregnant for the first time in the middle of a global pandemic. it means that all of my friends live in different states, and even if they lived nearby I couldn’t see them anyway. it means that I’m going somewhere where I’ve never been before and I’m terrified about it.