pregnancy observations: 26 weeks
Something very strange and stressful happened a week ago, completely unrelated to my pregnancy, and it really, truly, threw me out of any balance I was in. We’re okay, it seems, and I won’t go into the details or what happened or why it was so stressful and remains so because I don’t want to keep thinking about it deeply enough to write it – but to clue you in on the true strangeness I will say that it involved a groundhog. Over and over, life proves to be stranger than fiction.
But it remains stressful and scary, and my fear-response is all over-tuned and out of whack right now. In a virtual meeting with my therapist yesterday, I learned about my brain. My amygdala, how overpowering fear really is, how logic gets sort of toppled over. How much new information has been flung into my brain, so roughly, this year? New chaos, new fear, new reactions, new regrets. Over and over being handed things we have no idea what to do with. Impossible choices, and none of the safety or care coming from the places they’re supposed to come from. The risk, in all things, strange or ordinary, is never zero. No wonder we’re all exhausted, no wonder the country is collectively spinning out of control. I feel it happening, individually, to me. There’s no clear fix, no simple way to feel better. At this point I feel like if my little family makes it to the end of this year intact – mother, father, baby, dog – it will be a miracle, one I’ll celebrate and marvel at forever. My therapist told me, “it sounds like you’re doing the very best that you can be doing” which made me feel downright weepy and marginally, momentarily, reassured.
And now it’s raining heavily here in Pennsylvania, the morning after a terrible hurricane swept through all of Louisiana. This awful year! How to even absorb all the awfulness? One body can’t!
Pregnancy is ongoing, and keeps alternating between feeling acute and irrelevant. I’ve been doing lots of book stuff lately which has kept me busy. (My book! I have a book! Coming out in December!). They say poetry books don’t make any money, which has me feeling bold and defiant. Maybe mine will! (Ha! Ha! Ha!) Either way, in a hilarious coincidence or trick of fate, my book is scheduled to come out December 15th, only 13 days after my December 2nd due date. Given that first babies are notoriously late, it’s quite possible that I’ll be either in labor or directly postpartum when my book is being born too. Twins! I’m anxious about having the energy for the publicity required for a book release, I’m unsure of how it will go. But what joy – two good things, two big things, two long-awaited and overwhelming things, both happening at the end of what has definitely been the weirdest year of my life. I don’t know what to make of that! I suppose it’s just true!
{P.S. dear reader, it would be so wonderful if you bought and read my book, and it would be even more wonderful it you preordered it, so that things are less stressful directly after the release. It feels like writers are always talking about how important preorders are, but I’m told that’s actually true, so if you have the means, please do! More info and preordering here. I’m planning to write some essays about the book and maybe even do a few short readings as audio clips in the next few weeks, so keep an eye out if you’re interested in that stuff! Tell a friend! Tell your mom! Tell yourself!}
The baby keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger and kicks a lot. I love it when he kicks, it makes me feel so reassured that he’s okay. At the end of the day, my pelvis starts hurting, like the bones start to feel weird and out of place. The baby feels heavy in my body – so obvious now that something is alive in there! What a wild bodily sensation, one I had no idea how to imagine before I felt it. At night, there’s no position where I’m truly comfortable, and even sitting on the couch has become more fidgeting than relaxation. And still three months to go! It will only get weirder, bigger, more uncomfortable.
I had a few weeks where I was really worried about going into preterm labor and losing the baby because I was feeling a lot of unexplained pressure in my pelvis, but I’m not feeling quite as worried about that anymore. Probably because new worries have moved in, and the sensation subsided. Things are happening though, as the time grows short. I’m reassured by the fact that the baby gets stronger, and more likely to survive outside the womb early if necessary, each day. Let’s pray he stays in there all the way until the due date though! There are virtual baby showers on the calendar and one tiny in-person one in my parents’ backyard planned. I signed up for childbirth and breastfeeding classes through the birthing center – those will be virtual too. Virtual pregnancy, can I give birth virtually too? It’s a relief each time I have an in-person midwife appointment and can make eye contact with one of the midwives at the center, both of us peeking over our masks, real hands measuring the fundal height of my belly. This is still a human thing. It will never not be.
All the usual things – so tired, trying to eat enough good stuff, trying to drink enough water, trying to keep moving, trying to relax and not be so worried all the time. So often feeling like I’m failing – but I’m not, at least not completely. I’m doing my best, doing what I can do. Reading books, writing poems, trying to keep asking for help when I need it.
