pregnancy observations: 17 weeks

My abdomen feels pulled taut like a drum. I’m now at the point where I can definitely tell I’m pregnant, but I’m not sure that others could. My round ligaments have made themselves known to me, stretching out for the first time. New back pain, new small sensations, lots of quiet fear.

They said the second trimester would be easier but I’m finding it more difficult. Maybe because my body feels more normal but my spirit doesn’t. My sense of self feels slippery. I am used to a certain amount of confidence, but I’m finding myself diminished.

While walking, Bobo suddenly lunged after a cat I didn’t see and I fell to my hands and knees and dropped his leash. He chased the cat all over the neighborhood (then was found easily one street over) and I fretted over the fall – though both my pregnancy book and my midwife told me such a minor fall was nothing to worry about at all. What amazed me was how worried it made me, that this small surprise mistake (not even a mistake) could spell the doom of my baby. If bodies were that fragile, none of us would be alive. So why did it worry me so?

I’m so relieved each day when Isaiah comes home from work. I’m not alone! I’m not alone!

I buy all the secondhand books on the internet I want – a luxury I’ve never allowed myself before.

I feel a sort of lurking sadness. I carry with me useless ambition. I’m not sure what to do with my hands. I’m not sure what to say when people ask me questions. I have no questions to ask.

Chinese birth chart says that the baby is a boy! Who knows, but sort of feels like it could be true? I always imagined myself having a girl first, but now my brain sort of settles toward boy more quickly. We’re planning to find out at the 20 week ultrasound if we can – we figure there will be enough surprises!

I keep feeling like I want to write a novel. I don’t know how to write a novel! Fiction doesn’t come easily to me! Why this impulse?

In the days around my birthday, I became obsessed with watching old family home videos, especially from when me and my sister were infants. so simultaneously comforting and strange to know that we were babies once and to see us in action. very quiet babies. agreeable. pleasant. comforting too to see my parents be parents to babies – all the cooing sounds. They seemed to like it. That was nice to see.

I’m learning waiting like it’s a skill. I’m holding waiting like it’s something with mass and volume. I’m carrying waiting in a backpack up the hill. I’m trying to walk with waiting and it keeps stopping to lie down in the shady clover.

I went on a walk with a woman who lives in my neighborhood who just a year ago had likely her last baby, ten years after her first. She gave me no advice but told me so much of what I needed to hear, about how her life has kept going, about what she’s learned, about how it has felt. While we walked, she pushed her one-year-old son in a stroller and he looked up at the trees.

I feel able to eat almost anything now, but most of it is likely to make me feel sick-ish or at the very least give me heartburn, so I’m still sort of stuck in no-food-land. 

What will happen? I wonder so often what will happen. It feels like my life is about to become something unrecognizable, and irreversibly. How does a person prepare for something like that?

It’s the long noon hour of this pregnancy. Not a novel idea anymore, not something to get used to, not something exciting or magical. Now I’m sitting with it, feeling the weight of reality. Acedia creeps in. I want to be anywhere but here.

I went to target to get groceries for the first time since the lockdowns began. It took a lot of mustered-up bravery. I passed by two teenage boys not wearing masks and talking loudly, spewing their particles into the air. I wanted to shout at them – WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? I wanted to wear a sign around my neck that said: “You can’t tell yet but I’m pregnant! Be kind!” 

Our first ultrasound is in three weeks and the wait feels interminable. I’m so anxious to be told that everything is okay. I want to see fingers and toes. I’m terrified that we’ll arrive and they’ll tell me “I’m sorry, no heartbeat” or “I’m sorry, there’s something terribly wrong.” I’m worried that Isaiah won’t be able to come with me and I’ll be all alone.

Each day’s work feels tedious and gigantic. The laundry, the dishes, the creative projects that feel like they all have too many steps. 

I feel all this anxiety about all of mothering, as if it’s too big of an endeavor to take on. Remember, remember, it’s just one day at a time. No, it’s one hour at a time. No, it’s one minute at a time. It will just be. I’ll shift into it. I’ll find it slowly, not all at once.

what will I learn about failure? how will I lose what I thought I had?

re-listening to lots of Mom Rage. so grateful for that podcast. can’t quite get myself to listen to the birth hour. I expect that impulse will come later. reading lots of motherhood books and old blog archives, too many at once. the best new-to-me book is the blue jay’s dance by louise erdrich.

so much grief about covid-19 cases rising again all across the country. can’t we all just actually sit still for a year? can’t we let this giant lurking thing actually change our behavior? one year of sorrow. one year of solitude. one year of strangeness. it feels like such a small price to pay when people’s lives hang in the balance. I can’t tell if this is a virtuous attitude, or if I am just jealous of people who don’t seem as worried and troubled about it as I am. or maybe I feel willing to let this year be utterly different because I’m pregnant so it already is utterly different for me? endless complexity behind why people choose what they do – a lethal mix of capitalism, survival, and creature-comforts? still, I’m baffled. what are we supposed to do?

I keep feeling the urge to write, I have to write, but what the heck is there to write about when you’re pregnant, other than being pregnant and waiting and worried and not sure about anything?

why does thinking about it make me so sad? what is this sudden tenderness, weakness? maybe the first trimester hormones were all adrenaline and peace, and now I’m just myself (now that apparently the placenta has fully formed and taken on the hormonal load) and, big surprise, my self is sad. 

the good news is that it will go on changing, and it won’t last forever. the weeks are slow, but they’re a steady climb upward. at the top of the hill, a baby who will explode my life!