One month old

I spend a lot of time nursing this little girl, nursing and reconstructing my notions of motherhood. I don't hardly remember what they were, but this they aren't. I couldn't have imagined.

Baby, finally

Thea Chance Nelson
Born on her due date, May 25th 2009 at 11pm after 24 hours of blood-splattered labor, gruesome and painful beyond words. She weighed in at 7 pounds, 6 ounces and measured 19 inches long. We are back home now and the memory of her birth has already become something else, something that feels euphoric and poignant. What a trick of biology.

At 11:15pm Clark sent out a text message to our parents announcing THERE IS A BABY. Yes, there is and she is the coolest thing I have ever seen.

39 Weeks

I am one week from my due date. It seemed so far away and suddenly we are in the single digit days and I am sort of frantically packing a bag for the hospital which involves tearing the house apart which in turn is making me feel frantic. Every few minutes I stop and pant and flop face down over the arm of the couch in the basement where it is nice and cool, wherefrom I almost feel like I am laying on my stomach, my belly nestling in the negative space of the right angle and my feet up in the air so the exhaustion can drain out of my legs long enough for me to run around for five or ten minutes more. Repeat.

My hands and feet are suddenly puffy and my belly occasionally becomes noticeably lopsided. The baby prefers to nestle herself on my right side, never to the left, and sometimes as far up under my ribs as she can get.



I am tired of being pregnant. I stopped running about a week and a half ago because I can't find the enthusiasm to get trussed up just to go plodding cautiously along: a heartrate monitor, two sports bras, trying to find a shirt that will fit over my increasingly outrageous belly and the indignity of lacing up and tying not one, but TWO SHOES!

So now I am tired, and bored. Owen is napping at my feet, never straying more than a few feet away. The kitchen clock is ticking, flies are buzzing against the window screens above the sink. This pregnancy has been going on for years now.

Victory Dance

I got the news a couple days ago that I passed my certification test. Early in the morning I'd rolled over in bed to check the time on my phone and noticed that I had an email subjected "TEST RESULTS." My heart started chugging along painfully in my chest. After all, I have been waiting almost five weeks, hoping with that desperate certainty that if I don't pass now I'll never have the time or money or freedom to prepare for the test again. I opened the email and there was nothing about my result in the body, just expository text about the attached PDF file (agh). The PDF file took an entire 5 or 10 seconds to download (agh!) and at least 3 more seconds to open (AGH!) and then presented itself it tiny doll-sized font. AAGH!

CONGRATULATIONS!

Still, I am taking the precaution of not answering unidentified calls just in case they realize their mistake.

34 weeks

She is big enough now that I can usually find her bum and give it a little spank. Her knees and elbows are easy to identify, but she moves away the minute I start poking back, trying to feel her, trying to get my hands on her. It is so thrilling when her toes tickle my ribs, and I have no qualms about annoying the crap out of her by poke poke poking back. Oh hi baby!

The house is still a wreck, in a frantic uprooted way. Yesterday I tore the couches apart, scrubbed them with soapy water and shop-vacced them dry. The seat covers and cushions are drying in the basement. This must be nesting: furniture in various stages of rearrangement, cleaning wands and squeegees and mop heads... with the cute little robot vacuum beeping Roomba I can clean floors on both levels of the house at the same time with laundry cycling full time in the basement. It's the closest I can get to drunk. With joy.

I dream about well arranged closets; I can see them in my head. I can inventory the boxes I haven't unpacked since we moved, identify the things I don't need and schedule their disposal without even waking up! Nesting is the best thing that ever happened to me.

Seriously, I am totally at peace scrubbing my fridge.

32 weeks

People who tell me their labor horror stories or try to touch my belleh don't bother me at all, because the former fascinate me, in my information gathering stage like I am, and the latter, well, that doesn't really happen. I think belleh-touchin' is a myth that women like to get indignant about... either that or the expression on my face would make anyone think twice about copping an unsolicited feel.

(I think, honestly, most people aren't that interested in your gestation, and often times their inquiries are made out of politeness. Fair enough, I don't expect the world to revolve around me because I am pregnant. Anyway, nobody likes that woman. That woman is universally despised, though I have never met her.)

Anyhoo, I did recently have to listen to someone else's birth story and wanted to throw my shoe at her mouth, but it was because of her glowing fertile earth-mother positivity. She'd overheard me talking to a friend about feeling anxious and rushed over to assure me that she had felt nothing but joyjoyjoy at the birth of her son, and nothing but euphoric, blissful joy since... even still, 14 rapturous years later. I know what she was trying to do because she went on and on, countermanding the modern day OUT-OF-TOUCH fear and negativity associated with giving birth because ITS ALL NATURAL, RIGHT? SOMETHING WE WERE DESIGNED TO DO, yeah mother nature and all that crap. But what pissed me off is that I AM ANXIOUS AS HELL, and yes, I HAVE AN OVER ACTIVE AMYGDALA and I LIVE IN FEAR ALL THE FREAKIN TIME and for that I AM A FAILUREFAILUREFAILURE. Thanks a lot for making me anxious about being anxious.

Fucking hippy.

She is probably right, at least about implying that I shouldn't be fear-mongering myself into hysteria like I did this very week. I totally had a panic attack: a frame-shaking, hiccuping snotty mess of a panic attack. The whole tizzy.

I just do that sometimes. Like, I was at work reading some article about maternity ward-issue mesh panties when, just at that very moment I've got to turn and interpret something I know nothing about, rocketshippery or cacti propagation or some such twaddle, and it's like a electrical current collision in my brain and my chin starts quivering so I say YOU JUST PUT THAT AWAY, WE'RE ON THE TOPIC OF MANATEE HUNTING HERE so I stuff it and guess what. Boo.

It's not that I am reading the horror stories, rumors and wild inaccuracies that make up 99% of the body of information out there on the internet. That isn't what does me in anyway. I'm reading blog posts about must-haves for your hospital bag, and I AM TOTALLY POWERLESS TO UNPLUG MYSELF, BECAUSE AGH, THE FUTURE IS BEARING DOWN ON ME.



I am better now. It's out of my system for the time being. At least, I've got my National Interpreter Certification test coming up in a few days and that has given me the freedom to ignore everything but the fact that I BETTER GOTTAMN PASS IF I EVER WANT TO BE LOVED AGAIN.

Yay! I can direct my hypervigilence elsewhere, at least for the next 4,951 minutes!