Some things I liked lately:
Started re-watching Fleabag Season 2 last night because I needed to watch something I knew I liked and feel BIG FEELINGS that weren’t the same bad big feelings I was already feeling.
I read The Best Day the Worst Day, written by Donald Hall about his life with Jane Kenyon – my favorite poet. Hall is also a poet, and there’s nothing like a memoir written by a poet about his marriage to another poet, living and working in their old house in New England. The memoir is very sad because it chronicles the last few years of Jane’s life while she fought Leukemia. Despite the sadness, it was a truly wonderful book.
I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for the first time and really liked it.
Isaiah and I have been watching Veep and it makes us laugh so, so hard. We’re almost finished with it and I’m sad, might just start it over immediately. Helping me process America’s terrible leadership by watching fictional terrible leadership.
Other books I’m reading and really enjoying: My Bright Abyss by Christian Wiman, A Life’s Work by Rachel Cusk, The World Ending Fire, which is collected essays by Wendell Berry, Ordinary Insanity by Sarah Menkedick, and Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton. I’m a notorious multi-reader, can’t stick to just one book. I love hopping around, depending on how I’m feeling that day. And also such a good feeling too when one book sort of takes over and pulls you through. I felt that way recently reading Lily King’s Writers and Lovers and Lynn Steger Strong’s Want, both excellent new-ish novels that I devoured. (P.S. Follow me on Goodreads! Reading is truly what’s getting me through this year. When I wake up at night and can’t sleep anymore – a frequent occurrence – I read library ebooks on my phone on the Libby app. )
Mountain Man put out a new concert album, Look at Me Don’t Look at Me, and it’s lovely. Also comforted by the Everything is Rent podcast for some good old fashioned broadway geeking out.
Eating lots of Annie’s Mac and Cheese, with salty roasted broccoli to pretend it’s a real meal. Reader, I highly recommend this, pregnancy or not. Also Trader Joe’s sour scandinavian swimmers.
My new poetry manuscript is coming along. It’s going to be another book-length work, very linear and focused. I’m excited about it, and also nervous. I’ve been feeling some self-doubt as a writer, probably because I’m jumping into book publicity for the first time. Trying to tell people your writing is good makes you start to wonder whether that’s really true. I hope it is, no way to know for sure. I keep reading through the poems in the book trying to figure out which ones to share or use as examples, and it feels almost impossible to read them objectively enough to choose. It all feels complicated in me. But it’s encouraging to be writing, it’s encouraging when the poems keep coming, when they just are what they are. The comforting thing about poetry, in particular, is that it really can’t be forced. Each poem sort of emerges almost as if on its own. When it isn’t right, it isn’t right, and when it is, it is. There probably is no such thing as a good poem. But it’s scary. And I worry I’ll never publish again, never find a place in any journals or publications, never have another book after this one. And maybe I won’t! I don’t know! I’m trying to become more aggressive in my submitting, in my revision process, and in my career as a writer in general – considering MFA’s, keeping moving forward. It occurs to me what my poems are sort of weird, or maybe just very specific. Writing about the Bible sort of pigeon-holes you into Bible spaces. I want to not only be that, but, again, there’s no forcing things. We’ll see. All in time, all in whatever way is true and real. How incredible that I’ve gotten this far, that my book is being published – that on its own is a lifetime dream come true.
I felt moved seeing the accumulation of cups on the counter this morning. Reminded me of T.S. Eliot’s, “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons” from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The days still pile on days, the coffee still gets made, the cups still get filled and emptied and used. I am still alive, no matter how diminished or strange or small or vulnerable I feel. Clinging to ordinariness because it’s the tether I have. This year is the weirdest mix of extreme ordinariness and extreme newness, and we’re all in the middle trying to drink water and keep going. I’m proud of all of us. We keep dirtying cups!
I wish I could go to the ocean. Not on vacation, but casually, in a daily or weekly sort of way. A very quiet, very wild stretch of beach, lots of grasses and birds. I wish I lived in a house by the sea. I got to float in my friend’s swimming pool the other day, my first time in water this summer, and it felt so nice. Warm water, being suspended in it, floating. I needed that weightlessness in the middle of this year.